1. British Council colleagues in East Asia are running a series of webinars on Teacher Takeaways: Practical Ideas for Classroom Teaching in partnership with the China English Teacher Professional Teachers Association. More info and registration details here https://www.britishcouncil.cn/en/teach/2021webinar

Fraser Bewick opens the batting at 09:00 UK time this Thursday, 16^th September with a session on Adapting and experimenting with tasks to encourage thinking skills in classroom tasks. Full details of the whole Teacher Takeaways programme in the PDF below.

2. Thanks, as so often, to my colleague Andrew Skinner for this efficient short video introduction to ‘Assistive Technology’ from Microsoft: https://youtu.be/DBxmADjQlI4

Here’s another I found ‘all by myself’ (as my granddaughter often says with pride) where Microsoft employees describe the use they make of assistive technology in their work https://youtu.be/QJgca3Sb8iQ

Yes, at one level they’re advertisements for Microsoft, but the features they demonstrate are part of software that many of us who use it every day are unaware of.

3.  This quarter’s Poetry Book Society selection is Hannah Lowe’s ‘The Kids’, a collection of sonnets celebrating the children she taught in sixth form college in London – wonderful stuff! She’s giving a free reading at 19:00 UK time this Thursday, 16th September with Selima Hill and Stephanie Norgate https://www.eventbrite.com/e/launch-reading-by-selima-hill-hannah-lowe-and-stephanie-norgate-tickets-166293344871

4. And, finally, another resource from the ECML for the forthcoming European Day of Languages on 26^th September, “20 things you might not know about Europe’s languages” https://edl.ecml.at/

I’d no idea that there is an ancient whistling language in Spain that’s still being taught in local schools – are there lots more whistling or non-lexical languages out there round the world?

You can look at some of the statistics from the other end of the telescope: Europe is now home to only 225 or 3% of the world’s languages – presumably that was once a significantly higher percentage? How many languages is Africa home to? Copy of poster below.