Listening Post Nominated for an ELTon Award!
It was really great to hear that The Listening Post, a site I created to share my augmented reality, kinetic typography and spatial audio posters with other teachers, has been nominated for a 2016 English Language Teaching Innovation Award (ELTon).
As with previous years, I've been nominated in the category of Digital Innovation. This is a tough group as I'm often the only individual language teacher in there, competing against large publishers or teams that have considerable budgets to develop apps, games or, as with last year's winner Oxford University Press, build an entire online dictionary.
I have a budget of essentially zero, so I have to try to compensate with creativity and hard work. For The Listening Post I record and edit all my own 360° spatial audio, design the posters, add the augmented reality content and create all the synchronised kinetic typography myself. I also designed the site. While this can be a lot of work, it also gives me an excuse to keep learning new skills as I go.
The Listening Post content stems from my interest and research into embodied cognition, one direct expression of this being the use of spatial audio to increase the level of immersion and engagement with the content.
The book I co-wrote with Ben Goldstein (Language Learning with Digital Video) has also been nominated this year, so I will definitely have my fingers crossed on both hands!
