# Never use technology for the sake of using technology. Ensure instead that the use of technology is warranted within your schemes of work and that it will help you achieve your lesson objectives.
# Use streaming video in your classroom. The advent of broadband has facilitated the inclusion of video straight from the internet within lessons. Authentic video material from sites like YouTube or national TV broadcasters’ websites, such as TVE or Canal+ are a fantastic way to expose reluctant teenagers to the popular culture other reluctant teenagers enjoy in their native countries.
# Use more music. Teenagers are fanatical about music. The likelihood is that they use iTunes and so should you! Find out what type of music they are into and try to get similar music in the target language, which you can then use in your lessons.
# Use teleconferencing tools, such as Skype, to put your students in touch with students in partner schools abroad. They’ll realise there are other people in the same situation in other countries and might even end up establishing relationships they can follow up using MSM Chat, Hotmail, etc.
# Create your own interactive exercises. You know your pupils’ strengths and weaknesses better than anyone, so why be stuck with exercises done by other people for other people? Make your own using tools such as Hot Potatoes or game makers from ContentGenerator.net or LanguagesOnline Australia and then get your school teccie to put them on the school’s website or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). You can see my interactive Spanish exercises here.
# Use your interactive whiteboard more effectively. Go on a course and learn the basics. A little knowledge goes a long way helping you create more effective interactive classroom activities for you and your pupils. I have posted some tutorials here.
# Create your own podcasts. They are technically easy to do and once they are done they can be downloaded again and again, year after year. Think about them as lessons to take away. Alternatively get your pupils to

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When do people learn languages?

Advice for language learners
General warning: what follows may or may not apply to you. It's based on what linguistics knows about people in general (but any general advice will be ludicrously inappropriate for some people) and on my own experience (but you're not the same as me). If you have another way of learning that works, more power to you.

Given the discussion so far, the prospects for language learning may seem pretty bleak. It seems that you'll only learn a language if you really need to; but the fact that you haven't done so already is a pretty good indication that you don't really need to. How to break out of this paradox?

At the least, try to make the facts of language learning work for you, not against you. Exposure to the language, for instance, works in your favor. So create exposure.

* Read books in the target language.
* Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.)
* Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things.
* Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it.
* Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself.
* Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it.
* Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make new friends.
* Seek out opportunities to work using the language.
* Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language.
* Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language.
* Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people want you to know their language-- they don't want to teach it. Also, this strategy is tricky for multiple languages.)

Taking a class can be effective, partly for the instruction, but also because you can meet others who are learning the language, and because, psychologically, classes may be needed to make us give the subject matter time and attention. Self-study is too easy to blow off. If you study with someone, insist