Edtech & ELT Newsletter March 2025
Welcome to the March 2025 edition of the Edtech & ELT Newsletter.
Hi
Welcome to the new look Edtech & ELT Newsletter. If you are reading this then it has made its way past your email filter, so that’s good news. I’ve changed the service provider for the newsletter as the last one was getting very expensive and I thought it was about time I tried Substack, so here I am.
As usual there’s a roundup of new tools and apps as well as links to articles, so nothing to worry about. The content should be pretty much the same. I’ll also try to be a little more chatty. I hope it doesn’t get too much for you.
Anyway, here are the links. I hope you enjoy them.
And once again, many thanks to EIGO.AI for sponsoring this newsletter. Please find out more about Eigo below.
Vocabulary Building and Reading Support in English
Eigo.AI makes expanding your students’ English vocabulary easier than ever. Each English reading lesson includes contextual word definitions in multiple languages, helping learners quickly understand and acquire new vocabulary. With comprehension quizzes and personalized feedback, Eigo.AI supports learners’ English reading and vocabulary development while exploring fascinating topics across science, culture, and more.
Digital Tools
Here are some of the latest Digital Tools and Resources.
Get in touch if you would like to get your app or resource featured here.
Chalkie helps you make lessons in seconds
Chalkie is an AI tool for teachers to create lesson resources faster than ever before. Teachers spend hours planning and resourcing lessons each week. We want to give educators back the time and freedom to focus on what’s important. Inspiring children in the classroom. No more trawling the web for key facts and images or dreaming up dozens of quizzes and exercises. Just tell Chalkie your language, topic and the level of your students and we'll create fun and informative lesson slides or worksheets. Our resources are fully editable, exportable and filled with key facts, activities, pictures and even videos!
AI for Research
We combine unmatched access to both Open Access and paywalled content with our Smart Citations database that analyses and classifies 1.2B+ citations across 200M+ sources. This combination powers our AI and search tools, giving you verifiable insights you can trust.
SPEECHMA
This is a great tool for creating audio. It has multiple voices and can be used with a range of different languages. Just type in text, select the voice and generate the audio. Audio can be downloaded and used in projects. It does tend to get busy at particular times of day. If you are feeling generous you can donate to the company and help them develop it.
Hume
This is another text to speech tool. It's different from many other though in that you can describe the kind of emotion you want the voice to express, so this is great for more dramatic texts. The free subscription allows to create 10,000 character of voice each month. If you need more it's quite cheap to upgrade.
Chance AI
I love the concept behind this app. You can install it on your phone and point it at various things and it will give you information about them. From works of art, architectural designs, animals, plants and flowers and even food. It can identify objects and tell you about them. This is great for situated learning and for exploring and finding out more about the world.
Unhook
This is a useful browser plugin if you use YouTube to show students videos in class. It block the comments and other recommended videos so that only the video you want to show is visible. This reduces distraction and potential embarrassment.
Focal
This has been one of my most popular shares over the last few weeks. Focal is online AI powered video creation software that helps you tell stories. You describe the plot of the video and Focal creates it. They seem to have cracked the element of continuity that so many AI platforms struggle with. You can generate a minute of video each month on the free subscription.
Special offer - The Manual of AI-Mediated Autonomous Teacher Development
Get 40% off this book when you use the coupon code: EDTECHNEWS before paying.
The Manual of AI-Mediated Autonomous Teacher Development is your ultimate guide to using AI as a collaborative partner in your teaching journey. Written by Nik Peachey, an award-winning educator and expert in educational technology, this book takes you beyond generic AI-generated materials. Instead, it introduces collaborative prompting - a groundbreaking approach to professional growth through collaborative prompting - a method that transforms AI from a simple tool into an active mentor, guide, and thinking partner.
Edtech News and Views
Here are some of the most interesting articles from around the web. Drop me a line if you think there’s an article other teachers would be interested in.
Revolutionizing Language Assessment with AI: Can we get there in 2025?
Interesting article on assessment from: By James Ayres, Michigan State University, and Carlos Seoane, Co-founder and CEO, Extempore "Let’s dream for a minute. Imagine a classroom where students are assessed and provided feedback as soon as they click “submit”; where students immediately receive information that allows them to understand where they land in their ability to communicate. In this ideal world, student performance is evaluated objectively and teacher bias and error do not come into the equation. Validity and reliability are exponentially increased so that assessments provide an equitable measurement that is consistent across all levels and types of students."
Studies Related to Generative AI in Education
As you can probably guess from the title, this is a large collection of links to research on the use of GenAI in education. Lots of useful sources and you can download it as a PDF.
We're Worse at Listening Than We Realize
Actually, I did realise. I've done a lot of work over the years on helping students and teachers to understand listening and how, even in our first language, we need struggle with it. This article from Psychology Today share some interest statistics about listening and includes one of my favourite TEDTalks with 5 tips for improving listening.
Artificially Unintelligent: When Shortcuts Undermine Learning
This article explores a theme that I was trying to deal with in my latest book 'The Manual of AI-Mediated Autonomous Teacher Development' and that is the way many people are using AI to outsource their thinking and the kind of damage that can cause. In my book I help teachers to develop a type of AI prompting that turns the chatbot into a mentor and coach rather than a servant. Would love to know what you think.
Do tablets help or hinder children’s play?
This is a theme that returns regularly and it's something we are right to keep exploring. The simple answer is 'yes' they can help or hinder depending on how you use them, but check out the article for a more nuanced argument.
Al's Edu recommends
Here's a recommendation for a great newsletter about Edtech and AI from UK-based education author and speaker Al Kingsley. He publishes a regular newsletter through LinkedIn that has a great collection of links, summaries and opinions on the latest educational research and publishing from around the world. Highly recommended and free of course.
Read and subscribe on LinkedIn
Okay - We’re nearly to the end!
Free Webinar - Using Infographics to Enhance Information Literacy Skills
Later this week I'll be doing a free webinar on Using Infographics to Enhance Information Literacy Skills - I've spent years working with infographics and really love their versatility for instructional use. If you want to pick a few ideas and some example activities then sign up for this free webinar. It's on Thursday, 27 March 2025.
If you’ve got this far, then well done. I hope you like the new look. I’m also hoping to add a bit more interaction in the next newsletter, so you should be able to leave comments and have a chat.
Looking forward to that, and if you’ve enjoyed all the tools and articles here, consider downloading my Digital Toolbox app. It has all the links to apps and articles from all of my previous newsletters and curation work. It’s $9.99 and that money will go a long way to help me continue to create and share free content. Thanks
Nik Peachey - Pedagogical Director - PeacheyPublications