One-year anniversary of this blog

My first post was on 30 November 2012, so today this blog is one year old!

As I look back at one year of posts, I see that a lot of material has been about robots. I do teach a number of robotics engineering groups, but I find that robotic devices are relevant for my other engineering students as well: biomedical engineering, electronics engineering, information technology, computer science, etc. It also seems to me that even non-engineering students find robots interesting. After all, what would science fiction films be without them?

I also see that I have focused a lot on material for process descriptions. I find this text type comes up in every kind of course I teach - even my academic English groups. So much of what we write and read is some kind of process, so I think this is very relevant for our students. Reading texts, listening to videos, focusing on various aspects of writing, encouraging speaking/discussion - there are so many ways to focus on process description.

And another area I see a lot in my posts is information about innovation. ESP students are always interested in innovations, especially in their field, and they will of course be part of innovations in their professional lives. So any innovation provides material for the classroom.

Over the year I have shared material I have found, but there are a few websites in particular that I keep going back to for ideas for my courses. Here are the ones I've used the most (and the date of the post when I first mentioned them):

December 2012

• Engines of our Ingenuity radio program: http://www.uh.edu/engines/

• Technical word of the week newsletter: http://newsletter.thepyramidgroup.biz/

March 2013

• The Innovations Report website: http://www.innovations-report.com/index.php

May 2013

• Planetary Radio:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/

June 2013

• Comics English: http://www.comicsenglish.com

July 2013

• Readlang (especially to recommend to students): http://readlang.com/

September 2013

• News in levels (especially for my lower level students): http://www.newsinlevels.com/

And many posts with material from the BBC news website, section technology:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology

During the year I have gotten positive feedback from many areas: readers of this blog, colleagues, other teacher bloggers - but most importantly from my students. They have usually been very enthusiastic about the material I've used in class, and they're very motivated to give me further suggestions.

For the future -- I'm always looking for articles, videos and websites on topics that engage my students, and lately some of my students have given me suggestions about website they've found that had news they were interested in. So I'll be using my students' suggestions more, and continue to indicate what we did with the material. If you know of other interesting websites and material, please let me know and I'll post it here.