One of the useful things about cover teaching, is that you get to see how different language centres handle the same situation or circumstances. You get to see how some ideas work really well, and other ways of doing things, don’t work so well.

It’s kind of like teaching, in the sense that you get to see that one person doesn’t have a monopoly on all of the good ideas. If centres worked together (collaboration), by sharing their best practices, they could evolve all of their workflows really quickly. From there they could take things to an even higher level. Unfortunately, that rarely happens.

One of the differences I’ve noticed between centres, is advertisements on web pages, and particularly, on YouTube videos. Advertisements on videos can break the flow of the class. Also, children can tap on them on an interactive whiteboard, sending you away to an advertisement or another website.

One solution to this problem is to use an ad-blocker.

I use Ad-block plus. Its possible, however, you may have no control over what software or extensions you can install or use in the classroom.

Obviously, this brings up the argument that websites make their money from advertising, and hence can be sustainable. Some of the ad-blockers are customisable so that you can allow some ads or channels, and not others.

Overall, I’ve noticed the difference in the classrooms that use ad-blockers versus those that don’t, and can see a definite value in terms of blocking ads in videos.