Autobiography
Russell Stannard began his teaching career in Greece. He then moved onto Seville Spain where for 9 years he was the Director of Studies of International House Seville and a teacher trainer for the Spanish government. He became an expert in the Spanish educational reforms and trained state school teachers all over Andalucia in making language teaching more communicative. He also worked for a short period as a teacher trainer on the Trinity TESOL courses as well as being an examiner for the Cambridge University Exam Syndicate for the PET and First Certificate Exams.
Russell specialised in producing student centred learning materials which publishers quickly became interested in. He wrote photocopiable material for Wavelength (Longman) along with Michael Carter and then went on to do work on Inside Out (Macmillan) producing photocopiable materials for the teacher resource packs as well as working on the Advanced workbook.
Russell became interested in the spread of the Internet and in 1999 he returned to the UK to do a masters degree at the University of Westminster in Multimedia. He began to teach Spanish and English at Sutton Adult Education Centre as well as work on various teacher training courses that the college ran. During this period Russell began to do more and more work on the development of electronic products for language learning including consultancy work on “Get Into Spanish” a CD ROM for the BBC and various CD ROMs for Longman dictionaries.
In 2000 Russell was employed by the University of Westminster where is now a Principal Lecturer and course leader of the MSc in Interactive Multimedia. Russell trains students in producing material for CD ROMs as well as working on MSc courses in ICT and English for Academic Purposes. He has strong ties with the educational industry and has brought many of these contacts into the University where he regularly organises talks as well as job placements for many of his students.
In 2002 began to write the teacher’s guides to the “New Standard English Course” which has been widely covered in the national press for selling over 100 million units in China. Russell has worked in China on many occasions, giving lectures, talks and teacher training sessions to promote the New Standard English Course and develop teaching within the country.. Russell wrote a teacher manual for the Chinese teachers and became a key member of the teacher training team of Macmillan /FLTRP. Russell continues to be heavily involved with China. He writes a regular column in a Chinese newspaper called “Lighthouse” which sells on University campuses throughout China. His most recent articles deal with academic writing.
In 2000 Russell also began to write a column in the English Teaching Professional known as “Webwatcher”. This column looks at the use of technology in language teaching. Originally planned to be a one off article, “Webwatcher” has now been running for 7 years!! Russell has suggested literally hundreds of ideas for using technology in the classroom and his column is followed by teachers all over the world. Russell is also a regular contributor to Modern English Teacher where he writes about technology and language teaching.
In 2006 Russell began to do some experiments using Camtasia software. The software allows you to record the screen of your computer as if it was a video as well as record you voice. Russell demonstrated how Camtasia can be used to produce feedback of student’s coursework. The idea began to spread quickly. Early articles on the subject were published in Modern English Teacher and English Teaching Professional. An article was then included in the IATEFL SIG on technology in November 2006 as well as in the JISC newsletter a month later. In the same month an in-depth article on the subject was published in the Times Higher Educational Supplement. Russell is now heavily involved into more extensive research on the subject supported by funding from the EIC at the University of Westminster and there are now many other teachers/ researchers around the world working on the same idea.. He will be presenting his work at IATEFL in April 2007, the International House Conference in Seville March 2007 and the English Teaching Professional Conference in September 2007.
Russell continues to write and develop language learning products. For a brief period he worked on the Internet based language course “Really English” before starting his current project writing teacher’ guides for the Hello English series as well as produding the CD ROM content for the same course. (Balberry).