IATEFL 2014

This year IATEFL was held in Harrogate and it has been the first year I have really engaged with it online.What was so fantastic was being able to watch the plenary sessions streamed live and interviews with leading ELT influencers.What has also been wonderful is following responses and comments through blogs and twitter feeds..how lucky we are to be able to access all this wealth of experience and new ideas..
IATEFL Online

I really like this picture that I used when teacher training on a Young Learner course,although it says children..I think it can easily be replaced by language learners.

Project Based Learning Part Two

Stage Four:
The students gave a summary of their survey and report to the rest of the class and then focused on what recommendations they would make.We looked at an outline of a proposal together and the groups started to draft some ideas about what key areas they would propose and the benefits of these areas to the school and students.

While some students were working on the draft, other group members started to research student lounges in other school to report back to their group.

Stage Five:
The students started working together on creating their presentations..one group in particular wanted to try Prezi.Each member contributed pictures and text they had recorded during the previous days and negotiated the best way to incorporate his in their presentation.

Stage Six:

The students had time to practice delivering their presentation to an audience of English language students,teachers and school management who expressed the intention of possibly implementing changes to the student lounge.This gave the project real validity and personal investment for the students.
Here is the link to one of the presentations:

Student Lounge Presentation

Stage Seven:
The students were given the opportunity to reflect on their presentation performance and give feedback to one another immediately after. I uploaded on presentations onto YouTube and shared on our class Facebook page.As the presentations were on Friday, I told the students to watch them and  identify areas of strength and weakness in their language and delivery. Together we would then evaluate the project and language skills the following week.

Project Based Learning Part One

I decided to spend a whole week doing a Business English project with my students.I decided to follow a project based approach.The first stage was the problem:

Stage One: The student lounge needs to be updated and redesigned but the school doesn't know what to do with the space.As a group you need to create a proposal based on your own research and suggestions about what you would do with the space.


Stage Two: The students brainstormed the strengths and weaknesses of the current student lounge firstly as individuals then in a group brainstorm..some of the students started to suggest changes and ideas during this stage.The group identified the most important areas they would focus on an decided to create some questions to ask fellow students in other classes.

Stage Three: The groups wrote survey questions together and then approached different classes to ask the questions.Once the results had been collected the students decided how to organise the data and the relevance of it compared to their own suggestions.We then looked at how to write a report based around a summary which was started in class and completed for homework.

Learning to Listen

So I have finished my online tutoring course with International House which was great and thanks to the tutors and other participants really made the experience worthwhile.I highly recommend it to anyone in teaching.It makes you reflect on the different types of tasks and especially the tutor/learner relationship.A brief summary of what I thought was important was:

• Engaging learners by creating collaborative tasks online
• Creating discussion forums and topics where learners can share opinions
• Encouraging self reflection
• Colourful and meaningful online feedback using conventions like font,colour and net lingo 
• Realising that being an online tutor is no way an easy option!

A great thing this course has ignited in me is to have more confidence in teaching with technology and I am very lucky that I have groups of learners that are really engaged in that process as well.Something my tutor suggested was using a wiki as a means of online collaboration so I set one up with wikispaces and discussed with my Business class how we could use it.A work in progress!

Learning to Listen

Something I used today which was great was a TedTalks by Julian Treasure about listening.This is a skill that many of my students have problems with.

To begin with we discussed active listening and did an observational exercise from the British Council
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/active-listening-activities

The next step was talking about how we listen and barriers to listening in today's society.
I asked the class to note down 5 ways in which we are losing our ability to listen and why? This was essentially preparing them to listen to the talk.

After watching and listening to the first part of the talk, we discussed 5 ways we could overcome these barriers and what advice we would give to become a better listener.

We then watched the second part of the talk and then compared answers.The students then discussed how they could use what they had heard in the talk to change their listening strategies in the future.
Here is the link:http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_5_ways_to_listen_better

Sharing and Collaborating

My last post was about my professional development session and my colleague sharing a great activity with me. Something really cool that happened after the PD session was someone started using Edmodo with their class and is loving it as a collaborative tool.

That is what teaching is about surely..the exchange of ideas and resources!

It's the last week of my course and even though it will be nice to have that time to myself again and will really miss that input and  discussion that has been generated about teaching online. It has given me so many excellent ideas and a new confidence in using digital technologies.

My new thing is trying out Twitter with one of my classes..let's see what happens...

Professional Development

I did a professional development session last Friday and it was terrifying.All my colleagues are supportive and open people but so nerve wracking to present to your peers.Luckily I did it with my colleague so we shared the session. It was about how we use technology in the classroom.

I talked about Facebook and Edmodo and the ideas behind flipped learning while my colleague talked about blogs and screencasting. I think it went okay....I am so busy at the moment with the last week of my IHCOLT certificate,every day seems a blur with my workload.

A really cool exercise my colleague showed me today was a variation of reformulating a text. I am going to make a video and share on the blog when I have time..it worked really well so thanks Dave!

Waitangi Day

I used this fantastic information gap worksheet by a former colleague yesterday.It was all about Waitangi Day, the national holiday of New Zealand. Talking about national holidays and festivals is fantastic as students love sharing their culture with somebody from another country.There is so much information to share and compare with each other and great for students to research other countries festivals and then share them in class in mini presentations.

As I paid for my bus fare home and took out a 5 dollar note it made me think how much my students know about the faces on the back of the New Zealand currency..a little research project maybe?

What about creating their own festival together or creating a national day to honour someone famous of their choice ? Could be fun...!