British Council IATEFL Blog

Well just so you don’t think that IATEFL is all work and no play, I thought I’d fill you in on one of the many great evening events at IATEFL.

Last night Sirin, Leo and I braved the IATEFL crowd and picked our mics not to present but to sing! Yes, that’s right: Karaoke! Think about it; mix up a pub full of exhibitionists (English teachers), a long list of cheesy hits and a mic and you’re asking for trouble.

I have to say Leo made us proud with his rendition of ‘Alive and Kicking’ and others. However, Sirin and I (it could possibly have been my fault) chose a song in which we thought we knew how to sing but it turns out we only knew the chorus. Very embarrassing! Ah well, a fun night was had and I have already chosen my song for next year for karaoke in Glasgow!!! :)

It was great fun, meeting lots of interesting people and sharing ideas at the conference and I liked blogging too. Hopefully I’ll get to do it for IATEFL next year in Glasgow too!

Blog post by: Nikola Crowley

The IATEFL Conference centre is slightly less busy today and you can feel that it is ending. I walked to the exhibition area and saw what some more experienced people told me before - wait for the final day because the publishers offer significant discounts. It is so true and this area is full of teachers getting the latest editions and subsequently increasing their luggage weight! Just passing through I was offered different freebies, including couple of notepads.

One of the best things is when you find an available seat in the corridors between the sessions (and today is much easier to locate one) you can see people from around the world talking in so many different languages. IATEFL is truly global and international.

Last night all of us from our little blog team went for a dinner. It was really great meeting all of them in person and we had loads of fun last night. Most of us went to see Leo’s presentation on alliteration before that and, although no one had any doubts, he had his eye on the ball all the time and everyone enjoyed it. I really recommend that you visit the IATEFL online website and download his presentation file.

Our IATEFL blog was more successful than we dreamed of. With around 500 unique visitors per day, loads of reposts and retweets (thank you BC colleagues!), many teachers were following it. One interesting fact that fascinated me and shows how good we were: if you go to Google and type “IATEFL blog”, guess which one is ranked first out of 40,000 results? Oh yes, that’s us! This to thank everyone who supported us and this wou D not have been possible without you. Nevertheless, next year we will be even better, I promise you that :)

So, this is my last entry for this year but I will continue uploading an entry or two I expect from our team members. I really hope you enjoyed our IATEFL coverage and see you online soon!

Blog post by: Željko Jovanović

This is my last post from the conference. It was great to be here. I enjoyed the every bit of the conference. I’m tired and sleepless but I know it is worth it.

After blogging and twitter, many things changed in my life. I sleep less, I watch television less but I still can manage. Apart from the disadvantages of being online, I must admit there are thousands of advantages. One of them is you get informed about what’s going on  around you and then have chance to attend it, the other is when you attend these events you are surrounded by your PLN even in a totally foreign environment. As far as I know IATEFL 2011 is hosting more than 2000 delegates and it is quite normal that we can even find time to chit chat as we keep losing friend. However, the best thing about is we keep finding the others. So a great tip for you. Before you go to your next conference, make sure you have built your PLN.

Right now here comes the summary:

In the morning I attended Bethany Cagnol’s session called, ‘Ruling the Unruly’. Although my reality and Bethany’s reality are completely different, I came up with ideas for classroom management. And plus, I had the privilidge of listening to her. If you happen to be at a conference where she speaks, don’t miss her. She was fabulous.

The next one was Jeremy Harmer’s talk. Last year at IATEFL, he asked some teachers to explain the best lesson they’d taught and the talk was around those people and their best taught lessons. We discussed why the lessons went well and even we had great lesson ideas from those teachers.

Jeremy Harmer pointed out that when teachers talk about a successful lesson they smile and they always say what the students have done.

The next one was a great kinesthetic spelling session by Johanna Sterling. The games she used during the session were very useful.

All about Alliterations was the title of Leo Selivan’s session and it was very good and in the end we even had ideas how and when to use alliterations in our classroms. Above all, to end the session with a song was great. It was one of my favourites She by Elvis Costello.

Almost around six we were ready and eager to listen to Maris Constantinides. She was right. Trainers train teachers and they have to teach how to integrate technology into teaching before the new teachers arrive to their own classrooms and this actually should be done befoe they have graduated to become teachers, I guess.

My plan for tomorrow:

Ann Foreman ‘Helping your students to develop their personal learning environment:’

Sirin Soyoz, Suzanne Mordue, ‘Using E-tivities to create online communities’

Blog post by:
Eva Buyuksimkesyan

Although many of the teachers I have met at this conference use ready madeMoodle courses with their students, very few of them seem to actually be involved in setting a course up or creating (or even adding) content to their online Moodle courses. They’ve been handed Moodle in the same way as they would a workbook. To them it’s just a (good) resource.

Unfortunately, Moodle is not as well known in Turkey as in the rest of Europe, and many schools are far from ready to even consider blended learning. I guess that’s why publishers don’t offer “moodle packages” to go with their coursebooks yet? I really wish they’d start doing that soon because that would save moodlers like myself – who has had to create every bit of their course content from scratch – a lot of work and worry.

(Barbara Gardner, photo by Karin Tirasin)

By “from scratch” I don’t mean html code or anything like that of course. I’ve been using Hot Potatoes a lot in addition to the modules Moodle (9.1) offers. I’ve also (quite recently) found out about CourseLab. However, yesterday at Barbara Gardener’s amazing presentation “Creating and Delivering Online Professional Development using Moodle” several wonderful thingshappened. One was Barbara sharing her knowledge and experience of how to set up a course and what sorts of features make a Moodle course more successful and rewarding for the course participants, another was my chance meeting with José Louis G. Belderrain, a programmer actively involved in creating “moodle packages” (SCORM) to go with Cambridge course books!

Can you believe my luck? Both Barbara and José Louis stayed after Barbara’s presentation and discussed Moodle and moodling and content with me and seriously made my day! I am now literally bursting with new ideas for how to improve my own Moodle courses! In true “techno-freak-fashion” – we exchanged twitter handles and facebook account information and will (I hope to God) keep in touch so that I can learn more from them!

Ah! Happy day!!!

Blog post by:
Karin Tirasin 

I have just delivered my first talk in front of the international audience.It was on the topic of Improving language learning/teaching in primary schools from the point of view of teacher training institutes.

Everyone was willing to share ideas and there was a lot of learning from each other. I was rather nervous at the beginning, but I soon got relaxed.

I was amazed with the ease with which everyone worked together. It was great!

Blog post by: Ivana Lekic

One of the best presentations I watched at “The Old Ship Hotel” in Brighton yesterday was Mary Henderson’s “Meaningful English through Multimedia Projects”. The projects she was talking about were research projects where her students (young adults) had been expected to use various recording devices (video-cameras, audio-recorders) and computer software (Windows Moviemaker, word processing software etc.) to produce a written report and a video-presentation on their chosen topic. The topics ranged from sports and baseball to product design, and from tea-drinking customs in Britain to the meaning of the word “gig”. We got to see clips from the video presentations and we flipped through several of the reports and I thought they were all brilliant!

From Mary’s presentation it became clear that the keys to her (and her students’) success lay inthe planning and the feedback. The students had been required to follow a detailed week-to-week plan throughout the project and had had to complete the different steps in the process by given deadlines. That helped the students stay on track and also made it easier for Mary to monitor and assess her students’ work and effort continuously.

(Mary Henderson, photo by Karin Tirasin)

I would love to be able to do something like this with my students. However, my students are teenagers living in Turkey and not young adults living in Britain trying to improve their English. So, obviously I’ll have to lower the bar a bit as to the quality of the end product as well as probably think up ways to motivate them to actually do the work. My younger students may or may not be as techno-savvy as Mary’s students, nor have as much time as they did to devote to editing and programming, and that heeds to be taken into consideration as well.

Although designing and running a project like this seems to involve rather a lot of work on the teacher’s part (the very detailed planning, the regular assessment, the feedback, designing the rubrics, and evaluating the end products), the examples Mary showed us convinced me that it will all be worth it in the end!

Blog post by:
Karin Tirasin 

The title above was the theme of the conference for me today. The sessions I attended seemed to follow this line of thought; in other words we should questions assumptions about language and learning.

The plenary session by Peter Grundy was based around his book, The Pragmatics Reader. He questioned the true meaning of words as opposed to the language used. For example, saying ‘I’m tired’ at 11pm would naturally make the listener assume that you wanted to go to bed but the same utterance in the morning might lead the listener to assume that you wanted an espresso.

Later in the day Jamie Keddie was questioning our attitudes towards using authentic materials and gave tips about how to use them successfully and efficiently.

Finally, I went to Nicola Crowley’s session on using Youtube, where she explored how to exploit video through a ‘blind’ watching, where you only hear the video rather then see it. This worked well as we all guessed the context only to be surprised when we saw what had really happened. A great way to motivate learners.

So to round up the day, people might say something simple but it often has a deeper meaning that changes due to context, being ‘authentic’ can mean experimenting and supporting learners. The final lesson for the day was that showing less can reveal more.

Blog post by:
Suzanne Mordue 

(House art near the IATEFL Conference centre)

Check out the video of Sue Palmer’s educational and entertaining plenary session from Sunday morning on IATEFL online. She started with a poem to nouns, reflecting her background as a grammar specialist and then went onto her main topic ‘Toxic Childhood’. She published a book on this in 2006 which started a national debate about the state of childhood in the UK. She raised some really interesting points about the role of listening skills as a precursor for successful learning.

People were talking about the session all day – a clear indication that she grabbed the interest of the audience and had some challenges for all of us! We’ll never look at pushchairs the same way…! She went through a number of changes in ‘modern’ life which have impacted on childhood developmental conditions such as ADHD and dyslexia – daytime TV, videos for children and why childhood needs a detox.

It was a beautiful, sunny day so it was all the more impressive to see how many people were at sessions all day before going to have a drink and a chat at the British Council’s networking event in the evening. Michael Carrier showed a trailer for the British Council’s new TV programme – Word on the Street – if you want to watch it, have a look at LearnEnglish website.

At the half way point now! :-) Hope you are enjoying the blog and the online conference.

Blog post by:
Eilidh Hamilton

(Nicola just before her presentation on how to use YouTube videos in teaching)

I had another great and inspiring day and now I am totally and utterly exhausted. I’ve been to a plenary, a few talks and workshops, a debate, a meeting, a British Council event and a storytelling session. The day for me was built on Sue Palmer’s plenary on ‘Toxic Childhood’ in which she talked about ’ the dance of communication’, the very first communication a baby has with its mother when the mother instinctively rocks her baby.

Our life-long dance of communication is why we’re all here, why we’re at an IATEFL conference, why we’re English teachers…. and I reflected on that throughout the day. Then I got to Fran Sokel’s talk in which she emphasised the need for collaboration in class and creativity and critical thinking, and how we can’t just teach language but give our students the skills to think, create and communicate.

Next, I attended Ben Goldstein’s who discussed ways to communicate our identity, to make ourselves ‘known’ even in our L2. And then we got to digital communication with a wonderful debate led by Nicky Hockly and Alan Waters.

The funniest thing about this is that as soon as the debate was over there was a mad dash for the ladies where the participants continued the dance and debated while we queued up for the loo!!

Blog post by:
Nicola Crowley 

Well…I guess the language teacher in me speaks for itself in the title, BUT no, this is not a lesson plan based on a reading text… but rather my reflections on giving my first presentation at IATEFL!!

So the pre bit…nervous to say the least, and increasingly so as I attended other sessions before my presentation and found myself thinking ‘Why on earth did I opt to do this? Will anyone notice if I don’t show up?”

Anyway…after having a word with myself, I left Sue Palmer’s excellent plenary a few mins early to wind my way around the Brighton Centre to room 8. And then other people started to show up! Once I realized I wasn’t going to talking to myself I began to feel a bit better!

So the while part…I still felt a little jittery inside but I do have to admit that the feelings dissipated as the half hour went on… and I actually enjoyed myself :)

And then the post-bit …initially on a high which lasted for quite some time mixed with an enormous sense of relief that I’d lived through it, and sometime later an overwhelming tiredness came over me. What a day of rollercoaster emotions!!!

Thanks to all of you who allowed me to voice my pre while and post concerns and pleasures, and good luck to you if you are still to present.

Blog post by: Fran Sokel