IATEFL Business English special interest group

Posted on by
2

I have just returned from the IATEFL business English sig annual conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia. It was very useful, so I am sharing here two ideas of the many that were offered.

– I have decided to organize my own teacher workshop about teaching with technology. Something I have wanted to do for a long time, and at the conference, various conversations and presentations convinced me it is “doable.” the topic may be integrating online materials with f2f activities. Would anyone care to join me?

– it’s time to learn about DASHBOARDING ! If you know about it, would you please share? I am basically looking for a way to manage the huge flow of information from the Internet and learn new ways to teach well. At the conference, I attended a presentation by Valentina Dodge, who introduced
Diigo, the tool for bookmarking, collaborating, sharing content, and much more.

These are just two of many useful ideas. The real value of the conference, of course, was talking to people in the EFL profession and getting energized.

Joy and Pleasure

Posted on by
2

The other day my DOS asked me, how do you teach advanced students?
I answered as honestly as I could. Then I started musing about it, and hopefully other colleagues will contribute to the topic here, too. 

First, I said to my DOS, go for pleasure, because most advanced students are passionate about English, finding real joy in their own understanding and power of communication, not to mention their feelings of gratification when they help colleagues with lesser language knowledge. They are “basking” in their success; the struggle of learning irregular verbs and infinitives and gerunds is behind them.

Naturally, advanced students come with a few gaps, some of which they stress over. Moreover, the vastness of the English language precludes their having learned every possible vocabulary word.

These two conditions misled me earlier, causing me to react with “bitty” lessons aimed at plugging the gaps in my advanced students’ knowledge, the result being a kind of cat-and-mouse lesson plan. “Do you know this word? You do? Oh, and how about this one? No? AHA!”

Time to think a lot about Joy and Pleasure. I think it is best with advanced students to bring in dense content related to some passion of theirs, whether profession-related or otherwise. It should be used as a springboard. On one hand, may be interesting idioms, expressions or terms. Likewise, a text may espouse views opposed to the students’ own. Or the student may debunk to his/her heart’s delight.  Pronunciation, especially intonation can well deserve attention at this level, since it may have been neglected earlier in the rush to master practical English .

Naturally the Internet and Web 2.0 based resources must play a role in lessons for advanced students. Likewise the majority of materials, if not all of them, will be authentic and not from course books.

Kindly don’t misunderstand; an advanced lesson must have its parts and phases. However, they should all contribute in some way to creating a pleasurable experience for the student.

Looking forward to other ideas on this topic.

Time Management

Posted on by
Reply

I previously wrote a few musings about time management for teachers using ICT, online teaching, etc.

As Elek has pointed out, there is no ideal solution. I believe a lot of people use the style he mentioned, staying online most of the day and communicating often. It dovetails with the  comment about “striking while the iron is hot”, i.e. sending email, blog post, etc. as soon as the lesson is over.

I do also find it very effective to write about a lesson, whether to students or just in my own notes, as soon as the lesson is finished.

If one teaches onsite as I do, traveling from company to company during the day, it means there is little chance to go online between lessons. Therefore, I am experimenting with several different formats. I block out an afternoon for blogging, wiki maintenance, and email with students (the drawbacks of this have been pointed out!)  I could spend a few minutes on this every evening – the minutes of course can become hours. Or I could earmark a part of my weekend for such.

Now I have just hunted around for ideas from blogging teachers and found one person who firstly mentioned it is not necessary to check/write emails repeatedly during the day. Twice a day is plenty, says he. I think he may have a point; at least, when it comes to time management, checking email frequently is a really bad way to interrupt yourself and subvert a good plan. Secondly, this blogger mentions sorting tasks according to whether you need to be online to do them or not. If you have to write for example, you don’t necessarily have to be online to do it.

Finally, I think Nigel Marsh’s concepts of Work-Life Balance may apply here. He says we can be much happier if we don’t let our work rule us. I think that’s true here, too. Maybe I’ll approach this from the other side: which of my groups/individual students would benefit most from having their own blog/wiki, and who can I just email from time to time? I may even shut down a few superfluous things.

Graham Stanley and offline teaching

Posted on by
4

At the final event of the 21st IATEFL Hungary conference participants had the chance to ask the plenary speakers questions. One of the questions Graham Stanley got was: “When was the last time you taught an offline lesson?”

Just in case you didn’t know: Graham Stanley is one of the top experts on using technology in the language classroom.

So the assumption here is that since Graham uses technology in his classroom, he must be using it all the time, probably exclusively. Strangely enough, Jamie Keddie, who gave a talk on storytelling (an excellent one, by the way), didn’t get asked “Do you do anything else in your classroom apart from storytelling?” Sheelagh Deller (another excellent session!) wasn’t asked whether she was always pondering over who influences who in the learning community.

I’ve often had the same question and it always disturbed me: why do you have to assume that just because I happen to believe in using technology I’m so obsessed with it that I do nothing else? Of course Graham explained patiently that most of the time he has offline lessons. But why do we have to justify ourselves? I don’t drink but I still don’t go up to people at conference receptions with a second glass of wine in their hands asking them “How often do you get drunk?” When you give a talk on listening comprehension I don’t ask you whether you’re aware of the fact that speaking skills mustn’t be neglected either.

In his two brilliant sessions, Graham made several very convincing points for using technology in ways that help learners enormously. He showed real life examples from his own teaching which can be used without practically any computer skills, so the sessions were very definitely not exclusively for computer geeks but for a general ELT audience. And then he gets this question… I thought the debate over using technology in teaching was over.

But I don’t want to sound too pessimistic: I’m sure the vast majority of his audience will make excellent use of his ideas and probably even spread the word about them.

To learn more, make sure you check out Graham’s blog, his Twitter feed and his book Digital Play:

Using Google Docs in teaching English

Posted on by
Reply

One issue that came up during the ICT SIG Afternoon was using Google Docs in teaching English. Here’s a video about what you can do with this brilliant tool:

Here’s Google’s own introduction for educators interested in using Google Docs: http://www.google.com/educators/p_docs.html

And another one, on teaching collaborative revision: http://www.google.com/educators/weeklyreader.html

Have you used Google Docs in your lessons? What were your experiences? Do you have any questions about it? Or some links you’d like to share?

We have started

Posted on by
Reply

Thank you very much to all of you who came to the ICT SIG Afternoon of the 21st IATEFL Hungary conference. This site is the result of this afternoon as many of you expressed your interest in setting it up – so it’s here. Now it’s over to you – only you can fill it with content and make it meaningful. Please note that this is very much a work in progress – bear with us in these very early days if you encounter problems.

Till then, please explore the site (won’t take too long) and try to think of ways you can make use of it. First of all, register (link in the right-hand navigation bar) and fill in your profile. And of course, please leave a comment so that we know you’re here and tell us what you’d like to see here.