Month: March 2014

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Conferences…why bother?

A great post on why we should.attend conferences.

Rachael TESOL

I’ll tell you why, if you are someone who is wondering if ELT conferences are worth it.  Worth the money (and very often it is teachers who self fund to attend).  Worth the time (you may have to use annual leave to attend, or give up a weekend).

I’ve had teachers say to me ‘I don’t need to attend trainings/conferences any more,  I’ve been teaching 10/20+ years’.  In every way, these are the teachers who need to attend conferences and training the most (and it shows in their teaching, obviously)!  And who have the most to gain from attending a conference such as, say, the IATEFL conference coming up next month in the UK (and see here for the online sessions).

So, why bother?

iatefl-conference-sign

First of all, teacher development is for you and benefits YOU.  It’s not something to do for your school (though the school undoubtedly benefits…

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Upcoming event – IATEFL Conference, Harrogate

This year’s IATEFL Conference will take place from 2nd to 5th April in Harrogate. I will be presenting on Friday 4th April at 2:35 in Hall Qe. I am looking forward to meeting up with friends and colleagues, and to taking part in this fantastic conference.

The talk I will be giving is ‘Exploiting video in the language classroom’, which is based on a post I wrote for this blog in collaboration with the TESOL Spain e-Newsletter, which you can access here. The workshop explores different techniques we as teachers can use to exploit video in our classrooms in order to motivate our students, rather than simply putting on a film and expecting them to be content. I hope to see you there!

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TESOL Greece – Motivation in the 21st Century.

It’s been a hectic week, with TESOL Spain last week in Madrid and now TESOL Greece here in Athens. This is just a quick post to publish my powerpoint form this afternoon’s closing plenary. More to come soon.

TESOL Greece Plenary Speakers

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Do *you* use a global coursebook? If so, please read on…

I’m sure many of us find ourselves in this situation, so here’s a chance to help out some colleagues and share our ideas.

Lizzie Pinard

When it comes to global coursebooks, everyone has an opinion regarding their qualities and flaws, and everyone has their own special ways of using them when required to do so…

Heather Buchanan (Leeds Metropolitan University) and Julie Norton (University of Leicester) are doing some research on this topic and are interested in finding out about your views and uses. They will share the results of this research as part of a presentation at the IATEFL conference in Harrogate next month.

Participation in this project is completely voluntary and anonymous. If you would like to help, by sharing your views on global coursebooks and your uses of them, please visit the following link:

Global coursebook questionnaire

When you click on this link, you will be taken to a page which provides you with more information about the project and will then be given a choice of…

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