The challenge is part of this year’s IATEFL-H  SIG DAY, centred around two famous leaders: Abraham Lincoln and Margaret Thatcher.

The ICT programme will offer a range of web tools, applications, practices that can be used in relation to films. Now our featured movie is Lincoln (2012) .

What is the challenge?

All the resources mentioned above will be showcased in a Prezi, the zooming presentation tool.

Prezi allows collaboration, so we can build a huge goldmine of Lincoln resources together! 

The three levels of the challenge are the following:

Level 1

Visit the page regularly during the time of the challenge, ending on 30th May. (It will be growing gradually.) Check out the resources, try them if you wish, give feedback. (Comment or email me barbyorama@gmail.com)

Level 2

Share your own finds, practices or ideas with us, send us content that you or your students create. (Text, video, voice, multimedia.) Email me all these.

Level 3

Edit that very Prezi. 10 people can work on it at the same time, you can access it with the help of the this invitation link which is valid for a week. Contact me for a new one if expired (barbyorama@gmail.com). Please make sure you do not delete someone else’s content 🙂

If you need any help with it or need tutorial, you will find support on prezi.com or contact me.

 Any level is suitable for you, don’t hesitate, join us.

What’s good in it for you?

If you are a proficient user of Prezi, there’s nothing it can offer 🙂 (Beyond the sheer pleasure of collaboration with fellow teachers.)

If you have seen Prezi (never made you dizzy), but haven’t tried, this is a great opportunity.

Show it to your students and encourage them to use it, success is guaranteed, they will always bless your name and remember you as one of their best teachers, hahahaaaaa 🙂

Please join us, contact me if you are in.

One of the massive cornerstones of my professional development is the pedagogical/teaching-related PROBLEM. Luckily I have plenty of problems, which ensures I don’t usually get stuck in a PD rut.

Back in my beginner years I used to ask my experienced colleagues for help. They were absolutely wonderful and ready to give me good advice, although most of the time I should have magically turned into a totally different me in order to be able to follow their suggestions.

Another option: methodology books and papers. Evidence-based, scientific, reliable. Love them, they didn’t always seem to be applicable my peculiar circumstances however.

Then teacher blogs were invented, love them too! They often take me closer to my own solutions and I shouldn’t forget about the joy of reading them. But how reliable are they? Practically anyone is allowed to write a blog. (Even me!)

As for studies, research papers and methodology books again, how many times have I heard practising teachers (speaking of authors of those) grumbling that experts should sometimes enter the jungle of real life, everyday classrooms … Do they lose contact with 3D life?

So.. What now?
Ask peers? Dig up the libraries? Blogs?

Or… There’s this The Round thing. The Round is a unique mixture of blogs and books.
I would say you will be better off reading this to have a clearer picture.
The latest publication is really my latest fav (and I’m not paid to write this): Scott Thornbury’s Big Questions in ELT.

You might already his blog An A-Z of ELT .
The blog format allows anyone to comment on the content, the original post is sometimes ‘only’ a trigger for commenters who engage in long dialogues and exploit the concept in question. That guarantees a certain quality, the worldwide collaboration of practitioners and the insight of and expert, you feel it, don’t you?

The outcome, this book, is particular handy for coping with my down to earth practical teaching misery.
And it’s price? Oh, come on! <3

What do YOU think? What’s your PD magic bullet?

What’s the average number of talks, workshops and seminars you can attend a year? 3? 30?
This number may be determined by your physical location, whether you are a student at the moment or not, the information you can access about these occasions, etc.

These are excellent opportunities to learn something new, broaden your mind, socialize with fellow teachers, grow professionally in general. The thing that keeps me away from these events is the price of the ticket and the 6 hours spent on the train with slightly unpredictable heating conditions.

For me it is WEBINARS!

Definition: a webinar is a 30-60 minutes long online PD session that you can attend in pajamas or even naked.

OK,  more precisely, you enter a virtual room, most of the time you see the presenter (who is often an expert on the other side of the world you have no chance to meet, I will never forget Stephen Karshen and his red hoodie once) talking in a video box, the slides in a bigger box, the list of the usernames of the other participants, and a chatbox where everyone can write whatever they want. You are not seen or heard, only read. (Then pajamas don’t matter.)

To enjoy the experience you will need internet connection, a computer or a mobile device with free, easily accessible, fool-proof software. Webinars come in all shapes and topics. If the time is not convenient, you can watch the recording later.  

Here is a recording of one of Shelly Terrel’s wonderful Friday webinars:

What I especially love about them is the chat session. It practically means multiple participants back-channelling the webinar. The comments, questions popped in by the large number of peers help me see the main or underlying structure of what is being presented. You can ask questions, make new friends and have dinner/do the laundry/mop the floor while learning loads.

Look out for webinars on Twitter and Facebook.

For  webinars see these links:

http://www.livebinders.com/play/present?id=292127
(Free Friday Webinars by Shelly Terrell & American TESOL)

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/webinars
(British Council TeachingEnglish webinars)

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/turkey?page=0%2C1
(Story Sharing Web Conference )

http://vickyloras.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/from-zug-to-belgium-a-belta-webinar/
(very fresh From Zug to Belgium – A BELTA Webinar by Vicky Loras)

Share your webinar experiences with us, give us tips or ask us about them. And pajamas up, go webinaring!

Before you …… We are here to help. 🙂

http://www.britishcouncil.org/hungary-english-teach-english-blogathon-2013

All you have to do is to apply and blog hard between 1 and 28 February.

Thanks to British Council TeachingEnglish, you can win valuable prizes, even an all-inclusive trip to the IATEFL conference in Liverpool!

That’s a massive reason to start/go on blogging indeed. But once British Council has started the ball rolling I feel the topic of teachers blogging worths a bit of attention.

Why is it good to write a blog? What is good in it for a teacher of English?

Having asked my Facebook friends this is what has been put together:

WHY IS IT GOOD FOR A TEACHER TO START A BLOG?

“In that way a teacher motivates, inspires & helps other teachers to develop & improve their current teaching styles:)”
Tamara Petrovic

“It’s journaling out loud…to the world…with lots of helpful feedback both in writing style and in thinking. AND it becomes a chronological archive of your professional and personal growth in your ideas!”
Walter McKenzie

“Well, why is it good for students to practice writing? Same thing, teachers are lifelong learners. That’s one thing, being able to reflect on what we wrote is a great advantage as well, see how we build and develop our own way of expressing our thoughts…. and above all, blogging is a form of written dialogue where you can get a reaction and build a whole conversation on…”
Vladimira Chalyova

“I was inspired to start my blog after reading http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/britishcouncilturkey/why-do-i-blog-janet-bianchini-guest-post. But I started blogging later jumping into Brad Patterson’s challenge and thanks to him wrote my first blog. Challenging is also inspiring.”
Larisa Dubova

“I like to think of my blog as a space for me to reflect, but by doing it in public I’m inviting people to offer their opinions on what I write, which in turn makes me reconsider and evaluate them. It’s also a very useful way of arranging my thoughts into a coherent shape and logical order.”
James Taylor

After all these wonderful thoughts you may want to have a look at the update and the comments. Some of them are truly outside the box!

If you also have ideas, experience, opinion to share with us, please comment.

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.