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Showing posts from October, 2013

New British Council podcast - Ceibal English interview

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Earlier this month I was thrilled when asked to be interviewed by Rob Lewis about the Ceibal English project for the new British Council English Agenda podcast for teachers. It was an honour to be part of the first episode and a lot of fun to do. The result can be listened to here:  http://englishagenda.britishcouncil.org/content/englishagenda-podcast-15th-october-2013   1. You’ve been in Uruguay for a few months now – can you tell us about the project you’re managing?  Ceibal en Ingles (Ceibal English) is a project the British Council won after a tender was issued by Plan Ceibal for English language teaching via video-conferencing in Primary schools in Uruguay. You will have heard of Plan Ceibal as the organisation that has succeeded in the OLPC initiative.  It started five years ago, and now each state school child in the country has received a laptop. With English, however, there aren’t enough qualified and experienced English teachers to be able to offer primary ch

Short and Sweet - Kieran Donaghy

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Short and Sweet - Kieran Donaghy  The Image Conference , Brasilia 25th October 2013 This was Kieran's first conference presentation in Brasil. Here on a flying visit (the lack of sleep didn't show!), Kieran spoken about how best to use short films in the ELT classroom, presenting ideas that he has made popular through his ELTon award winning website, Film English . Kieran thinks that today's Internet culture, has led to more short films these days, and especially the rise in use of mobile deviceshas seen a renaissance in watching short films. For these reasons, the time is ripe to take advantage of this in the classroom. Why use short films?  The main reason is that they are short! This means  you can show them several times and do different activities with each viewing. You can also show learners a complete narrative, which means it can be more fulfilling for students than showing excerpts of films. The form is also usually innovative and so it is o

Carla Arena - Transforming sins into virtues in Design for Learning

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Carla' session at the Image conference, Brasilia, was all about showing some common sins when designing digital resources and thinking about noticing the power of good design to enhance learning and power up the visuals in the language classroom. Carla Arena is a great believer in design when it comes to every stage of teaching or teacher training, taking care of details such as posters to attract teachers to training sessions.  Back in 2005, Carla believed she was a good designer, but now, looking back and sharing with us a presentation that she created that she is now horrified with what she created. Design for learning from sins to virtues from Carla Arena Some years ago, during an online course, she decided to change, and she shared her sins and how she changed with us during this presentation: Her first sin was...greed Crowding everything onto one slide, using lots of different fonts and animations. She changed to a more simpler approach - one

the Image Conference, Brasilia

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The Image Conference, Cultura Inglesa, Brasilia 25th October 2013 You can't imagine how excited I was about attending this Braz-TESOL event in Brasilia, and so very pleased for Kieran Donaghy to see him here too. The First Image Conference was held earlier this year, in June, in Barcelona. I was first contacted by Kieran, the teacher behind the ELTon award winning Film English site , who asked me to present a the conference in Barcelona back in April, but then a week earlier he called me to say the event would have to be cancelled because his University said they were not prepared to take the financial risk. It was such a shame as Kieran had done 80% of the planning of the conference already: he'd lined up an impressive list of speakers, had arranged for sponsorship from major publishers, presented a preliminary budget, costed the refreshments and meals and talked to people about technical Support, etc.etc. Fortunately, I was able to suggest that the IATEFL LTSIG