Using Harrogate Online videos for teacher development - ideas welcome

I should also mention that teachers - in previous years - have also come up with innovative ideas on using the IATEFL Online forums for teacher development.

Once again, if you have done this in the past or you see this as a possibility in the future, please share your ideas here so others can benefit

Thanks

Julian & HO Team

From the top of my head, I'm going to give a presentation to master's degree students on language skills and ICT in a week and I'm planning to use part of the material as reference and as part of the introduction. All links, part of them from the IATEFL conference, will be available for these students in a wiki. Also, we ,AVEALMEC (a Venezuelan association that promotes the use of ICT in the language classroom in our country and Latin America), are planning to give some workshops by mid September and will be referring to this event and maybe using some of its materials as well during their delivery.

The speakers from International House London were really excited at the range of material available on the IATEFL Online site - many thanks to you and the team, Julian. What we are planning to do here is probably the most obvious use of the resources... We want to use this content as a TD resource throughout the rest of the year. The idea is that every 3 weeks we will have a TD session focussing on one of the filmed sessions. Participants will be required to watch the session beforehand, and the meeting will be a facilitated discussion on the themes and topics of the talk, and how they relate to our teaching and training context. There are 2 reasons for doing it this way [oh, I've just thought of another one, so make that 3 reasons...]
1. There is a wealth of material to cover
2. We want to make IATEFL online an active part of the school's TD programme, and really integrate it into the life of our organisation
3. Watching sessions which are not given by 'big names' may encourage other staff members to consider putting in a proposal for IATEFL 2011, once they see that it isn't as intimidating as they may fear
4 [Yes, I know I said 3, but I've just thought of anouther one again!] The discussion will be facilitated by staff members, not only members of the DoS team. This way, we hope that staff who may lack confidence in delivering a 'standard' TD session may be able to 'cut their teeth' in managing the discussion of the filmed session, with help and support from more experienced staff members and members of our Dos team.
That's the idea, anyway!

If Cardiff online was a pleasure to have as a resource, Harrogate online must surely be every wiki or moodle designer's dream of good sessions to dip into and link to for teacher development work.

I have already started linking online sessions to my wikis - for CELTA and other initial training courses, I have opted for the more practical sessions; for the DELTA, I have also included some of the more theoretical ones which fit in with their syllabus.

This is valuable material for revision, expansion, watch and report sessions and am hopeful to read more ideas by colleagues on this page.

Hello,
As SIG Coordinator for TESOL Arabia, I am hoping that some of our SIGs and Chapters will consider showing a video from IATEFL or slides/handouts for one of the sessions at our local events. I think that it would be a good type of session to organise if someone went through the video/materials carefully, did an intro and then held a discussion either at key points or at the end of the video, particularly to encourage our members to think how they could apply the info and ideas in the video to our local situation. It would also be interesting to find out how our members react to such a session - ie a video-ed session rather than a 'live' presenter speaking for 45 mins.
Our Learner Independence SIG for example has, in the 'online years' demo-ed IATEFL Online at events to illustrate how PD can be done at home. Similarly last week Vance Stevens and Jim Buckingham did a session hooking up 2 Chapter meetings and recording the session for others to view later. Whilst this idea has received some positive feedback - and definitely has considerable backing and support - some members appreciate the social side of our meetings and don't seem to mind a long drive to attend them.
However, I believe it's good to have options and also to offer a variety of types of presentation and to encourage our members to do what is convenient to them. Equally (and with no disrespect) it would be a good idea for us to have a bank of your sessions to utilise at our events in case a presenter suddenly drops out - instant back-up!
Thanks for everything,
Heather
PS: Any chance you could keep this discussion open for a while (or relocate it) so that people can report back?

Thanks Heather, Marisa, Maureen,

Heather - of course - we'll keep things open here for the next 12 months - no problem

Thanks for sharing ideas - comments so far suggest that the Harogate Online materials can be used in a number of ways - keep the ideas coming

We are grateful to those presenters who allowed cameras into their sessions

Best

Julian

Hi Julian and all

Thank you very much for sharing such useful and practical ideas for how to integrate the video sessions and materials available.

What I would like to do is show the IATEFL links to a group of teachers I will be teaching, and then encourage them to have a look for themselves as part of their ongoing CPD. Watching a short interview with the presenter of a particular session first and then discussing the topic before we watch the presentation maybe via the ppt or selected video highlights, for example, would make for a great lesson.

Once again, many thanks to all the presenters who have made their fabulous work available to us all!

Best

janet

Thanks for sharing those valuable presentations. I work at a language school and we have an online Google group, which we use to exchange ideas and material for professional growth. I've shared Harrogate Online Videos with my colleagues. each of us can probably choose a session to comment in our next staff meeting.
Best,
Marisa

Hi

I've just watched half of Marjorie Rosenberg's workshop. I am organising a course for teachers of Business English and wondered if I may use some of the ideas with them? Is it also possible to get a copy of the slides? I will not be showing the video but, if allowed, will be using the ideas and activities mentioned.
What a marvellous idea to record talks and share them with us. thank you.

Dear Jean

You can look through the 'all session' list (see below) to see whether presenters have made their slides available

To make use of the session pages that IATEFL Harrogate presenters have created - please visit  > >

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010/sessions

Thanks once again to all IATEFL presenters who have made their materials available

Julian & HO Team

Hi Julian and HO Team,

As I told you personally at IATEFL, we had teachers all over Brazil following IATEFL Online and they seemed to really enjoy it.

We will be encouraging teachers to look over a few more of the plenaries and I´ll be bloogging son about the sessions and encouraging them to post comments as well so we start discussing some of the themes talked about.

I´m going to try and get a Voicethread going about Tessa´s session - I´ll post the link once I get that off the ground - it´s loop input for teachers on how to use certain web 2.0 resources and to start sharing ideas - will let you know how things develop.

Please do keep up the IATEFL Online iniciative - it might be an excellent way to expand interest in IATEFL and get people to register and eventually to go to the conference personally. These big events sometimes scare teachers off who feel they may be a bit lost - so the community might be a good way of making them feel at home and eventually saving up and travelling to the UK.

Thanks for the excellent contribution. There should be a sort of prize for the work you all did!!!

Take care,
Valéria

Hi Valéria

Great to see you and catch up at IATEFL 

Thanks for sharing your ideas here & great to hear that your Brazil teacher networks are making good use of the materials & videos - please keep us posted on this as others might be interested

On the IATEFL Online initiative - it will continue and as you say, it has even greater potential than it's already achieved

We know of teachers who followed Aberdeen & Exeter Online then attended Cardiff and presented at Harrogate - it's interesting that our online coverage encourages that kind of participation

Boa sorte!

Julian

Hello everybody!

I would like to thank everyone who always makes the Annual IATEFL Conference sessions available for others and the participants who did not mind sharing their sessions!

I would like to share below what we, the British Council, did in Uzbekistan for the Uzbekistan Teachers of English Association (UzTEA), which the British Council works very closely with.

We decided to run Harrogate online session for several reasons:
1 - to raise awareness of the IATEFL and its annual conferences;
2 - to provide a sense of confidence in trying the chance of becoming either a presenter or a participant at the next conference;
3 - to push forward teachers' professional development

I chose Tessa Woodward’s plenary session on the Professional Life Cycles of Teachers.

First, I made a short 5 min brainstorming session about Tessa: I wrote down on the board several facts about her and asked the teachers to find a common thing/a link about them. Then, i gave a brief intro into the Tessa's topic asking the participants some questions that Tessa included in her plenary - this really helped to get preliminary idea and understand the native speaker better. After a brief Q&A part the floor was given to Tessa. I stopped the session several times to check the comprehension and let teachers share opinion by guiding questions. After Tessa has finished we had another round of discussions one of which was a group work - I divided the audience into two groups - those with 1 to 7 years of teaching experience made one group and 8 + was the second group. In groups they were supposed to share their professional development opportunities (past, present, future plans); then, two groups reported to each other. It was interesting to see both similarities and differences. For instance, the group with 8+ years of teaching experience had a practice in writing and editing the course books; however, the “1 to 7” showed more enthusiasm in participating in various local and international ELT conferences/seminars, etc. I ended up the session with a short action planning part where teachers were planning their PD for 2010-2011 and I was satisfied to see that about 90% of them planned to explore IATEFL and apply for the annual conference next year.

I thought that Tessa’s session would be one of the best options as it is very lively and has good sense of humour, so it would not be boring to watch it for 50 min; it also involves the opinions of different teachers with a variety of backgrounds, native and non-native speakers; to top it all of, discussions about the professional development are not that wide spread here and in most of the cases the teachers are usually trained on the ways of teaching, activities, etc (practicalities and theories of ELT).

The Harrogate online session turned to be an efficient example which we are planning to run in the BC Learning Centre now for Teacher Development package.

Good luck to everyone!

Dear All,
I've created a Ning "uzbekespteachers",the related link is:
http://uzbekespteachers.ning.com/
we are 23 now , 1 are from Germany,1 from Kazakhstan, others- mostly from Tashkent.
Dear All ,
I am involved into Online discussion on the topics, I guess which would be of Interest for you too:
"Tell me which NING groups do you belong to' “ and I say WHO and What are YOU! The usual replies here are :
"Facebook and Social Networking, are they good or bad?"
Also,there are some types of opinions :
“Personally I have never liked any sort of social networking,even stating that Facebook was initially funded by the CIA”...
“Or being members in a couple of NINGs... "Usually one is a small closed group a colleague set up so that members can support each other in a University course review team and the other is to help members practice their (beginnig,intermediate or advanced levels) of some lingua francas, mostly English. Ning members hope to visit some countries so they want to have some knowledge of the language”.."may be we may need to move to a new platform or find some sort of sponsorship, which is a pity as we have done lots of work"...
Dear All,
My Uzbek ESP colleagues, who've joined to my Ning “Uzbekespteachers” have told me, that the intention/participation of/in their previous Ning’s were good, but results were only twitting about nonsenses....
Therefore, we 've defined our main aim as following : How to make our Ning “Uzbekespteachers”more USEFUL for Uzbek ESP trainers?
Btw, we widely use The Harrogate Online conference coverage of this year's Harrogate IATEFL Conference
Halima