Smart Phones Meeting (EFL Business English Lesson)

These days, at least over here in Europe, smart phones are about as commonplace as, er... um, desks.

So let's use them to teach with...



Lesson objective:
Practice the language of arranging meetings

Procedure (1):

You can easily dogme this lesson - simply ask your students to brainstorm a list of meetings and appointments they regularly and irregularly have with their colleagues and in their personal lives.

• Get them to write these down in their notebooks or stick up on the board.

• Ask them to drag out their computers-in-their-back-pockets a.k.a phones and encourage them to organize meetings with each other. Provide a time frame to work within, e.g within the next 2 - 8 weeks.

• Work on their grammatical weaknesses, supply alternative phrases, correct the common errors.

Procedure (2):

For students who feel more comfortable with a worksheet, download these:

Smart Phone Meetings (students)

Smart Phone Meetings (teachers)

Who's this lesson for?

Employed adults with smartphones or BlackBerry devices.
Elementary (with some vocabulary explanations) to Advanced.
Best with Pre-Intermediate.

Timing

25 - 40 minutes. Longer if you do the extension exercise.

When to use this lesson:

• to support a textbook unit on telephoning or meetings
• as a review of expressions for arranging meetings
• to focus on prepositions of time (on, at, in)
• to practice using ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd..)
• to work on the future structures (will, be going to, future continuous etc.)

after the first time of presenting this lesson, you can also

• follow up weekly/ whenever you need quick ice-breaker or a 5 minute filler

Have fun!

Best,
Karenne

p.s. before you dash off - have you got any other great ideas for using smartphones in class? The other day we google'd and wikipedia'd (we were looking up Farah Fawcett's age) and this was loads of fun too - would love to know how you've been using them too...

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Open Letter to English Language Institutions

In response to Scott McLeod's call-out on his Dangerously Irrelevant blog for postings regarding Technology Leadership in education, I decided that I'd write an open letter to:

Directors of Studies and School Administrators of the international Adult English Language Learning Institutions and Centers.

This is my letter:

Dear Sirs and Madams,

This is what the lives of our adult professional students currently look like:

View Full Album

This is what many TEFL teachers' classrooms still look like:

View Full Album

Now, there's nothing innately wrong with the above pictures however to adequately reflect our student real-world experiences and to adequately prepare them to conduct global business, while speaking English, this is what they really should look like, as often as possible:

View Full Album

What are you and your teachers doing?

Technology won't replace teachers but teachers who use technology will.

Robert Copeland

What you could do right now:

1. Read:

• Where are all the horseshoe makers now?

also... (from the Dangerously Irrelevant blog)

• Iowa - a computer in every hand


• Iowa -21st century curricula

2. Watch:

• Videos saved for you on youtube

3. Invest in your staff… and invest in your institutes' future.

External Options:

a. Consultants-e

Cert IBET Certificate in International Business English Training, Cert ICT Certificate in Teaching with Technology + short courses in moodle, e-moderation, podcasting, e-networks, 2ndLife, webquests & blogs.

b..Lancelot

Offers a 3-month professional development course in the methodology, intercultural competence and technology of teaching a language in virtual classrooms using state-of-the-art synchronous Internet communication tools. They also have 2-3h live online workshops conducted by LANCELOT certified language trainers. These provide concise information about a special set of tools.

c. Pete Sharma & Associates

Combining face2face teaching with blended learning. Blended Learning, evaluating web based ELT materials, blogs and wikis, podcasting, interactive whiteboards, virtual learning environments and new technologies.

In-house Options:

a. Hire a teacher-trainer to work through the various web2.0 based tools with your teachers.

Contact me to see if I can come over and train your teachers (check out examples of my presentations here/sign in to LinkedIn to read my professional references here).

If I'm not available, I'm very "socially-networked" and therefore can easily point you in the direction of another good teacher-trainer or three!

b. Hire an experienced techie teacher and assign IT leadership (or give the task to one of your current employees). Pay him /her to get up to speed and get this senior teacher to train the rest of your teachers.

Whatever it is that you and your team do decide to do, just don't do this:

Useful links related to this posting:

• Teaching with technology tips


• List of Web 2.0 tools

Best,

Karenne

Questions? Don't hesitate to ask.

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Gr8 edu-tweets June 1-12, 2009

So, I thought I'd really better start saving some of the fantastic links other teachers share with me - that I "favorite" while on Twitter - but as there's just so much great stuff flying out across the world... am never going to be able to keep up with these unless I organize them on the blog!


Teacher, developing

via @lclandfield:

• Does ELT need its gurus?

via @Larryferlazzo RT @shaunwoodnz:

• Student assessment of a teacher

and:


Teaching in a digital age

via @AngelaMaiers

• Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace Edutopia

via @datruss

• The ICE CREAM Approach to Online Facilitation by Linda Waddell and Susan Byrne

via @reportertanya RT @web20classroom

• Very organized list of Web 2.0 Tools

via @ShellTerrell RT @Larryferlazzo

• Collection of Photo Effects, Online Photo Editor

and:


Teaching: videos

via @sethdickens:

• 25 incredible TED Talks for Educators

via @tomwhitby

• Will Richardson on social media for schools

and:


Second Language Acquisition

via @cgoodey RT @Blythe_Musteric

• L2 Represented In Different Part Of Brain

via @nealchambers

• Do bilingual speakers have distinct language areas in their brain?

via @ShellTerrell RT @via @CotterHUE:

• Using L1 in the classroom

and:


Twitter

via @neal chambers

• Tweetiquette

via @barbsaka

• Twitter users mentoring teachers new to twitter

via @CotterHUE RT @barbsaka @EnglishProfi by @danzarrella

• The Linguistics of ReTweets GREAT!!

and:



Hope these links are useful for you too - the pics are linked as well - don't hesitate to add to the list of interesting tweets or to ask questions!

Best,
Karenne

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EFL Teachers LinkedIn - tech tip #9

Like everything else in life, you get back what you put in and LinkedIn is no exception to this rule.

LinkedIn is a social-networking site, in the way that Facebook, Twitter and Ning are, however, its community function is slightly different - its core objective lies in bringing together professionals.

Whether they are accountants, IT managers or CEOs they're all there on LinkedIn.

English Language Teachers, institute owners, publishers, authors, bloggers and e-learning site developers.

However, and actually, the thing I like best about this site is that unlike most other social-networking sites, on LinkedIn you know exactly who're you're talking to and the profile you build also manages to serve as an online public CV (resumé) .

That may seem a little scary, especially if you're learning all this techie stuff with me step-by-step, but if you are looking to

• expand your clientele
• stretch into new fields of expertise
• state your availability for new projects or jobs
• or you just want to let the world know about your teaching abilities

then it is an excellent space in which to do this in.

Harvesting what you plant...

1. Building a good profile

Spend time filling in all the details about your life, work experience, abilities, qualities and aspirations.

Remember that you are not only listing what you can do but in a way, just like in an interview, you are selling yourself in advance.

Definitely put in the same amount of time you'd spend updating your CV if you were applying for a job next week - LinkedIn is searchable by Google and once you have a profile listed, it is this (if you have a vanity profile) that will most likely be on the first page whenever someone types in your name.

Read these***

• Guy Kawasaki

• Chris Brogan

2. Add applications to make your page attractive

Towards the bottom of the left-hand column you'll see something that looks like a wheel, click on that to add apps (applications).

Are you a great English teacher?

Dig through your hard-drive.

Are there any lessons you could upload into box.net?


Are you running a language school?

Upload your latest brochure so your network can learn more about what you and your school offers and why this is special.

Drop the web 1.0 approach to everything - the web 2.0 works on openness and sharing and you are much more likely to attract clients if they can download your information easily.


Are you a teacher trainer?

Have another look in the dead-files, do you have a good powerpoint presentation you've made that you won't be using again (or at least not exactly the way it is now) which could be easily loaded up into slideshare so that potential teachers or associations can view the quality of your work?


Are you an aspiring or published author?

Stick up a chapter or two up for easy and free download. You will earn respect and if your network likes your work, they'll buy it.


Are you an editor or an ELT salesperson?

Load up your company's catalog. If you're looking for new leads tell the world what you have (but do not spam). If you're looking for writers of materials, say so and openly provide a specific email address for this function.

If you don't want to be bothered with unattractive requests, state this.



Do you have a personal blog or a website?

List it.

Use the "other" function so that you can name it appropriately (google-searchable).


What books are you currently reading?

Add one or two using Amazon, this will make you look much more well-rounded.


Travel a lot from conference to conference?

Let your network know, perhaps you do really prefer sitting in dusty hotel rooms all alone but if you don't, perhaps meeting up for a beer with someone in the same location might lead to further conferences or in-house employee workshops. Or a new friend.

3. Finding a great photograph

Remember that you are in a professional environment and want to look your best but also do make a good effort not to look boring!

Read this

Seth Godin and the power of the tiny picture



4. Expand your network


Who do you know that is already on LinkedIn?

Check your email addresses and send an automatic invite.

Connect with me (Karenne Sylvester - mention the blog so I'll know it's you - my email address for LinkedIn purposes is kalinago.english (at) gmail (dot) com.


Search for old bosses and dig through your last ELT conference's business cards - you know the ones you shoved in the back of your wallet - see it was useful for you to keep these!

Try to build a good-sized network of at least 50 people. Below this and you probably won't be able to experience the benefit of being on LinkedIn.

Take a look at the people in your contacts' contacts lists - have you already met some of those people? If you have, send them an invite to connect.

Read this
10 etiquette rules for LinkedIn



5. Get recommended

After a little while on LinkedIn, say a few weeks once you've tweaked and re-tweaked your profile (it takes a while to get it right), have a look through your contacts - who knows you and the quality of your work?

Would they be willing to say so in a public sphere?

Send them a nice email asking them to write you up a short reference.




6. Join Groups

The very best way to expand your network and find other like-minded professionals is to join in with other like-minded professionals!

Here's a list of some of the great ELT groups available:

• BESIG (moderator: Duncan Baker - Treasurer of the BESIG association)
• ESL International (one of the largest groups with 916 members)
• English Language Services Professionals (freelancers and translators)
• Edubloggers (to hook up with other educational bloggers)
  

If you're a Tweeter, join Tom Whitby's

• Twitter-using-Educators

But don't join only education groups - search for ones applicable to the country you live in, the type of interests and hobbies you have as you never know where that next great teaching assignment or professional contact will come in from.

If you're a language institution, do reach out to the HR professional groups and connect with them as well as teachers who you may potentially hire.



7. Getting "known"

The best way to connect with others is to connect with others!

Read your groups' discussion pages:

• If you need help figuring something out about teaching, ask a question.

• Can you help by answering someone else's question? Share your knowledge.
  

There's also an open Q&A section within LinkedIn, search through these to see if anyone wants to know something you know about.

And whenever you really like someone's questions or answers, linkup with them by using the Add to your network (top right) + select the group you both belong to from the drop-down menu.

Whenever contacting pure strangers, try not to use the standard "I'd like to add you to my network" invite from LinkedIn but instead say something like "I really liked your answer on.... blah, blah, and I was wondering if you'd like to connect with me."

The key is to be polite and most people will say yes.



8. Update your profile status regularly

Every time you make a change to your page, your network is notified, so do do this.

Whenever you notice a change on someone else's profile that is interesting, comment - it shows you are paying attention and develops your social-networking abilities.

And of course, the next time you're at a workshop or a teaching conference, you'll have a lot more to say to each other than "jolly good location, the food's great but the coffee's crap."




More links...
See what I've saved for you on delicious - this post will tell you what delicious is. Also read Tony Karrer's blog posting with many more links!


And now for a handful of don'ts

• If you're not a really close personal friend of one of the people in your contact list, don't ask that person to introduce you to someone else unless you have a really, really good reason. It's in poor taste.

• Do not shove your products and services down the throats of others! Be the same nice person/ educator that you are in real life - don't send out random annoying email requests to people you don't really know asking them to do you favors or asking them to advertise your products. It's in poor taste.

• If you have a serious professional offer to make someone, provide a relative amount of detail. "We'd like to work with you" is saying what exactly? ;-)
  

• If you decide to be on online, then be online - drop the old ways of thinking. Load up a real picture of you. Never, ever use your company logo or an avatar - it looks really weird if you don't have a real pic here and you will, effectively, have defeated the purpose of creating a profile.
  

Any questions?

Need me to clarify one of the points or have you got a top tip to add? Share it with us! And don't let my note on the "don'ts" scare you - due to the fact that LinkedIn has quite a closed door approach to networking, as a general rule, the spam factor is incredibly low.

Best,

Karenne

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The Problem with e-Books

So, like, er... how am I supposed to collect autographs now that everything's going digital?


Useful links related to this posting:

• David Graddol

• English Next, pdf

• Stephen Hawkings "Humans have entered a new stage of evolution" (hat-tip @shiv53)
  

Best,
Karenne

pic: David Graddol 'signing' English Next after speaking at ELTAS's 20th anniversary on the global changes in the world of learning and teaching English. Full report soon.

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The Orient Express: English Language Teachers Blogging

Are you ready?

I'm about to take you on the most exciting of adventures...

Along this journey, you'll be exploring some seriously interesting articles about teaching, language and our great ELT industry while journeying throughout the work of 22 ELT Bloggers who're based around the world.

We'll travel from Poland to Serbia, from Dubai to Italy, stopping off in Spain, Germany, the Oman, the US and the Philippines, Italy, before ending up in the UK - this is the blogosphere.

Packed your passport?

Shut down all the other windows on your computer?

Poured a glass of wine and pumped up that seat cushion?

Comfortable?

It's a virtual explosion of talent out there - the best of June begins...

Tips & Tricks

Jeremy Day in Poland discovered the usefulness of using the Google News function and changing the country of origin to gather media for ESP classes, honing in on complex grammatical structures and Alex Case served us up with yet another 15 ways to make writing interactive.

Janet, over in Italy, wrote about the IPOD generation (i.e Insecure, Pressurised, Over-taxed and Debt-ridden) and Natasa, in Serbia, took us and her students down a memory lane.

Natasa's lesson-tips weren't about Michael Jackson as might well be expected, given events last week, although Anthony Green's guest-piece for my student blog was: complete with VOICEbook, a free downloadable audio activity for our students.


While we're on the subject of the King of Pop, Benjamin Zimmer in the Language Blog, a.k.a the Indiana Jones of Linguistics, uncovered the origins of "ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma ku sa" - a fascinating modern-day-history-tour behind the 'Wanna be starting something' track from the Thriller album. (Hat tip to Alex Case for pointing me on over there).

One of his commenters also left this link to a visual map of songs arising from Soul Makossa.

Developing Professionally

Vicki Hollett, while discussing Madoff and learning to speak 'merican, cited:

"There have been some interesting instances in conversational research of ‘experts’ who sound authoritative and ‘experts’ who sound more tentative. The latter seem to collect more feedback.

So ironically, if you sound too much like an expert, it may prevent you from receiving the information you need to behave like expert"

which I really liked, rather Tao in its form. It especially went well with Larry Ferlazzo's post Life is very lonely when you're always right.

Both articles support the humor in Chwa eeLoon's self-reflections on raising language awareness over in Japan with his ESP classes.

Tweaching

We'll now journey over on to Neal, also in Japan, who has started up a newer blog (his other is Teacher Stumpers) where he has scribbled some thoughts regarding the Twyths about Twitter, i.e. for those of you who aren't on it yet or you can't figure out what could possibly be so interesting that millions are flocking on and have the idea that Twitter is about talking about your cups of coffee...

"I think lots of people think twitter is stupid or/and useless because they don’t follow the “right” people. I’m an English teacher, interested in Web 2.0 and how to integrate it in the classroom, and if I weren’t following great English teachers and important educators, I’d probably think the same. Finding people with similar interests, who’ve got something to say, is the key in my opinion. (Found in comments)"

Come see what it is about- Thomas has written up a piece on the simple steps involved in setting up an account, Burcu in Turkey has posted up a list of the top ELT tweeters for you to follow and I've saved some core articles for you to explore here. I'm @kalinagoenglish.

Talking About Teaching

Burcu Akyol had a conversation with a colleague of hers and then submitted a simply gorgeous piece on making a difference and having the power to change the future.

Henrik Edberg did a list of the 16 things he wished he'd learned at school and I must really figure out a way how to turn this into a lesson for my business students - if you do this before me, send it in and I'll post it up as a guest piece!

In Spain, Lindsay Clandfield decided to place a poll on his site of the most influential TEFLers/Linguists which set off a virtual hurricane of tweets and FB mobbing and he's currently gone into hiding.

There really were an awful lot of rather inspiring authors, TEFL hacks, SL acquisitionalists and edu-technologists who were not on that list - (Graddol, Hollett, Prensky, Pinker ..er, L what were you thinking?) but no, we won't continue that fight over here as Scott Thornbury did indeed make the list - fortunately - his books have, of course, had the hugest influence on my teaching style and...

I'm fighting the good fight by compiling a series on the most influential women in ELT, starting soon with a handful of guest-pieces.

Welcoming in the Best New Blogger of the Month

Tamas Lorincz in Dubai has started blogging!

He's one of my best-Twitter-friends (we're actually writing a story tweet-by-tweet along with Neal Chambers, Marisa Constantinides and Blythe Musteric - read it backwards if you dare),

he says:

"During my years as a student, trainer, teacher and mentor I have met so many teachers who have lost (or never had) the spark, the love of sharing, giving, loving, enthusiasm and I believe that this happens because it is so easy to sink into the day-to-day drudgery of delivering lessons and being a ‘martyr’ of the profession."

He is so right.

For Our Students

Miracel Juanta in the Philippines cracked out the whip for her students taking the IELTS and listed up the 7 habits of highly ineffective test takers.

Markus, in Deutschland, introduced me to the first bilingual blog I've ever seen - Der Englisch Blog!







Speaking of Speaking
Blythe in the US came up with 20 reasons why classroom discussions fail while Shelly, here in Germany asked what is the right question provoking us to think about how to create higher order queries for our lessons.

Jumping back to Korea (a lot of TEFL talent over in Asia), David Deubel wrote the seven sensational sins of great English teachers and Peter in Oman pontificated Power in ELT.

"One effect of the chat, for me, was that it made laughably absurd the idea of integrative motivation. These were highly motivated students; but there is little they’re motivated less by than the idea of integrating into British society.

In fact, it seems like something close to the converse is true: they were forced to appear more British in order to qualify for the privileges accorded to white people. They were motivated to learn English purely by the desire to be treated as equals."

Shifting Paradigms

Diamondfingerz's posting led to Chwa's posting on money-making in ELT and then, interestingly, to an unscheduled detour on Sacred Words.

As a general rule, Gavin Dudeney's posts are snappy: he has a sharp tongue and dry wit and That'S Life is fast becoming a must-read.

This week's rant was on the seeming hypocrisy of writers and publishers regarding copyright issues - a brave and honest post considering he's an author!

"I urged them to look at the music on their iPods, their copies of Windows, Office…, their DVDs, the materials they take into class.

Do they own legal copies of them all?

Do YOU? Do I??? If we can answer ‘yes’ to even one of those questions then our moral outrage is at best a tad dubious…"

While we're on the subject of copyright and copyleft, did you know that Wikipedia community and Wikimedia board have approved the cc-by-sa license for their entries there?

I'm distinctly pro creative-commons and see a great future in it, all the photos on these pages are from flickr and are used with permission, and I really believe that once all the kinks are ironed out and people understand how it all works we will see some beautiful and creative work coming out in lesson planning: see an old posting of mine on what creative commons is.


Reflections

Our tour around the world has almost come to an end except that I really must get you to look out towards our left window towards a truly intriguing and cryptic hint coming from Cleve Miller (in Cambridge) on English 360:

"This long tail of content will provide the custom course work that will result in radically personalized learning – we’ll have as many courses as we have students.

And as we’ve seen with Wikipedia, it’ll be fast and it’ll be cheap.

And most importantly, what it will be is open."

Oh boy, teachers, there are really some very interesting things going on in education right now...

I'll leave you with the interesting diagram and question on evolution of classroom design and a heart-warming matching picture of a student's self-evaluation of her 7th grade class (read her comments too) - this simple drawing made me feel quite nostalgic for teaching the young ones.

And that, my friends, is it.

It's now time to shut down the computer and tidy my office! I do hope you've had a lovely journey.



Next month's train ride will be all about blogging and advice for those who'd like to become bloggers, joining in the fun and professional development - based on a carnival I'm running here.

See you soon!

Best,
Karenne

p.s. For a slightly shorter journey, through my own postings in June, come here.
p.p.s Special mega thanks to Annie Mole for providing so many pictures of the Orient Express under creative commons, what a great gal!

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