What a mad month! July 2009

The Big News

473 blogs were nominated from 26 countries and 5000 readers voted placing Kalinago English as #9 in the Bab.la/Lexiophiles list of top language teaching blogs!!!

For other winning categories, see :

• Language Learning
• Language Technology
• Language Professionals

Crazy, don't really know quite what to say.

It's a mega honor, so to all of you who voted:

THANK YOU VERY, VERY MUCH
;-)

And if that's not enough, just as insanely, it's currently the no. 1 blog on OneStopEnglish blogs!

Hmmm... are you guys liking reading my rants or it's the pretty picture of the sailboats that keep bringing you back?



Anyhoo, on to

Summary of July's Postings

This month I wrote:

Lessons/ lesson tips:

• Smartphone meetings - authentic, practical activity + the language of arrangements
  
• The God in Marketing - how to use Seth Godin's work in ESP and Business English lessons.

Social-networking:

• LinkedIn - getting the most out of the social networking platform for professionals.
• What is BELTfree - a community of ELT bloggers
• 8 great ELT blogs - notes on bloggers, commenting and my own blog roll
• Gr8 edu-tweets - small selection of some of my fave tweets in early June
  

Rants and musings:

• How do you keep language learners learning?
  
• Open letter to English language institutions
• The problem with e-books
  

Coming Next Month...

The series on She-In-ELT kicks off this month and I've got some seriously fantastic guest-pieces lined up.

Towards the middle of the month I'll be doing a feature piece on ELT teacher trainers who are on LinkedIn (check the discussion pages of the LinkedIn groups: BESIG/ Teacher-trainers for details).

And will also be posting up a workshop review regarding David Graddol's fascinating research into the current state of English and other languages.

For those of you on Twitter, that's how I got to meet @ShellTerrell and @EnglishProfi! Such fun ;-).

The long awaited Advice for NOObie bloggers will be going up early next week plus a really awesome speaking skills game/lesson worksheet in the pipeline.

On Life

Isn't summer supposed to be when everything goes a bit quiet and you get to catch up on important life stuff? Mine's all been a bit nuts and I've had to do quite a bit of juggling to get everything to fit together.

My cousin Pat, her husband and son were here and I discovered that there is actually a LegoLand not far from Stuttgart - we had great fun together and Chris declared that Stuttgart is all about fountains and trains.

He's right.

I started working on a materials writing project for Klett and also confirmed a major client for ESP: IT classes + community based language learning platform to begin October. Very chuffed about this.

Despite all this, I actually had a holiday!

Ran off to Malta for five days of relaxation, recharging the batteries via forced unplugging of the internet and all other electronic devices and instead caught up on some important reading - booked the holiday with a last minute travel agent and somehow ended up staying in a palace built by the Knights of St. John!



Read 5 books.

Okay, 4 and a half. There was a lot of waiting around in airports.



I really enjoyed Hape Kerkeling's I'm Off Then - about his Camino de Santiago - it's funnier in German but still, as I'd listened to this pre-pilgrimage, it was a treat reading about the places that I'd been to myself along the road and recognizing experiences.

On the same sort of theme, I then read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert - absolutely recommend this if you're into travel/exploring spirituality books. She journeys through Italy, India and Indonesia and talks about what happens to her there.

Then, of course, I got a bit serious and did my homework. Ploughed my way through Hugh McLeod's Ignore Everybody and Seth Godin's Purple Cow. Both excellent books on creativity.

Lastly, I read most of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers which I'd been meaning to get to for ages.

Now that I'm back, haven't finished it. Pah!

Hope you've been having an awesome summer too!

Best,
Karenne