ELTMentor News
Here’s our weekly digest of forum comments, upcoming dates and other snippets of useful information.
Please welcome Michael our latest ELTMentor participant. I know that you will all make him welcome and I see that he has already posted a bio on the Forum
The Forum
Don’t forget to use the forum for sharing ideas, asking for help or posting successes!
Start your own thread choose whatever it is that you are passionate about and let’s get discussing it.
Your passwords should all be your name+elt on the end. If you have problems let me know. There has been a change to passwords so if you reset them you’ll need a mix of letter upper & lower case and digits.
Can anybody who hasn’t yet please post up a short bio? We can’t wait to find out all about you 🙂
Here’s the link again:
If you haven’t managed to find the forum yet let me know.
Marcia wrote her very first guest blog post – great job Marcia;
Go along, have a read and leave a comment.
Do share your successes with us – it’s good to see how people are growing and developing in their career.
#eltmentor
Thank you to Marcia and Edith for posting under this hashtag. It’s a good idea to add #eltmentor when you post anything on twitter that will be of help or interest to the whole group.
If you are still struggling with twitter just let me know and I can go through it with you.
(Sign up to twitter, then sign up to tweetdeck and post a comment there).
#eltchat
Edith is fast becoming an expert on eltchat. Maybe you can post something on the forum Edith to encourage the others and let them know how you managed to go from newbie to regular attender/tweeter in an instant!
For those of you who would like to follow #eltchat but haven’t signed up to twitter and would prefer to ‘lurk’ and observe before taking the plunge, you can observe #eltchat on Tweetchat.com. Here is the link:
When you get to the site add eltchat to the # box. You can then sit back and watch the action! If you want to contribute you can sign in but this is really the best place for smart lurking :-0
#eltchat is held on Wednesdays at 12.00 and 21.00 UK time – but the # is in use at all times so you can check in anytime to see what is going on.
To find out more about eltchat here is a link to the site – even if you don’t attend the chat you can get great information and links to resources via this site:
Useful articles
As Marcia mentioned Dogme in her article and that was also a large part of today’s eltchat I thought I’d add some references here. It is a ‘theme’ of the moment and so worth an investigation.
Firstly a catalogue of resources on the topic can be found on @cybraryman’s site.
Jerry’s site is a real treasure trove of information on all things educational.
Here are the original ideas which formed the thinking on Dogme from Scott Thornbury:
The Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_language_teaching
Finally Karenne Sylvester (who is a real dogme practitioner and ‘evangelist’) writes a lot about Dogme
Here’s an example http://kalinago.blogspot.com/2010/10/dogme-blog-challenge-2-its-emergent.html
Gapfillers
Don’t forget to give me feedback if you use the site for yourself or with students. Also if you have suggestions they’re always welcome 🙂
If you have any students interested then just tell them to contact me mentioning you and I’ll sort everything out for them.
Just a reminder that we do offer a school licence so if your school has advanced students (if wants to use it for teachers) this is possible – just let me know.
We can also syndicate content which means we can deliver straight to your school site or intranet.
Next Session November 21st 12.00 p.m. UK time
This will be our technology webinar and I want to talk about Pecha Kuchas and presenting online. This will be a prelude to the Christmas ‘party’ where we will all get a chance to present something. I also want to talk about the Virtual Round Table where I hope some of you will present.
Edith can you present your Presto on the 21st as you lost connection last time?
Finally we’ll have Q&A on progress to date. I’m hoping to get as much interaction as I can into this session.
November 28th is our normal monthly session and we’ll be talking about teaching mixed level groups.
The final session of the year is our half-day workshop on the 4th December – lots of PKs Christmas songs and I hope some suggestions from you for other things to include.
Need help with anything?
If anybody else needs help with anything just post in the forum, or on twitter or email me or send a message in Gapfillers. I am really pleased that you are using the forum – let’s get more things posted to discuss.
Don’t forget to put any suggestions in the forum, this is your space to share ideas or experiences and to ask questions.
Until next week
Berni