IATEFL Hungary's Official Blog

(by Barbara Bujtás)

Twitter has proven to be a fast news channel of the IATEFL Glasgow conference. Tweeters recommended and back-channeled sessions,  there were actual discussions on sessions, and in many cases participants tweeted links of video sessions. As a participant, one doesn’t necessarily have to tweet, they can just follow the tweeters who are often referred as ‘Personal Learning Network’ (PLN).

This week has been quite efficient in terms of Twitter use for professional development. There are a number of new users who decided to join the tweeting community after seeing the advantages. IATEFL Hungary’s Glasgow Online After party session turned into an offline PLN where members actually helped each other understand the whole business the best possible way. Online PLNs are really growing like grass after the rain, no wonder, it’s spring huh!

So for all the new twitter fans, please take this freshly made spring recipe collection

7 day Twitter diet

Spring is here, and 80 % of people think it’s high time to lose weight, 10 % go on a cleaning diet. There is another 10 % hmmm.. They ….

Well, if you are just about to start a spring diet of some kind, why don’t you try IATEFL Hungary 7 day Twitter diet?

There are basically two components. One is of course exercise, the other one is food.

Daily exercise:
Get a mobile device (your mobile phone, iPod, iPad, mp3 player, your kid’s mobile device or any of your students’ gadget confiscated for inappropriate use during lessons). Choose one that can play music and you will also need earphones. Any music will do, there might be a radio in your phone, just perfect. Put on comfy shoes and clothes, insert the earphones in your ears and switch on the music. Spend 10 minutes walking to the rhythm of music, whatever it is.

Done? Great! Feeling fine?

Eating:
Substitute one meal a day with 10 minutes of using Twitter according to the programme below. Don’t overdo it! It might cause serious health hazard!!! (those who don’t want to lose weight may consume a 100 g bar chocolate or a four cheese pizza meanwhile)

Day 1:
Register on twitter. Once registered, close the window. Now open a window, type twitter.com, sign in. Type “iateflhugo” in the search box on the top right. When you’ve found this user, click on “follow”.
Congratulations! You have just completed the first day.

Day 2 (follow day)
Go to twitter.com. Sign in. Click on user iateflhugo. Click on ‘Follows’. Follow all the people iateflhugo follows. Now choose three of them, read their profile information and follow 10 people they follow each. There might be cross sections, never mind.
Day 2 done.

Day 3 (hunt day)
Sign in to Twitter. Wow! Look at your wall! Now you are hunting for links. Links are strange animals, study them carefully.
Find five links, click on them. This is how you shoot them, that is. Each link is more or less a surprise. Open them. Aren’t they great?

Day 4 (sniff day)
Now you are to sniff around and find more people to follow. There are many ways to find people, now try these two:
Twitter automatically offers you people to follow based on your previous follows. You can read their bio, you can see what they post and you can follow them. At this point your task is to follow as many people as possible. (in 10 minutes, of course. As it is he fourth day, if you really want to spend more time there, stay for an extra 5 minutes, NO MORE! It’s addictive!

Day 5
Follow 10 more people! Quick!
Now look at your wall and hunt 5 links.
Follow 10 more people again.
Done.

Day 6
Write your profile and try and upload a picture that will represent you.
Hunt for 3 links.

Day 7
You may have followers, right?
It’s time to give them something:)
Hunt for 5 links again and choose the one you like the best. Go back to the tweet where you found it. Find the Retweet sign, it means that you share this tweet with your followers, thus making them happy:)

Congratulations!

You have completed the mission! Probably you have lost half a kilo, relieved a lot of stress by walking to the rhythm of music and learned the basics of using Twitter as an online PLN tool.

You can unfollow anyone any time, no worries! You can as well commit Twittercide (=kill your twitter profile by deleting it) it happened to Gavin Dudeney’s profile, from whom I first heard of.

With your questions do not hesitate to contact me:
barbyorama@gmail.com

(The images are available for free from this site.)

(by Simon Ingram-Hill, the director of British Council Hungary)

My very first ELT blog and first involvement in Glasgow on-line. I started in a rather obvious place by watching  the British  Council’s Signature event on global Primary ELT issues. 3 days after the actual event,  in slow time,  with  interruptions,   chatting with colleagues about some of its findings, jotting down a couple of striking points, not bothering  at this stage but knowing that I  can always download the powerpoint  presentation as a resource for later use, having a quick look at some of the blog comments already up there,  and really feeling  that I was in charge of my learning  journey.

British Council Signature Event: Global Primary ELT Issues

Screenshot of British Council SIG event

Two related points stood out for me, perhaps because I am in Hungary amid current discussions around language policy.  One, the general policy trend over the last 10 years around the world  has been the lowering of the age at which foreign languages are introduced into the school curriculum. On the basis of  “the younger the better”. Later in the presentation we heard examples of  what  some research is telling  us which doesn’t support the “the younger  the better” assumption.  Studies show that with vocabulary acquisition, speech fluency and  writing performance, early starters do not perform better; meanwhile  older learners progress faster than  younger ones. There are other reasons and other research to show the benefits of early  language learning , but I did think this was interesting and I did press the pause button on some of my own assumptions.

And here was at least one benefit of Glasgow on-line.  You can  learn something in your own time which  is relevant  and up-to-date, and you then take it where you want to go.   I am going to  have another  look and see what else there is going on in Glasgow.   It doesn’t really even matter if it’s “live” either.

(by Nora Tartsay)

I have been following the 46th IATEFL Conference tweets in the past few days and these are three examples of what I learned:

1. I got to know a couple of blogs, for example Adrien Underhill and Jim Scrivener’ new blog, Demand High ELT
2. People from the audience have been writing reports on the talks and published their notes.
   Check out this excellent example, feels as if participated at Mike Harrison’s workshop on using sounds and images in the classroom. One task from the session was described by @Lauraahaha as: “Activity 6: stimulating.  We divide a piece of paper into 4 sections, labeling each one 1-4.  (Reference to Vicky Samuell’s Pecha Kucha on choice last night – students have some choice!)  As they listen to 4 short music clips, the students scribble down a little drawing it makes them think of.”. The same idea in a 140 character-limit tweet looks like this: “@jemjemgardner Divide paper in 4, T plays 4 sfx, sts draw/write what comes to mind, write story to link pics.”
   Another great report from @Lauraahaha on a session on using iPads in the classroom is here. It also suggests some free Apps you can use with students.
3. I got to know some more ELT professionals who are great Twitter users as well, and will hopefully offer more reports on ELT events. I suggest you start following: @jimscriv, @kenwilsonlondon, @jemjemgardner, @cheimi10, @harrisonmike, @thronburyscott, @barbsaka, @sandymillin, @vickyloras

More to come as I read more tweets