“Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience.” Denis Waitley

Summer holiday is a good learning and development opportunity for us since our minds are not engaged with students, planning lessons, marking papers, parents, meetings, reports, etc. You should definitely give yourself some pampering and do nothing for some time. But please remember… Starting the new year with lots of ideas and refreshed knowledge and skills and even with new contacts will boost your confidence and success! For me, every summer is an excellent time for making resolutions about different aspects of my professional life. Last summer, I decided to go to the IATEFL conference to make a presentation for the first time. I concentrated on my session during summer and I was there in April! Sometimes we underestimate what we can do and the only way to find out is by actually trying! Anyway… After thinking for a while, I’ve come up with a list of ideas that might help you make a great start to the new academic year. It doesn’t matter where you’re spending your summer holiday… All you need is a computer and Internet connection. Here we go…

DO SOME READING…
Summer holiday is an excellent time to do some professional reading. I suggest you to make some notes as you read. This will help you find your way around new ideas. You can use one of these tools to organize your thoughts. Here are some links for professional reading:

Books and Articles by Stephen D. Krashen
International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching
Onestopenglish
Teaching English
TEFLtastic
EnglishClub.com
The Internet TESL Journal
Total ESL Teaching Articles
ESLarticle.com
ELTWeekly
Humanising Language Teaching

START FOLLOWING EFL/ESL BLOGS…
Following blogs is a great idea in order to keep up with what’s happening in ELT, learn about people’s experiences from different contexts and share ideas with colleagues. On the left sidebar, you can find some great blogs that I highly recommend you follow.

START A BLOG…
All I can say about blogging is that it is addictive! Once you start writing and see that people read your posts, you start thinking what your next post might be about:-) Blogging is very useful for professional development because when you decide to write about something, you have to extend your knowledge to be able to share it effectively.
You can read my series of articles about my blogging adventure by which I might convince you to start your own blog!

START TWITTERING…
If you are willing to share ideas, links and experiences with colleagues from all around the world and think that doing this in 140 characters in each message would be interesting, you should start twittering:-))
Read my articles about Twitter to get started easily… To Tweet Or Not To Tweet & Top … ELT People To Follow On Twitter

JOIN AN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORK…
Online social networking offers teachers a great dimension of continuous learning. Learning by interacting with other teachers and experts of the field… Read my article for suggestions.

TAKE AN ONLINE COURSE…
You can sign up for a short online course by which you can learn new things or refresh your existing knowledge.
For example, this summer The Consultants-E offers a wide range of 2-week courses for teachers each of which focuses on a different ICT tool.

If you have other summer learning ideas or links, please feel free to share!

Have a wonderful and enriching holiday!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.