TESOL France Colloquium 2009 &

A Wonderful Tweetup in Paris

I was in Paris on 6-7, November for The 28th Annual TESOL France Colloquium. It was a wonderful event. Thanks a lot to Bethany Cagnol who was a great host! There were very good talks. I attended Jamie Keddie‘s plenary called ‘Materials World‘. He had given a talk with the same name in Istanbul but he shared completely different ideas this time. I loved the video called ‘Mr W‘ and here is the link to the lesson plan. My students loved  it.

Another great talk was by Lindsay Clandfield. The name of his talk was “Blogging Your Way to Being a Better Teacher“. He showed some teacher blogs from different countries and gave some useful information and ideas to encourage teachers to start their own blogs. It was a great session and I am sure that he inspired many people to start blogging.

Gavin, in his talk ‘Beyond the Book’ shared very practical ideas and resources to integrate web technologies into lessons. It was great to see that teachers were amazed when they saw that using most of the web tools was very easy and fun. Here are some links recommended by Gavin:
Wordle
PhotoFunia (I loved it!)
Dvolver Movie Maker
Where the hell is Matt?

wordle.net

Ken Wilson shared useful ideas for turning passive lessons into active ones and it was great how he also turned us into very active participants (physically and mentally) during his session:-)

Penny Ur was the other plenary speaker of the conference. The name of her talk was ‘English as a Lingua Franca’. She discussed if there is such a thing as an ELF standard of language use in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation and how the development of ELF change our teaching goals.

My session went well too. I shared my class blog experience with teachers and gave them some ideas about how to use blogs in the language classroom.

Then it was Pecha Kucha time! It was a real adrenalin rush! The atmosphere was amazing and Lindsay was absolutely a great host!

Here is my Pecha Kucha filmed and uploaded by my sweet friend Shelly Terrell. You can find the other PKs on Shelly’s channel too. Thanks Shelly!

As well as being a wonderful event, it was amazing to meet some Twitter friends. I met @ShellTerrell, @englishprofi, @paulmaglione, @lclandfield f2f for the first time. I can’t describe how amazing it is to meet Twitter friends in real life.

I’m looking forward to the 44th IATEFL Conference, the Pecha Kucha evening and the big Twitter party in Harrogate!

Wonderful dinner with PLN: @englishprofi, @vale24, @dudeneyge and his lovely sister Lisa, @ShellTerrell and her lovely husband Steven, @cheimi10, @paulmaglione, @kenwilsonlondon, @hughdellar, David Hill

@kenwilsonlondon, @ShellTerrell, @burcuakyol

@lclandfield & Penny Ur

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