TESOL SPAIN, 2010

TESOL was brilliant... lots of things that I saw were really practical, things that teachers could bring into class the Monday after the convention. Met Steve Starry of Madridteacher.com, and a lot of people interested in making cool things happen.

There were some great workshops with speakers: like...

Elaine Gallagher: talked about CLIL, Bloom´s taxonomy, and gave candy for good answers. What energy... exactly the teacher you would want your child to have.

Micheal O'Brian: I thought AR was "augmented reality" not "action research" but despite the fact that my inner geek was whining, the Action Research workshop was interesting and worth staying for.

Elspeth Pollock: Personalizing technology was an interesting workshop on using tech tools to make personalized classes. The neat thing in tech workshops is how people whip off urls for different tools.

Charles Goodger's workshop on action songs got oversold to me by someone, it wasn't that it was bad, just that it wasn't as dead killer as the "ad" I got for it was. (With the help of "Band in a Box", I think I could do similar songs... by next month I hope to convert Swans Practical Grammar into 45 country music albums.)

Graham Stanley (you can read his blog at http://blog-efl.blogspot.com/ )My head got stretched a tad entertaining the concept of 2nd life language teaching, aside from the fact that Mr. Stanley is exactly the kind of person I enjoy hanging out with. Graham and I were mutually following each other on Twitter and it was nice to meet each other F2F. (He also re-tweeted the esssentials of my conference talk, and I felt like a celebrity...)

Graham talks briefly of the British Council Island in this video:

Talking with him also brought up a topic that is very web 2.0: what to do when you run into a troll that spams about your hashtag and can put your state funded project in jeopardy? (negativity can threaten grants for renewal, or just "street creds".) While it hasn't happened to me (that I know of) yet... one's competition could easily flame anyone throughout the net, and affect ones credibility. What can you do? (any ideas?)

Jamie Keddie, of teflclips.com did two workshops that were excellent as usual, and I missed a "Theatre of the oppressed" workshop to see one. Not just those "Robbie Williams" good looks, he always gives practical ideas...

looking for a Jamie Keddie video with him in it, I found him entering my "magic show territory":

(Jamie, if you want me to take this off, I will!)

I thought it was dead cool for teachers to learn.

Russell Stannard did a Jing.com workshop, and I missed Elena Bañares' moodle workshop to see it. It was good, and many good ideas that are directly usable came out.

Then I did mine on Making your own Interactive whiteboard. I was all over the place, but the audience was there with me, so big fun... we got the basic ideas covered, and I think that there will be some whiteboards made.

Paul Seligson who has another youtube series on classroom management. Paul wrote "English File", and did a great workshop on "the four skills." I found some videos on classroom management, (from a conference in Brazil) so I thought I'd put them up here to give everyone a taste of Paul...

































It would be really great to have a TESOL Spain youtube channel. (hint, hint.)

Next year the conference will be in Madrid... English Teachers, come!