Pete Sharma Associates

Margarita says – “Innovative way of learning”. We are all enjoying (I think) the experience!

What a trip! Bizarre delay had us sitting on an aeroplane for hours at Heathrow. Missed the connection in JFK but a lovely lady from Delta got me on night flight to Mexico city. Arriving at half four and flying over this vast, vast city was unforgettable.

Sleep – then down to the Macmillan offices to prepare for a talk. The Mac folk were as wonderful, warm humorous and mad as ever! Brilliant day….off to play with a Promethean board and an e-pen now and deliver with Omar the second of the sessions on our pilot ICT course via Elluminate… Or is that Blackboard connect?

Our next newsletter will be coming out soon. In the meantime, you can take part in our latest competition by going to the competition page and giving us a response to the question there. The page is here.

It was a great conference in Salford yesterday! I really enjoyed the three elective sessions I attended.

RICHARD GRESSWELL  showed us some impressive  videos made by his ESOL students. He spoke about his new video-sharing site:

http://web2literacy.com/2011/05/10/a-video-sharing-community-web2english/

JESSICA FRYE showed a couple of brilliant short films, both silent, to use with learners

Both are avilable on YouTube. One ‘split screen’ – ‘The wrong side of the bed’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR_PzFZgsHU

The other the award-winning ‘Black Hole’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5_Msrdg3Hk

PHIL BIRD and  MIKE HARRSION,  in their session on differentiated learning showed some interesting tools and sites for students, including:

Telescopic texts http://www.telescopictext.org/

Animoto http://animoto.com/

A big thanks to everyone who came to my session.

Here is the lite-version of the Power Point:

practical_ideas-lite

Here is the answer to the Vocabulary frequency exercise

Using the star system as outlined in the Macmillan English Dictionary:

nod (verb) is red, three star; rob is red, two star; nomination is red, one star; fracture is the black word

frame as noun is two star; as a verb it is one star

It was great meeting professional acquaintances – some from way back – and catching up! I won’t mention the food – brilliant: a huge thumbs up the caterers……:-)

Yikes – just visited the Mac site (as you do) and discovered that our Glossary of tech terms is up there!

The site with info on the book is: Macmillan English

The 2-page Glossary of terms (like audacity, infinite cloner, LAT, VLE) is a free downloadable .pdf and would make a good handout at the end of a training session.

As they say oop norf, Take That.

oooooooo – just discovered there’s a ‘Technology’ track at this weekend’s NATESOL conference in Salford.

In Session 1, RICHARD GRESSWELL  is looking at making and sharing video clips by young adult ESOL learners

In Session 2, JESSICA FRYE  is looking at Bringing Youtube into the classroom – Making use of short films in the EFL classroom

It’s me after lunch in Session 3, Teaching and learning in the digital age – I’ll be there at this session

Then, in Session 4, PHIL BIRD and  MIKE HARRSION  are looking at differentiated learning supported by technology.

So, that’s me sorted. Apparently some band or other are playing in Manchester (Take That). Good enuff reason to go to a conference, methinks.

The plenary and workshop summaries from many of the sessions at April’s EAQUALS Conference in Prague have been posted on the EAQUALS website, including:

Plenary: enhancing classroom language learning through technology (Pete Sharma)

Pete’s Technology Workshop: PPT also posted on-line

To view summaries and PPT, visit: http://www.eaquals.org/pages/?p=8232 and click on the Conference programme.

Great venue (below) – great event