Pete Sharma Associates

I really enjoyed giving the talk

Dealing with differentiation in Business English teaching

with Louis Rogers for Richmond last week at IATEFL, Liverpool.

Great to see so many familiar faces in the audience.

As promised, the Bibliography.

Handout

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was attending this conference in Madrid this weekend (9 February 2013) in person, and Pete was hoping to do his presentation from a computer in Argentina. I was very much hoping that everything worked, as doing somebody else’s presentation is not easy. The night before the conference, we were still unsure where Pete would do his presentation from. The hotel connection was too poor, so he was going to take up an offer from a student of his in Argentina to use the broadband at her home (at least that was how he explained it!). In the end, he was able to use the facilities at the local Catholic university. In the meantime, we had arranged that we would do a test at 2.15 Madrid time in the lunch break. After 45 minutes with the willing and able assistance of Gerry Lerner, we finally managed to get an Internet connection on my laptop – the login page for the hotel didn’t like Firefox! After that, technically it went perfectly, and the immediate response to the talk was very positive as well. I had to disconnect the sound and the projector from the laptop quite quickly to allow us all to make generally celebratory noises because it had been such a success!

When I write all, I must make special mention of Cornelia Kreis-Meyer. She donated her Adobe Connect room, her time and her expertise without complaint, and without her it would not have happened, so many thanks from us.

From a general perspective, this was a nice conference. The range of talks was very interesting, and I attended one that was probably the most exciting presentation I have ever attended. Borja Uruñuela, of the St. James Language Center in Seville, may have solved a question I have been grappling with for years. I can’t say what, but hopefully I can write more on this in the future. The conference was well-organised, the organising team were friendly and always willing to help. It was a good atmosphere, and when I finally got there, lunch was good too. The coffee break was even better though – a wide range of beverages, and some of the best pastries I have had for a long time.

We have an interesting event coming up in Madrid at the beginning of next month. Pete is making a presentation, but due to other commitments, Pete will be presenting via Adobe Connect from his hotel room in Argentina! Just in case the technology lets us down, Kevin will be physically present in the room, and will also be able to feed questions to Pete from the audience. Should be fun! Kevin will also be manning a stand at the event, so if you are going, come and say hello. Here is the link to the event details on our site:

http://www.psa.eu.com/event/fecei-conference-madrid

I’ve been trying to collate all the apps mentioned by participants at the end of my session on Apps at the BESIG conference in Stuttgart …. so far to no avail! Thanks to the generosity of participants, there were so many of them!

Finally, here’s the collated list! BESIG apps apps-handout2

I’d be keen to invesitigate many of them further, and will continue to do so as Barney and myself finalise our forthcoming e-book on Apps!

In the meantime – hope this one-page Handout gives a flavour of the incredible range of Apps out there. The next questions are – which are best suited to the needs of our business English learners, and how can they best be exploited? Keep your eye out for news on our next book…..

Our proposal has been accepted for TESOL Spain! The event is titled “Teaching with Technology and the Human Touch” and Kevin and Byron will be making a contribution entitled “Producing Materials for Blended Learning: Including the Individual”. It is scheduled for 9am on the Saturday. Seville is one of my favourite places, so I am really pleased to be going, and Byron has never been there before, so I hope we will have time to look around the city as well. Do let us know also if you will be there so we can have a chat.

For details of the event, go to the events page.

Wow – brilliant weekend in Dublin. I learnt SO much by being with like-minded people…..and people from different sets of experience – academic, gaming, social media….

You can download my plenary presentation, workshops slides as .pdfs and Handout from the conference website

http://www.socialmobileweb2.net/programme/

Great weekend, great food, great company…..

A huge thanks to everyone who came to my session on Apptivities at the BESIG confernce earlier this month.

I am happy to post the PPT as a .pdf here. stuttgar-presentationt This will also be available on the BESIG wesbite.

Thanks also to all the attendees who submitted suggestions for Apps! I am still processing these and will post the Handout later this week.

In the meantime, be ‘appy – it won’t be long before the e-book is released…..

Starting the session on blogs – waiting for coffee!

Here’s the handout with Rerefences from my Webinar for Macmillan! Happy hunting……

It was really great to attend this day. Lovely to meet so many teachers, great food, enjoyable workshops ….. and also great to listen to Jim Scrivener on ‘Demand high teaching’.

Here is an 11-page .pdf version of my PowerPoint plenary: Microsoft PowerPoint – plenary-lite

Thanks again fro a great day!