Shaun Wilden's Blog

This week the IATEFL online site 2010 went live.  Harrogate 2010 is a good way to participate in the conference whether you are going to the ‘live’ event or not. Presenters are going to upload their talks, some talks will be broadcast live and starting from this week the discussion forums are open. So if you are a teacher I recommend you go along to site and join (it’s free) – and if you do see ,  come and say hi in the learning technology forum…see the message below from the online team for more info:

IATEFL HARROGATE CONFERENCE: HARROGATE ONLINE WEBSITE NOW LIVE!

Online conference coverage of the 44th IATEFL Conference

The Harrogate Online website is now live at:
http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010

The British Council and IATEFL have launched the Harrogate Online website which offers live web coverage of this year’s IATEFL Conference in Harrogate.

The Harrogate Online website allows remote participants to take part in one of the world’s biggest ELT conferences through a variety of resources including:

- Video recordings of selected sessions
- Live interviews and streamed plenaries
- Moderated special interest discussion forums
- Text reports and photo albums

To visit the Harrogate Online website, go to:
http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2010

This initiative builds on the earlier collaboration between the British Council and IATEFL.
Last year, 1,600 teachers and trainers attended the Cardiff IATEFL Conference, and over 20,000 participated online.

This year we expect a much larger audience, and this is a real opportunity to take part in the biggest online ELT training community.

The Harrogate Online website gives you an opportunity to share ideas with teachers all around the world. There will be interactive live coverage with video presentations, reports and interviews from Harrogate.

We look forward to meeting you online, and hope that you will share this information with your colleagues worldwide.

Gavin Dudeney – Honorary Secretary, IATEFL
Julian Wing – British Council Harrogate Online Project Manager
Nik Peachey – IATEFL Online Editor

Gosh been a while since I posted, sorry folks lots of travelling but while on the road have been collecting links and trying out stuff with groups of teachers but before I get to them, I have a number of people ask me what happened to the flash games links I twittered about some weeks ago. Tis a good question ,the post seems to have vanished. My favourite games are in superteachertools.com.  This website has a selection of games flash game templates for you to use on and offline. Since any resources made automatically go online that also means there is a wide selection of pre-made material (though the downside to this is that they are not well-organised and labelled). I have used the millionaire template quite a lot in teaching (and if you come to my iatefl talk  you’ll be playing it my session). Since it is based online, it also some thing you can give students for homework as they simply have to go home, access the template and type 15 questions. They can then save it as txt.file. The flash is very both colourful and recreates the game music.  Here’s a screenshot:

The site also has templates for games such as jeopardy and hangman as well as offering other tools for teachers. However for Jeopardy (probably my all time favourite quiz), there is another site jeopardylabs.com. Again this allows you to store templates online and offline. It does require more interaction as in the correct answer has to be said to the teacher but again has home study uses and students can make games templates for each other. As I said in a previous post, the technology allows use to give a new lease of life to our old activities – both of these games I have played for years in class but now with these sites, I make the quicker and more professionally and motivate my students to make their own.  The added bonus is that you can use them on your computer, in a computer room, with a dat projector or on an IWB.

Another site I’m enjoying playing with is more aimed for kids  - kidsspell.com. There are a number of small games (some more fun that others – I don’t like spellasaurus), each game practices spelling, they claim to have 6000 words to spell but the real bonus for teachers is that you can type in your own list of words for the students to play with  - or again the students (or even a supportive parent) can make their own lists.

There are a large number of flash-based activities out their – esolcourses has a number of activities as does manythings.org and there is a long list of games to be found on the Interent TESL journal.

As always enjoy