Last weekend, I was in Istanbul for the 5th TED International ELT Conference hosted by the Istanbul branch of the school I work for (typical that we finally have a conference there at a time when most of my Istanbul-based PLN were still on their way back from IATEFL!) I did a workshop based on the lessons I’ve been doing to prepare my students for the Cambridge Starters, Movers and Flyers tests, also featured on this blog in the Lessons on the Fly series.
For those of you who were there and would like a re-cap (and also for those of you who were not there but would maybe like to have a look), here are my slides from the session:
The slides themselves include a (quite deliberate) low amount of text and may not mean much alone so here is a short video summary:
And these are links to some online articles and blog posts I mentioned during the talk in case you’d like a little further reading. 
- A Dogma for EFL by Scott Thornbury - the article that set the dogme ELT ball rolling…
- Lesson skeleton: YLs and drawing by Dale Coulter - a post with lots of great ideas.
- Present simple/Present Continuous by Sandy Millin - in this post, Sandy tells us how she took inspiration from a coursebook activity to make a lesson of student-generated content all starting with some pictures.
- For more artistic ideas, look up Mike Harrison, who has plenty of great ideas for drawing on his blog.
- Meet Pompiskotch - a post I wrote at the start of this academic year in which we again built a whole series of lessons from one drawing activity.
- Don’t just fill the gaps - try leaving some space… - another post from the start of the school year about why I think a materials light approach is more beneficial than a materials loaded one.
- …and finally my Lessons on the Fly series of posts which I will be adding to more over the next couple of months starting soon with a round-up of some of the great ideas the participants in my sessions had.
I just wrote a big comment and just as I was about to post I somehow navigated away from the page. Grrr!
ReplyDeleteto summarize...
Great to see you using drawing, you know I'm also a big fan and employ similar techniques even with 18 and 19 year olds. By that age they've forgotten how to be creative and something like this can really go down a treat.
Thanks for the comment Adam (and sorry to hear about the 'lost' one!)
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of people having forgotten how to be creative, the biggest challenge was getting the teachers in attendance to draw! Some of them (not realising how well I soeak and understand Turkish) were looking at each other in disbelief and saying "he wants us to draw?!?" They soon got into it though ;)
Hi Dave,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the mention of my blogpost and I'm glad to see the conference went well. As I think I may have said to you before, it's great to see how you pull together the threads of many different thought processes from Twitter and logs and synthesise them to create something that is greater than the sum of it's parts!
Thanks for sharing this, Sandy
Thanks Sandy. :)
ReplyDeleteAs I said in the video, there's not much original or ground-breaking here in terms of ideas. However, they are good ideas that do work and are more effective than walking into class with piles of paper. Twitter and blogs are naturally a constant source of inspiration as are the students themselves. Thanks to you all for giving me the puzzle pieces. :)