02/2007 - Norwich, UK
New Technologies in ELT, Norwich, UK, February 17-18 2007
'New Technologies in ELT' was a two-day professional development seminar which took place in Norwich at INTO, University of East Anglia.
It included a range of hands-on workshops and was attended by 54 participants. The participants arrived from a range of countries, including the UK, Romania, Italy, Austria, Germany, Malta and Swaziland.
Workshop abstracts
Podcasts and Vodcasts in ELT: Paul Hullock, INTO, University of East Anglia
The term Podcasting, although originally inspired by the iPod, now tends to refer to any software and hardware combination that allows audio recordings to be automatically downloaded from the internet and listened to at a user's convenience. The tremendous growth in Podcasting (and to a lesser extent Vodcasting) over the last few years has seen a huge rise in the number of sites offering Podcasts to the English language learner. This session gave participants a hands-on guide to the good, bad and the ugly of Podcasting as well as providing a step-by-step introduction for teachers wanting to make their own Podcasts. It also established some simple pedagogical ground rules for practioners wishing to create audio materials for their learners.
Click here for Paul's powerpoint presentation.
Paul Hullock is a teacher, teacher trainer, materials writer and learning technologist who works for INTO UEA at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. He teaches on foundation, degree and post-graduate courses. He is also involved in a wide range of teacher training courses. Paul has been involved in Multimedia and Internet materials design and teacher training since the late 80's. He is currently working on an online ICT guide for language teachers and web2.0 technologies.
Reading and Writing Online: Tilly Harrison, University of Warwick
The Internet now offers a great range of options for new types of reading and writing. Students need to be 'hyper-literate' in the sense that they need to know how to read texts full of hyperlinks and how to evaluate information instantly available from a range of sources. Webquests are a good way to encourage these skills in a fun, motivating way. Students also now have new environments in which to practise writing: blogs for personal texts and wikis for collaborative writing. This workshop will explore the language learning possibilities offered by these three tools with a chance to discuss both their advantages and disadvantages. It will be assumed that all participants have basic computer and browser skills.
Click here for Tilly's powerpoint presentation. (There is additional information in the notes section).
Tilly Harrison works in the Centre for English Language Teacher Education (CELTE) at the University of Warwick, contributing to the teaching of Computer and Multimedia-assisted language learning as well as linguistics, language skills and English for Academic Purposes. Her international experience has involved teaching English in France, Spain, Sierra Leone and Japan. Her research interests are the use of corpus linguistics in EAP and language teaching, and the writing of second language learners.
Corpora and Language Learning: Michael Barlow, University of Auckland
This workshop covered the theory and practice of using corpora in language teaching, from the development of materials for particular courses to the use of corpus data in the classroom. The workshop consisted of both demonstrations and hands-on practice of text analysis techniques using a concordancer (MonoConc Pro) and a collocation extractor (Collocate). Using these tools, we were able to obtain frequency information for words, collocations, and constructions and to use search-and-sort techniques to provide more detailed information on the relevant lexical and grammatical patterns of language.
The workshop showed how the results of corpus analysis can be used to create word and collocation lists for specialised language courses. In addition, it examined a variety of ways of integrating corpus data into language teaching exercises.
Michael Barlow is Associate Professor of Applied language Studies at the University of Auckland and is the founder of Athelstan, a company that publishes books and text analysis software. He teaches courses on CALL and Corpora and Language Learning at the University of Auckland and has worked in these areas for several years.
The Interactive Whiteboard in ELT - what lies beyond the wow! factor? : Johanna Stirling, Freelance consultant
The interactive whiteboard wows, that's for sure, but what kind of real potential does it have for enhancing ELT classes? This workshop explored a wide range of possible applications and what they add to the learning process. Also, recognising that not all institutions can afford IWBs until the price falls, the workshop looked at how some activities designed for this technology can be adapted for classrooms with only a computer and data projector. Many of the activities require no additional software but the workshop also took a look at some existing published materials and discussed how these might develop in the future as the technology and pedagogy matures.
Click here for Johanna's notes / handout.
Johanna Stirling is a freelance teacher and teacher trainer who worked at Bell in Norwich for 20 years, where she came to know and love the interactive whiteboard. She also edits interactive whiteboard software. Johanna is the web mistress of The English Language Garden at http://www.elgweb.net.
Computer-Mediated Communication in ELT: Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou, Cyprus Pedagogical Institute
This workshop looked at the basic types of computer-mediated communication and discussed the potential benefits which computer-mediated communication can bring to language learning. The workshop particularly focused on synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), looking at text-based SCMC, audioconferencing and videoconferencing and encouraged the participants to review some of the most common tools for SCMC by trying them out first hand. Guidelines for successful implementation of SCMC into a language programme was discussed. Finally, participants were able to explore ways to implement SCMC in their own context.
Click here for details of Sophie's presentation.
Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou is a teacher trainer, researcher and materials developer. She has been involved in implementing and researching CMC for a number of years and has successfully implemented various forms of CMC both with young learners and young adults. Sophie is the coordinator of the Learning Technologies Special Interest Group.
The event was kindly sponsored by INTO University of East Anglia 
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