Çevre College 11th ELT Conference

Today is the day that 11th ELT Conference held in Çevre College. I was there and i had lots of fun and learnt new things. The openning was with a show about Notre Dame from the high school students of Çevre College. They were very talented. In addition, we watched some parts from the film that "Dead Poets Society" during the conference. It was great that the parts of the film created a coherence with the conference.

 The first plenary speaker was J.J. Wilson and i think  he was amazing! What he talked about was that "What inspires a teacher?". He added to the list these: students, ideas for classroom, teachable moments, colleagues, role models and gurus, a vision of your future self. He mentioned about different interesting projects. Here is the list of projects for you to search:
-Hole in the wall experiment
-Urban Chronicles
-Bill of rights for women
-3 generations project
-Citizen science
-The maker movement

Next, Emre Kınay was on the stage. He is an actor in Turkey and a drama teacher. He talked about the link between drama and teaching and also he answered the questions from the audience. We attended a concurrent session and the one that i chose was that "7 Education Technology Moduls For Teachers From Different Levels and Departments" by Pınar Kadıoğlu and Muhammet R. Ertuğrul from American Robert College. They told that they have a hashtag on Twitter and every wednesday nights they talk about educational problems at 9 p.m. The hashtag is #egtkonus. Don't forget to join the discussion. Edx was suggested for free conferences. Then, the plenary sessions went on. This time Ben Goldstein was on the stage. His speech was about teachers in the movies. I want to share the films that he told: Mona Lisa Smile, Dead Poets Society, To Sir With Love, Freedom Writers, School of Rock, Mr. Holland's Opus, Summer School, Bad Teacher, Detachment, Etre et Avoir, The Class. 

Ken Willson was the last speaker. He mentioned about seven strategies for improving communication between teacher and students. They are on the list below:
-Develop voices
-Talk about yourself
-Switch on your phones
-Find out what your students know
-Teach unplugged (a book about not using books)
-Do something unexpected
-Be memorable

Attending to the conference was a pleasure for me. I want to thank to the Çevre College. Hope to see you again next year. 

TELT Conference

Today ELT teachers from all over the world met in the Terakki Language Teaching Conference and Career Day in Terakki School. I attended the conference and want to share my observations with you.

Philip Kerr was the first plenary speaker and he started the conference. He mentioned about the study which was done by British Council and Tepav. Its name is "Turkish National Needs Assessment of State School English Teaching". You can check it. He also mentioned 3 kinds of teacher: the explainer, the involver and the enabler. He emphasized that teachers become guides/facilitators and students become active/responsible.

For the concurrent session 1 I chose "May I have your attention, please?" and the speaker was Özge Karaoğlu who I feel admiration for. She emphasized that we leave our foot prints in social media. It doesn't matter whether you deleted what you shared(text, pictures etc.) or not. it is still somewhere on the internet. So, we must be careful about what we shared and protect ourselves. She recommeded search engines which provide much more privacy such as duckduckgo, startpage, Ixquick. Mrs. Karaoğlu also recommended tools for privacy as disconnect.me and ghostery.com. In order to create your online identity use linkedin, about.me, visualcv.com, google+ and this online identity will be your reputation. She mentioned e-portfolio and suggested using evernote.

blogs suggested by Özge Karaoğlu

twitter users suggested by Özge Karaoğlu 

hashtags suggested by Özge Karaoğlu

hashtags suggested by Özge Karaoğlu

"Teachers as Learners" by Lucy Griffin was my choice for the roundtables 1. She talked about coursera. Please check it later. I think it is a very useful website. It provides free and online courses. In addition, I attended the sapiential circles. It was about "Project Based Learning" by Nicole Young. In PBL learning must be meaningful to students and the teacher should suggest different topics also by asking students' ideas and suggestions. She mentioned about 21st century skills as collaboration, communication, critical thinking and the use of technology.

For the concurrent session 2 I attended to "Say 'Hello!' to Video: Student-generated Smart Phone Projects" by Pelin Rau. She gave the answer that "It is highly versatile and reliable" to the question of "Why video?". Students have to think first and then write. So, it is as challenging as writing an essay. She offered bie.org for project based learning. There is a quote of her that I want to share with you: Language is a living animal. You can't reach the perfection.

project ideas suggested by Pelin Rau

The last roundtable session that I attended was "A Journey into Yourself as a Teacher" by Bilge Yelaldı. We talked about IB learner profile with her and the adjectives that an IB learner should have. These adjectives are knowledgeable, thinker, communicator, risk-taker, balanced, reflective, caring, open-minded, inquirer. We took notes as the following questions poped up and we wrote our teacher definition individually.
-What is your role as a teacher?
-How does your personality effect your teaching?
-How do you make use of your strengths as a teacher?
-Why did you choose to become  a teacher?
Please try to answer this questions and come up your own teacher definition.

Dr. Deniz Kurtoğlu Eken took the stage in the plenary session 2. She talked about "I hear you... The gem of feedback". I have the voice record of her speech and I will try to share it with you in the coming days.

It was a pleasure for me attending to the conference and I recommend it to you unhesitatingly. Please feel free to comment.