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.