Birmingham IATEFL Live Schedule Wednesday 13th April 2016

Birmingham IATEFL

Wednesday 13th April

0915-1025 OPENING PLENARY BY DAVID CRYSTAL
CHECK YOUR LOCAL TIME

Who would of thought it? The English language 1966-2066

Complaints about a supposed decline in standards of English continue to be made, with increasing frequency, in the British press. Although these are nothing new - as the long history of use of would of for would have illustrates - they do draw attention to the way we seem to be going through a period of unusually rapid language change. This paper illustrates the main changes in pronunciation, orthography, grammar, and vocabulary, discusses the chief factors involved - social mobility, globalization, and the Internet - and compares the changes that have taken place in the past fty years with those that are likely to take place in the next fty.

10:30    live studio starts

10:50    interview with Nicky Hockly

11:15    interview with Pete Sharma

11:30    interview with Adam Kightley

11:45    interview with Zeyneb Urkun 

12:00    interview with Silvana Richardson

12:15    interview with Jim Scrivener

12:30    interview with Gavin Dudeney

12:45    interview with George Pickering

13:00-14:00    break

14:00    interview with Hugh Dellar

14:00    interview with David Crystal

14:15    interview with Tessa Woodward

14:45    interview with Hornby scholars: Allwyn D'costa and Erkin Mukhammedor

15:00    interview with Hornby scholars: Mohammed Bashir and Abdallah Yousif

15:15    interview with Gail Ellis

15:30    interview with Hornby scholars Parwiz Hossain and Shoaib Jawad

15:45    interview with Alison Barrett

16:00    interview with Alan Maley

16:15    interview with Tim Phillips

17:20 - 18:25 BRITISH COUNCIL SIGNATURE EVENT
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Shakespeare lives: love, hate, death and desire in English language classroom

Speakers: Lisa Peter (The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust), Dr Christina Lim (lecturer, researcher and teacher educator), Shaheen Khan (actor), Lisa Peter (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust), Tonderai Munyevu (actor). Chaired by John Knagg, British Council.
Join the British Council to celebrate Shakespeare's work on teh 400th anniversary of his death. We will ecplore how Shakespeare has relevance to our society, students and classrooms today and how Shakespearecan speak to people from all around the world about universal human experiences like love, hate, death and desire.
The event will be practical, thought-provoking and fully interactive with the opportunity join in the discussion before, during and after, either in person and online. The audience will help to shape the event and on the day and participants will take away ideas to use in the classroom on how to address issues which feature in much of Shakespeare's work yet remain relevant today.

- See more at: Birmingham IATEFLBirmingham IATEFL

Localization: Taking eLearning Above And Beyond!

Localization: Taking eLearning Above And Beyond!:

Want to know if Localization can revolutionize eLearning? Check why Localization is the next big eLearning revolution and take eLearning above and beyond.

Education is coming out of the walled classrooms and crossing all physical barriers to empower hard to reach learners in the form of eLearning. But for the exponents of eLearning, it is important to understand that in order for this model to succeed, we cannot have a “one-size-fits-all” concept. The internet has melted the geographic barrier, but has it melted the language barrier too? English is still the most preferred medium of instruction for eLearning course developers, but in order to improve its efficacy, an eLearning course must be localized to suit the needs of the remote learner. While translating to native languages is one aspect, the power of localization can also be broadened to include the concept of on-demand learning. This article attempts to explore how localization can be the next big revolution in eLearning.

In its traditional definition, localization means to adapt a particular product to suit the linguistic and cultural sensibilities of a particular audience. When it comes to creating eLearning courses, developers are still using English to reach to a global audience. This is evident in the result of a Google search of “Top eLearning courses” (the results point to all English learning courses). But English is only the third spoken language in the world. Localizing a course to Mandarin, Spanish, or Hindi will give any eLearning course a mind-boggling number of audiences. 

http://elearningindustry.com/localization-taking-elearning-beyond 

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What challenges are involved in learning online?

What challenges are involved in learning online?

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges for teachers is to deliver a consistent experience to a large and varied general populations.

Teachers and students should not carry through device management. Their priorities should be placed on learning.

Technology is not the creator. Substantial belief in innovation is less important than the requirements of students and teachers.

Teachers have a well-defined responsibility with implementing, and identifying, the best combination of digital learning tools for each student.

Different approaches to learning, such as project-based learning,  active education, game-based learning, and more, is a part of personalized blended learning models. Consequently, such innovations will call for demonstration how their package improves learning outcomes.

Most challenges have to do with the procedures, but they have nothing to do with the teaching itself. To make it simple, if you know how to teach, all you need to do is learn about the elementary online tools available for online teaching, and begin using them.

As mentioned earlier, teaching an online class can be time-consuming. Also, developing an online course can be overwhelming. Learning and becoming proficient using an LMS takes time, and uploading materials to the online environment is also demanding and takes much time. Once you learn how to use the LMS, you need to get to teach students through it.

The time required to generate a new class can be a problem with developing online classes.

The instructor should be able to take care of the subject matter rather than spend countless

time is managing difficulties connected with the technology.

One of the most recommended ways to cope with the additional time required for teaching online classes is to decrease the class size.

Students also regularly run into technological problems and they need support with technology issues.

Navigating the Unique Challenges of Online Teaching. (n.d.). Retrieved from  

http://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/undergrad/ptacc/online-teaching.pdf

LEARNING AND TEACHING ONLINE

LEARNING AND TEACHING ONLINE

by Halina Ostankowicz-Bazan 

There are numerous definitions of online learning in the literature, definitions that reflect the diversity of practice and associated technologies. Carliner (1999) defines online learning as educational material that is presented on a computer. Khan (1997) defines online instruction as an innovative approach to delivering instruction to a remote audience, using the Web as the medium.

However, online learning involves more than just the presentation and distribution of the materials using the Web: the learner and the learning process should be the focus of online learning.

Teaching face-to-face and teaching online are both teaching, but they are qualitatively different.Online education starts when faculty move from the traditional classroom to the online classroom. There are some things that the two have in common, but there are also plenty of differences.

1. The online teacher plays the role of guiding students through one or more online learning experiences. These experiences are every so often designed and planned long before the course starts so that the teacher can devote more time to guiding the students and less time preparing lessons. Within this role, the teacher directs and redirects the attention of learners toward fundamental concepts and ideas.
2. Learning is hard work and studying online can sometimes feel isolating, confusing, or discouraging without the guide.

As a result, the effective online teacher makes intentional efforts to communicate precise encouraging messages to individual learners and the group as a whole. Moreover, even when providing constructive feedback, the teacher as supporter finds a way to promote positive messages alongside the critiques. Encouragement and welcoming support are an important approach to maintaining an overall positive morale in the class. At times, learners may fall into negative comments about themselves, the class, or their classmates (even the instructor, on occasion). The coach makes every effort to find ways to listen, respect the learner’s frustrations, but also to help them reframe the situation in a manner that students are more active and creative.

3. Many people focus on the role of the teacher as role model, and that is valuable. However, the role of the coach is just as important, even more, important if we want learners to develop high levels of competence and confidence. The online teacher must move beyond just modeling a depth motivation for the subject and personal skill with the content. The mentor needs to find ways to hand the matter over to the students to do something with it. Applied projects and papers work well for this, and it gives the teacher an opportunity to be a coach and advisor.
4. Learners need some feedback about their work. How are they doing? Are they getting closer to meeting the learning objectives or not? The effective online teacher finds ways to give thoughtful feedback to individual learners and, when appropriate, groups of students.
5. Without intentional efforts to build a positive social environment, online learning can feel lonely and impersonal. As a result, the online teacher must serve as an encouraging host, facilitating introductions, using discussion starters to enable conversations among students, and taking the time to get to know students and referencing that knowledge in interactions with them.
6. The whole thing is documented in an online course. The teacher can tell when and how many times a student logs into the course, what pages were viewed or not, how many discussions posts the student contributed, and much more. This data can be abused, but it can also be used to make adjustments and informed decisions by an online teacher. If a student is not logging in or failing to visit pages in the course with the direct instructions, the coach points that out to the learners or reorganizes the content so that it is easier to find.
7. Online courses are rich with content and sometimes students can get lost in all that content. The teacher as regulator intentionally releases content in chunks that are appropriate for students. Sometimes this comes in the form of only publishing content one week at a time. Other times, the teacher releases it all at once but directs students only to focus on individual parts at a time. Another key is to break content into smaller segments. Rather than a twenty-page document of instructions, it is better to consider breaking it into ten two-page documents.
8. Good teachers are lifelong learners, and they can model that learning for their students in a variety of ways in the online classroom. The teacher can be active (but not too active or it will silence students) participant in online discussions, sharing what they are learning about the subject, and even complete all or fragments of some assignments, sharing their work with the students. The procedure goes a long way in building an exciting and dynamic online learning community where one and all in the community commits to exemplifying the qualities of a lifelong learner.

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/eight-roles-of-an-effective-online-teacher/