Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

A guest piece by Nick Jaworski of Turklish TEFL blog

“Do you ever wonder why your Director of Studies likes others and not you? Do you ever get the feeling you’re being measured against some unknown scale? Well, this is because it’s true. We managers employ a highly refined set of criteria to judge the worthiness of our employees. It is only shared in secret meetings that we hold deep down below the bowels of the schools. Outsiders can never gain access as they are unaware of the sacred handshake.

But today is your lucky day. I’ve decided to break the code of silence that has kept this information secret for hundreds of years. I present to you the Revised Management Consultation Index for Teachers of English, more commonly referred to as Nick’s Scale of Awesomeness (of course simply replace Nick with your own manager’s name).

Buying Nick lunch- 10 points

Buying Nick a beer after work- 20 points (Discerning readers will notice the advantage of the cheaper option worth more points)

Helping students out in the office when Nick is busy- 10 points

Lesson planning together with other teachers- 20 points

Not being a wanker- 30 points (This is important)

Not being Scottish*- 20 points

Not having a name starting with “J”- 10 points

Using drama in your class- 20 points

Knowing how to turn on the computer- 10 points

Checking your email daily- 10 points

Responding promptly to sent emails- 20 points

Getting on Twitter- 30 points (Bonus points for developing your PLN)

Not coming in hungover- 20 points

Covering classes on short notice because someone quit, Nick needs to move some teachers around, or Nick needs to open a class immediately because whiny students threaten to pull out if it doesn’t start right now-  30 points

Coming to workshops because you want to improve, not because you think you have to- 20 points

Realizing the book is an aide, not a daily lesson plan- 20 points

Making the students, other teachers, or the office staff laugh- 20 points

Saving trees- 20 points

Not asking Nick for weekends off as this is our busiest time and you shouldn’t have become an English teacher if you didn’t want to work weekends- 20 points

Not getting all up in my grill- 10 points

Learning the language of your students- 30 points

Going to lessons to learn the students’ language, and not speaking English in class because you should really practice what you preach- 20 points

Not telling Nick all the cool stuff you did on your Christmas holiday because he worked it so you could have one-20 points

Not supporting another teacher’s wankishness-20 points

Cleaning off your board before you leave class-10 points

Not taking the books home because other teachers need them-20 points

Reading Nick’s blog-20 points

Telling Nick you like his blog-30 points

Not wearing jeans and a t-shirt to your interview-Your first 10 points

Not giving Nick a blank stare in the interview when he asks you what you have done to develop professionally in the 6 years since you took your CELTA -You will probably get hired

Doing the happy dance- 10 points

Teaching your students how to do the happy dance- 20 points

Playing some tunes and just getting down in the staff room- 10 points

Coming to the social outings- 20 points

Chatting with the students on break- 20 points

Not planning your next hour’s lesson on the break- 20 points

Knowing all your students’ names- 20 points

Not complaining about how Nick’s Scale of Awesomeness is discriminatory and highly subjective- 30 points

Well there it is. You’ll notice the highly positive nature of the system. You can only gain points, never lose them. We refer to this as the “glass half full” policy of teacher evaluation. These points are then shared with managers around the globe. Teachers with higher rankings on the Global Index of Teacher Awesomeness are more likely to get hired, be given higher salaries, be given more time off when they want it, and, perhaps most importantly, be able to “get away with it” more often.

If any other managers think I left some out, feel free to add them below in the comments.

*I have nothing against people of the Scottish persuasion, just an ongoing joke around my office ”

That’s straight on my list of posts for this year’s most TEFLtastic humour. Any other things you’d give points for? Care to tot up your own points and let us know? Fancy making up your own list or guest post? Comments or emails please!

If you’d asked me in 1999, I probably would’ve predicted that Task Based Learning was going to take over the TEFL world, for better or worse. What a damp squib that turned out to be, with apparently even Cutting Edge no longer being described as a task based course. Despite being ubiquitous in UK state schools, Interactive Whiteboards remain the next big thing in TEFL and so don’t quite cut it as the biggest change of this decade either. Ditto with the thing that is stealing TBL’s thunder, CLIL.

Here are some things that could be candidates, and you can vote for these or add your own suggestions in comments below:

- Books based on electronic corpora, e.g. the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, The Cambridge Grammar of English and Academic Vocabulary in Use

- Teacher development videos, e.g. included with the latest edition of The Practice of English Teaching or available on YouTube

- Illegal copies of TEFL books, videos and recordings being available for Bit Torrent download

- Use of YouTube in lessons

- Most students having electronic dictionaries

- The proliferation of TEFL teaching certificates, with some of the new ones apparently overtaking Trinity and nipping at Cambridge ESOL’s heels

- Online TEFL teacher training

- The expansion of Wall Street English and other schools where the student does most of their study on computers

- TEFL job ads moving entirely online

- The Oxford Basics series and other books aimed at the minimal resources, minimal training and sometimes minimal language skills of the majority of real English classrooms around the world

- The commercialisation of the British Council

- Onestopenglish and other publishers’ sites taking over from independant sites

- ESLprintables.com and other materials sharing sites

- TEFL blogs

- The influence of Dogme ELT

- Twitter

- The influence of the idea of English as a Lingua Franca/ English as an International Language

- The availability of online English lessons, e.g. via Skype

- The expansion of IELTS

- University and Assistant Language Teacher posts been subcontracted out to language schools and recruitment companies

- Static or dropping ELT wages in Thailand, Japan, UK etc

- The long decline in the number of new methodology and photocopiable books

- The expansion of English into primary schools in most countries of the world

- Digital voice recorders

- The expansion of the EU

- Countries considering Indian and Filipino teachers in place of overpriced and underqualified Brits, Yanks and Aussies

- Marketing departments in publishers deciding on the next book up then commissioning it from writers, and hence the disappearance of sending in an idea for a book and getting it commissioned

- The decline in reputation of International House

- The rise and fall of Dave’s ESL Café

- The appearance and disappearance of TEFL Blacklisting sites

- The decline in influence of the Pilgrims mafia

- The reacceptance of a need for a “focus on form”

- More and more specialist ESP

- Computer based testing

Please don’t Ask Auntie Alex if you have specific questions about netiquette, because I remain the least technology aware of all TEFL bloggers and proud of it (or so I tell myself when I stand in front of my mirror doing my daily self-affirmation routine). What interests me is that there are several interesting parallels to TEFL theory that could hopefully help to illuminate things.

The most obvious one is the prescriptivist/ descriptivist distinction, just like grammar. If someone tells you that “Almost everyone does this, but it isn’t good netiquette”, that’s obviously the former, but as with grammar/ spelling/ punctuation we are all more prescriptivist than we’d like to admit. Then again, many grammar prescriptions did become part of the language as it is spake and so that certainly means that referring to experts (Elements of Online Style??) to decide what is and what is good online form serves a role. Another similarity is that people who have put in the effort to learn and use the rules get irritated as hell that people can use the exact same language/ internet without a care in the world, making major boo boos without even noticing or caring. I’ve noticed the same thing in myself since reading Bill Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words (big mistake!)

Another parallel has more to do with moving abroad. Do you read your Culture Shock East Timor before you set off? When you get there, do you hold back until you have worked out what you should and should not do, or is your philosophy that getting stuck in and stepping on a few toes is the quickest way to learn? Or perhaps your philosophy is that you don’t expect recently arrived foreigners to “do in Rome” in your country, so perhaps the locals shouldn’t expect that from you and at least meet you halfway. Again, the people who read all the books and can never quite relax on holiday because they are being so careful not to show their shoulders in Thailand can get rather irritated with the blithe spirits.

(Brief aside- Has no one ever thought about Culture Shock Internet as a title, I wonder?)

The other concept we should all be familiar with is “speech communities”, and I see no reason why “netiquette communities” shouldn’t describe reality just as well. “Fanny” doesn’t mean the same in America and the UK (tries to hold childish giggles in) and grammar words don’t have the same meaning for the two different communities that are linguists and TEFLers, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason why netiquette shouldn’t be different in the community (ies?) of TEFL bloggers to how it is in the original online communities of techies.

And my point is?

None at all, just found it interesting and getting things down helped me get my ideas in order. I’ll leave the coherent arguments up the rest of you, but I’m pretty sure spreading arguments from other blog posts is bad netiquette, so let’s keep things theoretical here shall we?

Just to give you a teasing taster before I tell you what it is, let me tell you what it can do:

- You can send messages that are as long or short as you like to as many people as you please

- You can attach images, Word documents, PDF files etc in a matter of seconds

- You can give links to your own and others’ blog posts etc that you think people will find interesting precisely to the people who will appreciate them

- A system filters out most of the people you don’t want to hear from, and you can make your address as public or private as you like

And this great system is… (more…)

or Twitter on TEFL, or Twaddle on TEFLON, or whatever it should be…

1. You were still teaching SMS language/ textese even though it had actually virtually died out in the UK due to predictive texting, and you now have a reason to carry on just as before and use those “classic” lessons over and over again

2. You have a desperate desire to continue teachers’ room banter in your free time

3. Your email spam filter is working too well and you miss have a full inbox

4. You are afraid your blog posts will still be read weeks later and that your articles might still turn up on Google well into 2010, so you want to produce something more quickly forgotten

5. The news that the over 50s are the biggest group of Twitter users was a turn on rather than a turn off

6. You didn’t hear that news and are convinced that mentioning Twitter to your teenage students will make you hip

7. Your wife or husband speaks Pre-Int level English at best, so Twitter is your only hope of communicating with someone who will understand in less than 140 words, let alone 140 characters

8. No one at school will talk to you anymore because they know you’ll just drone on about teaching technology, so you need something to do as you sit at your teachers’ room computer while everyone else talks about the weekend’s big match

9. You can’t find a single other person to invite to be your Facebook friend or LinkedIn contact, and you enjoyed the process of collecting them so much that you want to do it all over again

10. You had just got into TBL when everyone else was moving onto CLIL or learnt about hardcore CLT just as the researchers decided Focus on Form was a good thing, and you’re scared of missing yet another TEFL trend

11. Due to modern life turning us all into teenagers, you’ve gone from thinking TEFL blog posts are too short and glib to thinking that they are too long and detailed, and you want something more succinct that doesn’t make you think so much

12. You’ve always thought that 140 characters was the right length for a TEFL workshop, lesson plan or article

13. You like receiving SMS messages from people you don’t know

14. The guilt of not finding time to read loads of good stuff on your RSS feeder is too impersonal for you and you want the personal touch of people actually taking offense

15. The irony of everybody trying to be different by doing the same thing never struck you once when you were a teenager

16. You’d never read an article unless the person who wrote it wanted to know about how your last lesson went

There are no doubt some misconceptions about Twitter above (as well as a miscount), but the great thing about not being a Twit is that now that no one emails or comments on blogs anymore I never have the know the error of my ways. Phew! Always wanted to be one of those villagers who never quite realized that the fall of the Roman Empire had happened, or one of those Japanese soldiers who were still holding out on Pacific island in 1974 refusing to believe that the Emperor had surrendered…

… is never going to happen. Got nothing against other people twitting till the electronic cows come home, just not my kind of thing. If I tell you that one of my favourite expressions is “worse than Facebook”, I think you’ll see where I’m coming from. However, I’m used to being in a minority of one, and if any of you want to quote me or link to me on there while you do whatever it is you Twits do, then feel free (more…)

By Darren Elliott, TEFL.net Book Reviews contributor and the man who inspired my 15 Tips for People Attending TESOL Conferences

“I can remember my first email account. It’s still out there somewhere, full of spam. I also remember running all over Katmandu to find the football scores, finally tracking them down to a tattered copy of the Guardian in the British Embassy. At university, I typed my essays on an electric typewriter, using scissors and tippex to edit.

Now we all live in a virtual world, and as teachers the opportunities for self development are immense. If you are reading this you may have stumbled across it whilst looking for something else. Or you might have clicked through from another link. Perhaps you subscribe to Alex’s blog through an RSS feed to an aggregator (as I do). But how can we best utilize the web to help us learn as teachers?

The first incarnation of the web was (and still is) like an enormous library, but better. This replicates the way people worked before the web; the user goes in and finds what they need, but interaction with material is limited. Sites such as onestopenglish provide excellent resources, but in the same way a collection of well-produced magazines would.

What separates newer technologies from the old is their malleability and the potential for collaboration. At the same time, it’s important to remember; just because you can do it with technology, doesn’t mean you have to! I’ll give you an example. I’m a keen photographer and user of the photo community at Flickr. I recently read a post on the forums from a guy who was sending tweets to Twitter using GPS technology to record where and when he changed his film canisters. At this point you are probably clapping your hands with glee, or shaking your head with confusion. Well, it was pointed out that a magic marker would do the job just as well, which rather burst that bubble.

I am quite skeptical when it comes to technology. I’ve used Twitter, and Second Life, but I’m yet to be convinced that reporting your trip to the newsagent’s or flying around bumping into walls has enormous merit. What I’ve been looking for is something that can do what I want it to do, but better than before. I’ve long struggled to keep a reflective teaching journal, but I have never been able to keep it going using a pen and a Moleskine. Part of the problem has been the lack of feedback, so I decided what was needed was a teacher development group, which I decided to form online. It’s in formation now, as a collection of linked blogs, using the Tumblr platform.

If you visit the blog (http://teacherdevelopment.tumblr.com/), at first sight it might appear to look like any other blog. The difference is probably conceptual rather than practical – most blogs are written for the readers, informative, entertaining or illuminating. These blogs are initially written for the writers. The benefits come from reading and responding reciprocally within the small community. For me, the act of writing in itself is helping me put things straight in my mind, but the feedback and insights of others has made it more valuable.

if you are interested in joining us, we still have plenty of room for others. Get in touch at darrenrelliott@gmail.com, or comment via the blog. Thanks to Alex for the opportunity to get a plug in, and for writing a proper blog ; )

Links referred to in the piece
http://www.flickr.com/groups/ishootfilm/discuss/72157616986780690/?search=twitter+film

http://www.onestopenglish.com/”

It occurs to me that Darren’s model would be another good way of organising the TEFL mentoring system that I mention two posts down- on a members only collection of blogs people mainly write for themselves but also comment on each others and maybe eventually “hook up”

Any other thoughts on this?