TEXAS TESOL

Tesol in Texas last month was very exciting. I was able to present only one talk this time, which lead me to be able to see many other talks. Usually I am so busy that I don't get to see that much.

I saw one talk that was about a class very similar to Webskills. It was called "Training Teachers for Using the Web" and I thought it would be interesting to see what they were doing, and see what I could learn.  What stood out to me were some major differences. First, the class met face-to-face in the initial sessions. The participants were all from one country and came to the US for a brief training period. A huge advantage that class had was the face-to-face meeting. I was envious about how efficient their first class was when all the tools could be introduced and covered quickly and efficiently. Once that was set up the class could go on to a more independent study mode.

Still many things were not fundamentally different. They used blogs, learned search techniques, wrote collaborative documents using google drive, and wrote lesson plans. They did not have a final project, however. And one thing I felt was that there was no principled approach to using or selecting technology.

Another talk I attended with great interest was one about mobile tools. This talk, if I must say so, was a had some problems, and the biggest problem was the technology the presenters were depending on. The tools were interesting enough, and they were good speakers, but when it came time to present the technology...poof...it did not work. They were trying to use live web technology. They couldn't get the connection to work right.

While I mostly felt sad for the speakers (they looked a bit extra nervous) , I also could help but to think of the basic point we covered last week in our lesson plans, having a Plan B, what will you do if your technology does not work? What is your back up plan? So many times I've seen talks where something didn't work out correctly. If you are depending on it, counting on it, relying on it, you better have a technology back up plan. 



PS,
If you are interested in the talk I did, I think you can still see or hear it here:
Link to recording here | Download the mp3 here