I’m delighted to say that a blog post of mine has won the award for the British Council TeachingEnglish ‘Featured blog of the month’ for July, 2014. Many thanks to all those who voted for me on the TeachingEnglish Facebook page!
My infographic on prepositions of place was voted for by visitors to the Facebook page. I designed the infographic to help students understand how the prepositions in, on and at are used in English. I used a combination of Piktochart and Bitstrips to create an engaging and helpful resource for language learners.
In all the excitement leading up to and during the IATEFL conference last month, one thing that almost passed me by was the fact that my teaching blog was chosen as the TEFL.net websites of the month for March, 2014. For those of you who don’t know, TEFL.net is one of the longest running and best sites in our profession. Despite the fact that they’ve been running a ‘best of’ monthly section since 2008, they don’t give away the award lightly. As a consequence, it’s something of an honor to have been chosen.
I’m delighted to say that my blogging efforts have been recognized again, this time by the Really Learn English website. My ‘Teach them English‘ blog has been nominated among only ten blogs as the best blog on the subject of teaching English.
I nowadays like to view these things as an opportunity for you all to get to discover new ELT blogs and find out about the great blogging that is going on out there. That’s partly why I agreed to participate in the ‘Really Learn English‘ website’s blog awards, as they’ve gone to the bother of interviewing each of the nominees, so that you can learn more about the people behind the blogs. You can read the full interviews and vote for your favourite blog here!
I’m happy to announce that my December blog post, ‘6 great techniques for getting students to write down their homework‘ has been nominated for the British Council’s Teaching English blog post of the month award. I’m quite pleased about this, mainly because this is a resource I greatly enjoy and visit on a regular basis.
While I would of course like you to peruse all of the nominations, it would make me happy if you’d take the time to vote (for me or one of the other excellent nominees). Click here for further details.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to praise the hard work of Ann Foreman (@Ann_F), who I happily got the opportunity to meet at IATEFL in March last year, for her work on the Teaching English webpage. It has grown exponentially since its launch and currently boasts in excess of 118,000 followers.
After a fantastic year in which I was able to attend and present at many conferences in both Turkey and abroad, as well as once again being blessed with fantastic classes, I was delighted to be chosen by my students for an Sabancı University academic teaching award for the second year running.
Here I am representing the school of Languages with my colleague (and fellow award winner) Ekrem Şimşek.
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One of the big things I want to look at in terms of how I teach this year is the integration of technology into my classroom practices. Those of you who visit the blog regularly will know that I?m a big advocate of technology, but I still feel that I need to look in depth at how ? and why ? I?m using it in my teaching. A good way to do this is through the TPaCK model. Rather than write about this in detail now, I?ve prepared a video explaining what this model represents (click here to watch the video). Please take a look if, like me, you like to use tech in your teaching and want to make sure that you are doing it in a beneficial way.
I?ve mostly been blogging about the main experiences of the last year on my Year in the Life of an English Teacher blog in the last couple of months. Here are a few selected highlights.
The IATEFL SIG Conference at Yeditepe University
I was lucky enough to be on the organizing committee for this excellent IATEFL Special Interest Group event back in May. It made a really nice change to not be presenting a conference after a busy year in which I made eight presentations at conferences in Turkey and abroad. I did a lot of blogging for the official website, so I mainly used my blog posts (one post for day one, another for day two) as a collection of photos of the event.
A day in the life of an ELT conference presenter (version 2.0)
As I mentioned above, this was a hectic year of conference going for me. A couple of events were flying visits to Ankara: a bus from Istanbul in the morning, a return bus in the evening. I decided to record my journey on the second of these flying visits, which was for the METU ELT convention at the end of May.
A Year in the Life of an English Teacher: A photo essay of my academic year
I attended so many events, met so many great people and had such great classes this year that the only way I could really summarize it all was by choosing photo highlights. I did this in three separate posts; here are the links to part one, part two and part three.
Why are some teachers always late?
I sometimes like to examine issues in the workplace that are not directly connected to teaching. This post examined the psychology of people who are habitually late.
The five most important trends in ELT
I love my job and am passionate about my profession in general. In two posts (the original suggestions and a follow-up based on the ideas of others) I examined where language teaching is heading and the important trends that are influencing its direction.
Book Review: Cambridge Academic English – Upper Intermediate
I have recently joined the reviews panel for TEFL.net and my second book review has just been posted to the website. You can read my review here.
The Bilgi University ELT conference took place on May 12th, 2012 and revolved around the theme of ?Using Resources Efficiently?. Sabancı University?s School of Languages was well represented at the event, featuring a plenary talk from Deniz Kurtoğlu Eken, a keynote speech from Zeynep Urkun, as well as my concurrent session.
I’ve written a comprehensive write-up on the School of Languages website.
Here are selected images from the event:
Having set up this website for myself, I decided to give a workshop to my colleagues in the School of Languages, explaining how to go about making such an online resume. For those who couldn’t attend the workshop, I also prepared a video summary of the session.
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You can access this video by clicking here.
Back in March I was lucky enough to attend the 18th TESOL Arabia Conference at Dubia Women’s College in the United Arab Emirates. I delivered a paper on the effectiveness of group work in the language classroom.
I have written about this experience on the School of Languages blog.
