Teaching Business English with Technology in Latin America

This year I was awarded the BESIG facilitator scholarship to attend IATEFL in Glasgow. As a scholarship winner, there were several moments to celebrate this award. IATEFL invited all the scholarship winners to attend a tea party and held posters on the IATEFL wall.

The same day we had our scholarship tea party, IATEFL online interviewed some scholarship winners. Take a look at our live interview together with Erika Osvath and Bruno Andrade.

This conference has been a turning point in my career. Not only was I able to finally meet several teachers of my inpiring PLN (Personal Learning Network) but also had to opportunity to attend thought-provoking sessions throughout the week.

My presentation was on March 22nd at 15:40 pm. In preparation for my presentation, I did everything by the book and finished with a tango called Caminito. I wanted the audience to understand that teachers in Latin America are asking for a change.

University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations helped me spread the word on a short survey I created for Business English teachers. The results of the survey clearly show that teachers want to start integrating technology and need to learn new skills and software applications.

One attendee did comment after the session that most teachers in his country do not know how to teach online and if it would be possible to train teachers online.

As always after attending an International conference, there were several great ideas I gleaned from the sessions attended that will be incorporated in my classes.

Below you will find the slides from my presentation.

Thank you to the BESIG team for making my dream come true and to be able to join such an amazing group of talented teachers.

The power of our PLN

It was a rainy Saturday and I was heading to a nearby bookstore to give my first presentation on how to use Twitter in education. My greatest fear what not to have Internet access because I wanted to use Twitter to engage the audience. This was accomplished thanks to my wonderful Twitter followers.

I tweeted the following:

and these were the answers I instantly received

I was totally amazed by the huge response. Teachers from different parts of the world immediately joined our conversation. This idea of being connected with so many wonderful teachers around the world is something I would have never imagined when I graduated from College long time ago.

Yesterday I also had another amazing surprise to see that a teacher was inspired to use images in her classroom when I tweeted the following ” 60 best movie posters of all time
http://www.stunningmesh.com/2010/03/60-best-movie-posters-of-all-time/
“

Please read her blog post
http://techlearning20.blogspot.com/2010/05/another-idea-for-creatively-increasing.html
.

Where did all these conversations take place before twitter was invented?

This is just becoming a more and more powerful tool for teachers who are willing to share and learn from others.

Where are we heading? Do you visualize no boundaries in our profession where the biggest power are teachers and their creative teaching methods?