The ELTons 2012

The ELTons are held every year in London and sponsored by Cambridge ESOL. The award ceremony is tonight May 23rd. It will be very exciting to follow the British Council's live streaming of the event starting UK time at 18.15pm here.

All the nominees are listed here.

A quote from the website -

"The ELTons are the only international awards that recognise and celebrate innovation in English language teaching (ELT). They reward educational resources that help English language learners and teachers to achieve their goals".

The reason I am writing this post is because I would like to mention the fact that #ELTChat has been nominated. Below you can see part of the very special #ELTChat T-shirt that I bought recently. I am looking forward to wearing it in the summer when I am teaching. It will be a great conversation starter, I reckon!

#ELTChat provides an invaluable resource for all English language teachers worldwide. The chat is held via Twitter every Wednesday at 12 o'clock midday, and then another topic is discussed at 9pm. Followers can suggest topics and then vote for a topic. The top two topics are chosen for the chat.

#ELTChat has been nominated for an award in the Innovation in Teacher Resources category. It is run by a small group of highly dedicated and comitted ELT teachers, together with the support of many volunteers, who help out in different ways, including the twice weekly writing up of summaries. These have been efficiently indexed and are freely available to all teachers. The subjects range from methodology, time management skills, using iPads in the ELT classroom to discussions on Multiple Intelligences and the latest trends in English language teaching.

I have created a special personal folder with the summaries of the topics that interest me the most, and I use these for my own CPD, to refer to and learn from.

In addition to the blog and wiki, there is also a dedicated #ELTChat podcast, with excellent reviews and interviews with teachers around the world talking on a variety of subjects.

I haven't been able to follow the chats of late, so this is a very small contribution to raise awareness of the outstanding contributions provided by the site. I wish them all the best for tonight!

In addition I would like to wish the following members of my PLN all the best for their nominations:

Ozge Karaoglu with her nomination in the Digital Innovation category for her contribution to the amazing Bubble and Pebble website.

Graham Stanley for his contribution to the book Digital Play, published by Delta Publishing.