Reform Symposium E-Conference: 31st July - 1st August 2010

A fabulous free educational e-conference called "Reform Symposium" is taking place this coming weekend from Friday 30th July to Sunday 1st August. This 3-day virtual event is hosted via the Elluminate! virtual platform. Educators from around the world will be presenting on a host of topics. Please see the complete schedule here.



I will be presenting on Sunday 1st August! It's a huge honour to share the same platform as a host of leading ELT illuminaries. I am very excited about taking part for the first time as a presenter. My talk is entitled "The Power of Images for Effective Communication". I have temporarily come back from my family holiday in a different part of Abruzzo, especially to prepare my talk today and tomorrow. I have had a training session with Shelly Terrell and Kelly Tenkely, two of the organisers of the e-conference. Shelly is responsible for looking after me, so I will be in very safe hands!

More Details
The following posts have been written about the Reform Symposium e-conference:

Shelly Terrell - "Six Reasons to attend the RSCON10 Free E-Conference"
Kelly Tenkely - "Reform Symposium Virtual Conference Call for Moderators".

I am sure you will have a great time at the conference and it will be excellent for your professional development.

Have you signed up yet? If not, below is a Youtube video which explains all about how you can attend the conference. Have fun!

A True Hero

With a heavy heart, I boarded the flight from London to Abruzzo Airport yesterday. The previous day, I had been on top of the world, looking forward to going home after a fabulous few weeks teaching at the Lake School of English, Oxford.

I had had an urgent message from K. Kelly, our stray dog, had been involved in an accident in the fields surrounding our home in Abruzzo. A tractor had run him over and had partially severed his foot. Poor Kelly had lost a lot of blood and with the help of the farmer, K had to cut off what was left of Kelly's foot. There was no other help at hand as it happened in open countryside and there was no other option. Kelly was transported back home in a wheelbarrow acting as a stretcher. By the time K had phoned for a vet, Kelly had somehow or other, vanished into thin air. No amount of calling or searching, found him. As it got later, and the sky grew darker and darker, it was assumed that Kelly had gone somewhere to lick his wounds and die with dignity. Thoughts were that at that stage, Kelly was beyond saving, even if he did come back, as he had suffered such a horrendous injury. The notion of having to put him down to spare him agony, saddened us immensely.

A life-saving Decision
Imagine my great surprise, when I phoned K the next day, to say that I and my parents had arrived at Abruzzo airport, to hear that Kelly had crawled back to our home and was in a very bad state indeed. The fact that Kelly had somehow or other, willed himself home was astonishing and uplifting. However, the thought of the vet spelling out a negative prognosis, made me feel edgy and very worried for him.

The local vet arrived and spent several hours tending to Kelly, giving him a drip, cleaning him up, giving him injections and generally saving his life. Kelly had lost a lot of blood, but luckily the injury had been just millimetres away from touching a main artery. The vet said Kelly would have died within 15 minutes of the impact if the main artery had been touched.

Most importantly of all, he stated that Kelly's life could be saved only if we could dedicate ourselves to 15 days of intensive TLC, involving twice daily injections, bathing the severed part of Kelly's foot three times a day, and punctual and exact administering of antibiotics and medication. Without hesitation and without the need to confer, we both agreed that of course, that was what we wanted to do. The thought of putting Kelly down there and then was simply not an option we wanted to consider if there was the slightest hope that he could live a fairly reasonable life.

A Dilemma
I must say in all truth that the heavy burden of the work rests on K's shoulders. My family are here in Abruzzo for the first time in 2 years. My mother's serious accident last year resulted in all our lives and plans being put on hold while we waited anxiously for news of recovery. The fact that my mother has defied all the medical odds stacked against her, is indeed cause for celebration this year, and this two-week family holiday has been greatly anticipated. My mother will be celebrating her birthday here as well. So, a moral dilemma has ensued. Kelly is very important. My family are very imprtant. I can't be in 2 places at once, clear and simple. So I will be with my family, and Karl will stay here, to look after Kelly while I am away, yet again.

Irony?
How ironic that just a few weeks ago on my blog, I featured the Newsy.com story of "Oscar, the Bionic Cat", who had had his legs severed in a similar accident to Kelly's. Even more of a coincidence, just a few days ago, I had taught my students some expressions such as "to pass away", "to kick the bucket", and "to put an animal down". It makes me think. Would all this have happened if I hadn't somehow tempted fate? It's a question that I have asked myself. The chance of one of our menagerie being involved in an accident is minimal as there is no heavy traffic around here, apart from the odd tractor or combine harvester.

A Fighter
Today Kelly wagged his tail, limped around his pen and ate some food. This is very positive. Alessio, our brilliant vet, has stressed that the only thing which stands in the way of Kelly's recovery, is the onset of gangrene in his foot. I hope and pray that this will not happen. Kelly is a fighter. He deserves another chance.

5 Fun End of Course Activities

The 2 week intensive Teachers' Refresher course has sadly come to an end. The blistering heat of the wilds of Abruzzo now beckons, and today I have been busy preparing for my homeward journey tomorrow morning. It's been a very exciting and productive time and I have had the most wonderful and amazing students at the Lake School of English, Oxford. I can't believe how fast it has all gone!

I would like to share 5 fun end of course activities that went down well.

The Gifts Game
I handed out some cutouts of a gift with a space for writing on and asked the participants in groups of 3 - 4, to write down a word or phrase that they especially liked to present to the members of their group. For example, one teacher wrote the word "brolly" in the space and then presented it to her clasmate by saying "I'd like to give you this brolly as a gift, because you will need one when it rains." Another wrote "A pint of lager", and gave it to a classmate saying "Here's a pint of lage, as I know you appreciate English beer". The students milled around and it was a great fun activity, recycling expressions learned, but at the same time it was a very positive way to end the classes.

My Front Door

Blue door to O'Connell House via Flickr

This idea from Mario Rinvolucri, seen in Arena Issue 24, is one which always works a treat. The transition from here to there is made in a positive fashion. I asked the students to visualise how they felt approaching their house in their country. They then had to visualise their front door. What was it like? What colour was it? Who would open the door? Describe the feeling. What would be the first thing they would do as soon as they arrived home? They were then asked to describe everything to their partner.
I know the first thing I am going to do once I have greeted the menagerie is to check on how K has managed with all the watering of my vegetable plot and flowers. Will my flowers be flourishing or wilting in the excessive heat of the last few weeks? I know I will notice every little change that has occured while I've been away. There will be sooo much catching up to do!

The Five-step Strategy to Implementing New Ideas
This is an idea I have picked up over the years on teacher training courses.

Stage 1: you ask the participants to think of a couple of new ideas they will definitely want to put into practice as soon as they get back to school. Usually they say that it's impossible to only choose a couple as there are so many new ones they have learned.
Stage 2: Ask them to choose only ONE idea they are keen to embrace as soon as they get back to their working environment. Get the teachers to concretise the actual moment they will put the new idea into place. Who will they use it with? Ask them to imagine the specific class and level of students. Who will support them in implementing this concrete example? Their Director of Studies? Someone from school, maybe a mentor? A colleague?
Stage 4: The participants are asked the following questions: How will you know if the idea worked? How will you get feedback on it?
Stage 5: They find a partner and tell them the answers to their thoughts. The partner must listen very carefully and pay attention. Reverse roles and listen to the partner's thoughts on ways of implementing one concrete idea.

I like this 5-stage activity because it is nice to focus on a concrete idea with a specific class. The motivation to try it out is thus greatly heightened.

Pyramid Reflection on the Qualities of Survivor Teachers
I asked the teachers in pairs to brainstorm 10 qualities of a "Survivor Teacher". All the words had to begin with the letter "c". As a whole class they managed to come up with 20 qualities within a set time limit and they are listed below in the Wordle. We voted that to be a "survivor" teacher, probably one of the most essential qualities was to be competent. It was nice to take part in the discussion as peers. I enjoyed the act of sharing our views as educators.



Wallwisher Good Luck Messages



This is a great activity. Hopefully the participants will add their messages over the coming weeks when they can. It will be a lovely memory of the happy times spent together as a group.

Goodbye Lovely Teachers via Youtube
A first for me! My co-teacher on the Secondary Teachers' Refresher course, Jane, kindly suggested videoing each other saying goodbye to our students and then uploading the film onto Youtube and then in the Wallwisher above. It's really strange watching myself in action! I didn't realise that I gesticulate so much. One day, I'll look back on this short piece of film and it will bring back wonderful memories of a fab time.

Thank you to all the participants for making it such a special two weeks, and thanks to my lovely colleagues Jane and Catherine, and everybody at the Lake School.

Guest Post by Karenne Joy Sylvester

3. The Best Edu-Bloggers Write Often

Whether you aim to write 200 word thought pieces or 2,500 word academic essays, as I mentioned in part 1 of this article, it takes time to blog.

Unless you're paid to blog and tweet on behalf of a company or you're currently in between jobs/ are an ex-teacher/ part-time trainer or superman, then it is unlikely that you will have time to blog daily.

When you're starting out, it can be incredibly daunting to discover that 800 word articles take 8 hours to write.

Add to that time the time you need to edit, to rewrite your posts because you've just got to get them perfect - there'll be other teachers/ students reading it after all - well, you might end up feeling like packing up shop after just three or four posts. Might as well stick to writing for teaching journals.

But here's the thing, you're honing a craft.

A very special, emerging craft.

You're developing a life skill and trust me, after you've been doing it for a while, those 800 words will begin to fall from your fingers in less than an hour. Over the months, once you've stuck with your blog, you'll find yourself organizing your thoughts way before you hit the page and you'll become more confident in the strength of your voice; more in touch with your style with its stable (or diverse) personalities and you'll lose the (ego)attachment to perfection:

you can always edit, it's yours, you know - it's online - it doesn't matter if that that i wasn't dotted or that t wasn't crossed, most people don't mind, and if they do...

keep focused,

keep in mind that blogging is a written conversation which occurs within a community and as in speech: we forgive, on the page: we forgive.

Many other niche areas of blogging have readers in the millions. To stay fresh for their readers they do need to post obsessively, on the hour, but our readers are mostly made up of other educators or students or our parenting communities - many of whom are regular and loyal readers and they simply do not have the time to listen to your thoughts, participate in your conversations at the same rate of output - to be honest, if you do this, apart from burning yourself out, you might end up finding some of your followers actually becoming a bit irritated with the feedburner's delivery of your posts into their in-boxes/Google readers, watching you fill their twitter stream every day.

However, if your goal is indeed to move on, beyond from blogging as a hobby or from using your page to make announcements of your upcoming training sessions, boast about recent achievements, awards or the place where you go to rant about life's injustices but instead you've decided that you would really like to become a lead blogger in your edu-niche or the sub-sub-sub niche of that, then you really must persuade your stubborn, lazy fingers to tap at that keyboard more than once a month.

You must arrive at the page as often as you can make the time to do so.

*click here to read full-sized + legend

Why?

Well...


a.

practice....

.......makes

perfect.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers, refers to 10,000 hours as being the time required to become truly successful in anything that people set out to do and all those who made it there, started out with their first hour and then one hour after that, and another hour after that...

b.

Google is a hungry beast: it needs feeding with fresh content regularly or it'll dismiss your blog and all of its posts and in the end, send you packing, out to the outer realms of the nether-sphere.

c.

Your readers will get completely bored with you if you're constantly apologizing for, yet again, writing to say you have nothing to say. Schedule slots, regular chunks of time into your diary, fix an editorial calendar to the wall and take it seriously; convince yourself that those deadlines are as important as anything else in your life.

In fact, ask yourself:

• How can I make the time to provide content consistently?
• What commitments do I currently have that I can get rid of?
• What television programs do I really not need to watch?
• Can I wake up an hour earlier? (I did that for a year)
• Can I go to bed an hour later? (I do that still).

4. The best edu-bloggers understand that

Content is King

Content is everything and don't let anyone tell you different(ly).

Above everything else, what you have on your page and within your archives is what determines, what separates an amazing Edu-blog from other blogs. It isn't about what connections you have, privately or via social-media, it isn't the back-links you have or don't have, it isn't what you have done or haven't done in your life up to the point when you enter the 'sphere.

And seriously, I mean - how can I say this strongly enough - completely forget about stupid, illusory things like counting the number of hits you receive; do not count how many comments you get versus how many another blogger got.

Your own personal readers might not feel like commenting, are shy, don't feel like they have anything to add - some people don't like to be the first commenter or commenter number 15+, some people only comment on blogs written by VIPs (to get their attention) so ignore this.

In fact, never,
ever, ever, ever
compare yourself
to someone else
who you think
is getting more attention
than you are.

Abandon those thoughts.

Hits, number of visitors, they are not important and they take a really long time to build.

This is not why you entered the blogosphere. In today's long process, this journey towards the democratization of education, in this level playing field you have now entered or are considering entering, you lone blogger teacher: you are writing with not against your peers so even though competitiveness can be healthy, don't let it shape or cause you to abandon, your work.

To become a truly great edu-blogger, stay true to your purpose and passion: you are making a repository of articles, you are honing your skill, you are learning your craft. You are creating a body of work and this will astound you, once the years past and you look back and see your own professional growth.

If you remember this - keeping it as your priority - you will never become discouraged.

And all the other stuff follows, in its own time. Once the world has realized that, indeed, you have made with your own two hands something worthy of commenting, praising, reTweeting, conversing, sharing with friends and linking to from other blogs, then you will still be there, still with both feet planted on the ground and you'll be able to keep churning out the good stuff.

Any questions?



image credit
Google in the afternoon, after Gari Melchers by Mike Licht, Notions.com

This post is part of a new series: Thoughts on Edu-blogging. For part 3 of this particular article, please visit Berni Wall's blog (coming soon). For glossaries related to some of the jargon mentioned in this article, see Mike Harrison's blog and Sue Lyon Jones on words related to the word blog. Please view Nick Jaworski's blog for "The Dogma of Blogging".

(c) KarenneJoySylvester, 2010
Karenne is an ELT-edu-blogger, a ESP:IT teacher, EdTech teacher-trainer and materials writer, originally from Grenada in the Caribbean. She currently lives in Stuttgart, Germany and blogs at Kalinago English (Bab.la/Lexiophile's #2 Global Language Teaching Blogs) and BusinessEnglish~5mins.

Find her on Twitter as @kalinagoenglish.

I am very honoured to have Karenne do this amazing guest post on my blog. She is my inspirational mentor. I owe a lot to her generosity of spirit. Her continuing quest to help fellow edubloggers is awesome. My heartfelt thanks, dear Karenne.

Newsy.com - Oscar,The Bionic Cat

Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

I just couldn't resist this inspiring Newsy.com video clip of Oscar, the world's first bionic cat. He had his back feet severed by a combine harvester. Read the incredible story here.

As you may know, I have two English cats living a very happy and comfortable life in Abruzzo. They have adapted very well to being amongst Italian chickens and dogs. Here is Victoria below, chilling out on the balcony. She is a real madam!