Posts

Showing posts from January, 2014

Plagiarists and cheats

Image
Ann Loseva , one of the BritishCouncil's new TeachingEnglish associates , has written a very touching post called  I HATED THAT FELLOW (C) C.G. JUNG on her personal blog that is a reflection on cheating/plagiarism undertaken by students and the reaction of teachers have to this. It made me think of the times that I called out students for cheating or plagiarism and I thought I'd share something related here on my blog. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cheating.JPG In denial and aggressive When I worked for a private university in Barcelona, I used to have zero tolerance for plagiarism and cheating. There was one short specialised course in particular that I taught for which I required a specific piece of writing that some students found difficult to do and which prompted some to copy and paste from articles they found on the Internet. I warned the students at the beginning of the course that if I considered plagiarism to be the ultimate sin on this course,

Tracking conferences and connecting with other speakers

Image
From time to time, I read posts on Facebook from people who wish it were easier to keep track of the many ELT conferences that take place annually, and it's true - I expect it's on the wishlist of every ELT conference speaker and those who attend conferences, but rather than it stay simply a wish, what would be the best way to make it happen? The major teacher organisations are probably in a good place to make it work, and it is true that IATEFL publish a listing of conferences in their Voices newsletter , but this is only available to members and so not accessible publicly online. TESOL publish a calendar of events , but this only seems to include those events related to the organisation or affiliates (the annual IATEFL conference is not included on the list, for example), so unless someone well-placed in either of these organisations takes it on, we'll have to look elsewhere. The British Council is another organisation very well placed to manage such a list, espe

TESOL EVO 2014

Image
Looking forward to TESOL's annual Electronic Village Online this year, which has just opened its call for participation. I am giving a session and helping out with the moderating of Teaching English to Young Learners and Teenagers . Their  blog is here and communication between members is taking place on the TEYLT2014 Yahoo Group . Crafting the ePerfect eTextbook promises to be a very interesting session, so I've signed up for that too. This group is connecting through a Google+ community and is using Listly to share resources and using the Twitter hashtag #EbookEVO . The session syllabus is here and the The list of moderators is extensive and includes many well-known teachers, teacher trainers and material writers. It's being sponsored by the IATEFL TD SIG and IATEFL MaW SIG and aims to help participants "outline, design and complete 1 chapter of an e-textbook that meets their learners' needs ". The moderators and other participants on the

Awards, prize, polls and virtual pats on the back

Image
2013 was the tenth year of the annual Edublog award s and when I began this post (in December)  voting had just opened for nominees . I remember when the awards started, back in the day when it was just about conceivable to regularly read all of the major edublogs, and I also remember being thrilled when my podcasting blog (now defunct) was short-listed for an Edublog award in 2005 . Then, the awards were generally embraced by the educational blogging community as a way of recognising and highlighting the ground-breaking work that educational bloggers were doing. Blogging wasn't the mature form it seems to be now, and it was both exciting and necessary for the edublogging community to have something that brought us together and which drew attention to what individual edubloggers were doing. This year,  as in the past , the awards have attracted both valid criticism, but also cynicism and cheap jokes from a growing number of people. This is a wave that has been growing for s