Last weekend I attended a great organization focusing on how to turn challenges into opportunities, held by Doğuş University. It was a conference full of precious speakers, many hands on activities and various surprises. I enjoyed every minute of it.
David Cyrstal’s Notes: David Cyrstal is an entertaining speaker, coloring his talk with demonstrations and movement. He started his talk with the question “How can you detect whether you are an internet addict” then, he offered his own criteria: “if you visit the bathroom in the middle of the night, does it occur to you to check your email on the way back to bed?” I think the answer is “No” for my case (just for now). It was also relieving to hear from him “internet addiction is ideal for the linguistic addict.”
Özge Karaoğlu’s Notes: I fell so happy to have such fruitful people like Özge in our field. She gave me very constructive ideas using the web securely and effectively. Here are some of them:
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Delicious is a tool providing you to save, stack and share your favorite links and topics on the web.
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Bloglines is an excellent site for you to find and track your favorite websites and blogs in real-time. This web tool allows you to follow the recent news and updates on the blogs or websites that you follow.
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Cybaryman is a great online resource bank not only for teachers but also for students.
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Linkedin is an e-portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system connecting users and creating online communities.
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Me on the web is my favourite tool among the others since you can manage your identity on the web. When you set up Google alerts, you get email from Google whenever your name, email or any search terms you specify are mentioned on the web.
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Goqr.me is a tool enabling you to generate QR codes. Özge mentioned that we can give the answer keys to the students in the form of QR codes so that they can scan and read them.
George Pickering’s Notes: I think he is one of the exceptional people who could capture himself as a monkey and put his photo together with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
He mainly mentioned about framing issue during his talk, the filters we use to view ourselves and the world. I strongly believe that zooming into the frames changes the vision of understanding of our students. Towards the end of his talk, he showed the sentence “Opportunityisnowhere” and asked us to read it. I was the one who read it as “Opportunity is now here.” Well, I think I am a little bit optimistic..
Michael Oneil’s Notes: At the beginning of the session, Michael shared a video of Bill Gates on creating great teachers. You can watch the video here. He explained how to improve teaching and learning establishing a taxonomy of successful teaching with 49 teaching techniques. He categorized this taxonomy into seven parts; Setting High Academic Expectations, Planning that ensures Academic Achievement, Structuring and Delivering Your Lessons, Engaging Students into Your Lessons, Creating a Strong Classroom Culture, Building and Maintaining High Behavioral Expectation and lastly Building Character and Trust.
Many of my friends were presenters at the conference including me (I will give more information about my workshop in my next post) On the first day, I attended a nice workshop given by my colleagues Merve Elbirlik Tülek and Emine Bülür Civanoğlu on “The Power of Images to Boost Learner Creativity and Motivation”. Many thanks for their practical ideas.
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Thank you so much Sultan for this detailed reflective post. I immediately shared WICTOM (What I Can Teach On Monday) and FAIL (First Attempt In Learning) with my students and we did have fun! George Pickering is such a great person, full of interesting ideas!
Great post, Sultan.
Just found your blog from Tamas’s edublog nominations. I’ve heard so many good things about the Dogus conference, and must admit I’m jealous that you got to see David Crystal speak. I saw him at IATEFL and have been a big fan of his blog since (http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/).
Ozge is an amazing sharer, and if you’re not active on linked-in yet, there are a number of great groups to join and discuss ELT.
Thanks for sharing !
-Brad
Thanks for your kind words Brad,
You are right about David Cyrstal and Özge. I feel really lucky to have such dynamic and resourceful people in my PLN.
Also, I am still not a member of Linked-in but I will get an account very soon.
-Sultan
I absolutely agree with you about George Pickering.
Hope to watch him again on the stage
-Sultan