DAY3 SESSIONS

I should read the program more carefully--I managed to select two sessions that were publishers' promos. Whenever the one guy mentioned the text that he was pushing, he said "ka-ching!" Another session, "The Digital Classroom" picked up on the ideas presented by Marc Prensky in the plenary--digital immigrant vs. digital native. The proposal was that if those two are on one continuum, then an intersecting continuum is from techno-phobe to techno-geek. This model then provides for four quadrants.

In another session, we were given information on a variety of online resources:
Hot Potatoes
Moodle discussions
The Idiom Connection
English Listening Lab Online (ELLO)
CoBuild concordance and Collacations
Study Note

A session on "The tipping point in the EAP classroom" proved interesting; the presenter was talking about the importance of transitions to signal intent in writing. He was particularly concerned with teaching towards the IELTS paragraph writing test, and was particularly fond of the "not only but also" transiton. He also talked about teaching students how to use complex noun phrases at the start of sentence and getting students to recognize these structures and how they modify the basic sentence. There is a big emphasis/focus on IELTS at this conference; I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

It was yet another fine day for lunch in the park.


I still didn't manage to last until the end of the day--it was a combination of jet lag and information overload.