TEFL Conference Series Part 1 - App Swap

The app swap we had in IATEFL 2013 in Liverpool with Joe Dale, Shaun Wilden, Ana Maria Menezes, among other educators make me consider repeating the model in our CTJ, Alumni and IBEU TEFL Conference in Brasilia.

The session in which participants were the lead presenters in break out groups were the stars of the session, sharing with others their favorite apps for the classroom or for personal use. Vinicius Lemos and I started by giving an example of tools and, from there, teachers never stopped sharing.

As they shared their favorite apps with the others, we kept walking around adding the names of the apps to our collaborative page on Todaysmeet.

Enjoy it. Try some them.

http://todaysmeet.com/appswapctj

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You might be interested in the shared list of apps in IATEFL at http://list.ly/list/4NE-app-swap-iatefl-2013

About Me - Creating a Digital Profile to Stand Out

I tirelessly mention in teacher training sessions the importance of establishing a reliable digital footprint. Of course, this involves many fronts, such as the kinds of photos you publish online, how you interact with online users, the resources you share, how generous you are in the network, among others.

However, one area that sometimes is overseen, though totally relevant, is our online profiles. We establish trust if we show ourselves through a nice image, what we say and show about ourselves. This means taking good care of social media profiles. Also, it is important to have an about you page that makes justice to who you are.

There are some very effective and cool platforms that you can use for this purpose, and here are some examples of my own digital profiles:

http://about.me/carlaarena


https://www.smore.com/qa7m-carla-arena 


One, though, that I've just tried out and it has a really neat, visual presentation is Visify. I came across after seeing a tweet by Jesse Stommel.   Check the final result of my profile, which took less than 10 minutes to have this outcome:


https://www.vizify.com/carla-arena 



What's your favorite profile page on the Web?

Can you imagine how exciting it would be to use those profiles, real ones, for authentic language practice in the classroom? 

One idea would be to ask someone you know to create one of those, use it in class, and ask students to come up with followup questions. Then, the person could answer them in a video post, for example. How exciting would that be?!