Digital Curation for Business English Teachers - IATEFL BESIG

Last Sunday, Aug 4th, I had a great time interacting with Business English teachers all over the world in BESIG-IATEFL very well-organized online events.

Here are the slides:

Digital Curation for Business English Teachers - BESIG IATEFL from Carla Arena

We mainly explored http://cowbird.com for engaging personal stories related to the workplace, business world.

We talked about ways of using Pinterest for Business English classes by encouraging teachers to create topic board for students and inviting them on a Web Safari. Also, it would be wonderful if students created their own boards and shared with other students. The comment area in Pinterest has great potential for emergent conversations among a group. The teacher can also decide for one group collaborative board by inviting students to the topic board. It is just a fantastic collaborative approach to learning where you give choice, control and agency in the hands of students.

I was surprised to realize that not many teachers knew about http://getpocket.com , a place where you can add all the posts, articles, resources that you find online and want to keep  "in your pocket" for later use. It is just very helpful to curate great content. From there, you can share resources with students and even encourage them to keep their "pockets"and share resources with the group. What I love about it is that it is totally crossplatform, with easy access on the web and any mobile device. Plus, to add resources to Pocket, you can install firefox and Chrome plugins to save them on the go.

Talking about cross platform, one tool that I feel has great potential for Business English teachers is http://newsmix.me . There you can create magazines with different topic feeds. It might help with authentic resources for students. Again, it is web-based as well as mobile device accessible.

Then, we moved on to learning playlists. Again, great potential for the classroom with platforms such as http://mentormob.com, http://learn.ist and http://theemefy.com . All worth the exploration with this great concept of giving more control for the students in their learning process.

Any other curatorial tools you'd add for the Business English Teacher?

Filtering Relevant Information for the EFL Classroom through Digital Curation

This is the time of the year that I get totally thrilled. Convention time. IATEFL, Liverpool. Promising. My second time in one of the best EFL teaching conferences in the world with wonderful professionals willing to share best practices, research, classroom ideas that can really make a difference in our classrooms.

Digital Curation for Educators from Carla Arena

I'm pleased to be presenting about a topic that has been dear to my heart for the past years, and now I've been exploring its many facets more in depth, Content Curation. Though I've presented it twice, I've revamped it a bit, not its essence but some interesting tools I've been using lately. So, if you are around Liverpool, why not joining us for a chat about how to make sense of this world where information more than abounds?

   Any curatorial tools that you've been using lately that you think have made a difference in your efficiency and productivity as an educator? I'd love to hear about it.

My latest experiments have been with http://newsmix.me/carlaarena . Still finding my way around, but enjoying playing around with it.

Here is some background on digital curation that you might find useful:

Here's Graham Stanley's summary of the presentation: Graham's summary