Hello and welcome back to work after your break. I hope you managed to get home safely without too much volcanic disruption.

This week, I thought I'd write a little about the sessions I was lucky enough to watch at the recent IATEFL conference in Yorkshire, in the UK.

For those of you who don't know, the IATEFL conference is a huge annual 5-day event held in the UK, bringing in educators from all over the world. There are over 500 sessions to choose from, delivered by a host of famous authors and worldwide institutions.

Here, naturally, I'm going to focus on the highlights among the digital sessions which I attended.

Day 1

My personal highlight of the first day was the talk given by Michael Carrier, who has recently moved from International House to the British Council. He's also well-known externally as the editor of the technology section which ran in Modern English Teacher.

His talk looked at innovation in ELT and asked what modern learners expect us to provide.

Generation Y learners are those born betwen 1978 and 1994. Peer-learning has become popular within this generation. Millennials, meanwhile, were born since 1995, have been brought up learning from sound, video and images on screens and over the years, we have witnessed a decrease in attention spans, but an increase in the tendency to multi-task. One could also interpret that they prefer high context learning.

He suggested that current learners, more than any learner before, expect that we explore their needs and teach what they want to learn in the way they want to learn. In order to do this and maintain competitive advantage, he outlined 4 necessary features: innovation; quality; technology and teacher development.

Looking at innovation from a marketing perspective, he examined what innovation is: a new course type (eg CLIL and immersive learning); a new way of teaching an old course type; a new way of supporting learning; a new service quality for learners. In terms of quality, we should provide an experience, not simply a commodity or a service, Michael claimed. The relevance of teachnology was mentioned in relation to how learners these days are time-poor and a great deal of free-time is spent on the move. The importance of digitally-supported social learning was also stressed, and this theme continued throughout the conference, with numerous mentions of Vygotsky. In terms of digital classrooms, he mentioned projectors, netbooks, wall-mounted speakers, digital cameras and wi-fi. Finally he discussed how the CELTA has now been around for almost 50 years and that it doesn't respond to the needs of young teachers, suggesting that teachers should not only have more access to modules to build their own portfolio development, but that this development should be progressive, thus eliminating the massive leap from CELTA to DELTA.

Day 2

Russell Stannard is a name on everyone's lips at the moment after his teacher training videos website won an ELTON award for innovation. In this session he talked about Jing. Jing is screen-capture software (like Camtasia, but free) which allows you to "film" your computer screen and record audio, in this example, your own voice. Russell showed us how rather than writing all over a student's piece of written work (or using track changes on Word), he assesses a student's piece of written work by talking them through it, with the work visible on the screen. You can then upload this and send your student the link. The packed audience reacted very well. Have a look at the website yourself.

Day 3

Vic Richardson from Embassy language schools gave a fascinating talk as part of the Management SIG strand about how his chain of schools has managed to encourage teachers to take up the digital baton through a change management approach to staff development. The school invested in IWBs throughout some time ago, but as we know, this is only the first investment. The much larger investment is in time spent training teachers, and the most challenging part of the whole process is to get buy-in form more reticent teachers. This was achieved in the Embassy schools through creating champions, respected tachers among the community who would encourage teachers to get involved, try things out and gain confidence, and in turn generate further enthusiasm in the staffroom. I'm going to write more about this approach in a future post on IWBs.

Day 4

Andrew Newton, also of the British Council, rounded off the conference with a thorough overview of the range of mobile products which are being produced in Hong Kong for the huge Chinese market. One interesting idea involved a learner preparing  for a lesson which would then be carried out via VOIP with a teacher in another part of the world. That teacher would then provide feedback. Integration between web and mobile was also demonstrated through the "Big City, Small World" online soap opera, which includes printable language activities and downloadable MP3 audio. There are also wordbooks, which add a fun element to personal wordlists, by allowing for an element of social interaction. There are also the ubiquitous vocabulary and grammar games, no doubt with the British Council stamp of quality.

Did you go to the conference? What were your digital highlights?

Thanks for reading

James