Ed Tech & TESOL Alumni

BARGE, Martin (MEd EdTech & ELT — distance)
Since finishing, Martin has become Technical Director of the Language Learning Centre at Queen Mary, University of London. You can take a peek at some of the materials he produced for teaching English to African Air Traffic Controllers, which he was doing at one point during his time with us. These are linked from his webpage as is a blog he used as a diary during one of his course units on teaching and learning online:  http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/mibarge/

Martin is also now busy writing a Business English Teachers’ book for MacMillan and is involved in a project looking at teaching in multimedia labs, supported by an award from the Centre for Excellence in Multimedia Language Learning:

http://www.arts.ulster.ac.uk/lanlit/cetl/news/2007/winner_mmlt_award07-08.html

HAI, Cong ‘Grace’ (MA EdTechnology & TESOL (onsite 2005-2006).

Now works as a language instructor for Beijing Language and Culture University, China (BLCU).  She was sent by BLCU, to work for its Confucius Institutes at UK and Romania respectively from 2007 to 2010.  It was during these intercultural working periods that she feels that developed her own intercultural communicative competencies and a beter appreciation of the theories of Intercultual Communication which she studied with Richard as part of the MA programme. 

Her research interests now focus on the intercultural aspects of Foreign Language Education (Teaching both English to Speakers of Chinese and Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages)
 
HEMPEKIDOU, Keti (MEd. Ed Tech & TESOL, 2002)
Since graduation in 2002, Keti has become a Lecturer in English at the University of the Aegean located in Rhodes.  She has also been involved in teacher training with newly-appointed state teachers of English, French, German and Italian. Her contribution to these annual training activities have been in: i) Educational Technologies and Foreign Language Teaching; ii) Intercultural Communication in State school Classrooms; and iii) Evaluation of Teaching Materials. And since 2004, she has been a member of the General Register of Trainers which is supervised by the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (E.K.D.D.A.). She has also published articles in the ELT newletter for Greece as follows:

• “Evaluating Educational Sites on the Internet”, ELT News, August , 2007
• “Multimedia in English Language Teaching”, ELT News, July, 2007
• “Intercultural Communication in ELT classroom”, ELT News, June, 2007
• “Intercultural Communication – a case study”, ELT News, May, 2007

Her conference papers include: “The Use of Multimedia in Tertiary Education in Greece: Teaching English for Engineering”, Proceedings of the 4^th International Conference on Informational and Educational Technologies in Education, Athens, 2004.

Kozar, Olga (MA EdTech and TESOL, 2010, distance learning)
Just 12 days after finishing her Masters in September 2010 , Olga moved from Russia to Australia and started working on a project aimed to set up online lessons for Sudanese refugees (University of New South Wales, Sydney); several months later she received a scholarship to do a PhD at Macquarie University (Sydney) starting February 2011. Olga has a particular interest in teaching by audio and video conferencing as she has been a ‘Skype’ tutor for over 4 years now, and the role of the teacher in the Skype 1-1 setting was a focus for her MA dissertation research. She’s now going on to explore this further in her PhD.

LEE, Joy
Joy Lee has been awarded an Inspired Teacher Scholarship for Visual Learning. Joy teaches in Singapore and did her Masters with us by distance learning. For her dissertation, she researched the impact of using Inspiration software to develop visual learning strategies to help her students improve narrative writing. She has now been awarded one of Inspiration’s 2008 scholarships for her project. Congratulations, Joy.

PATHARE, Emma
Emma graduated from our MEd Educational Technology and ELT course and won the international category in the 2008 British Council ELTons, awarded for innovation in ELT. Emma gained this recognition for her web-based vocabulary course, which was the focus of development and research for her Masters dissertation. See:
http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-innovation-awards-2008-winners.htm and http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/courses/story/0,,2263401,00.html

ROGERS, Aaron (MA Edtech & TESOL, distance learning)
Aaron writes …. “Before starting the MA I was a full-time lecturer in a state university teaching on a Pre-service teacher training programme in Colombia. During my time on the MA, I was offered freelance work as an Academic Consultant with Pearson Education Colombia within the ELT division. It was this work that helped me focus on the topic of my dissertation and lead to the company eventually offering me the permanent position of Teacher Development Unit Coordinator for Pearson Longman Colombia. Since I have been working for Pearson Longman I have finished writing a text book called ‘ICTeaching’ which will be published early 2011, published in national journals, given conferences, formed part of editorial committees for two recognised journals, travelled extensively around South America and had the opportunity to meet so many teachers that help me to develop on a daily basis. Also due to my recent graduation I have been offered a part time position teaching on two MA’s here in Colombia ‘Master in English Language Teaching for Self-Directed Learning’ and ‘Master in English Language Teaching – Autonomous Learning Environments’. I enjoyed the MA at Manchester so much and learnt such a lot that I am considering carrying on with doctoral work.

ZORKO, Vida (MA EdTech & TESOL, 2007, distance learning)
Since graduating, Vida has not only become a valued member of the internationally team for the Computer-mediated intercultural Communication (which Diane, Richard and Susan run with Manchester BA students), she’s also been a very active conference paper-giver and online article contributor (see her works in the Student Contributions to Scholarship) and webmaster / editor also for  the The Slovene Association of LSP Teachers’s international (see the BlogRoll link for their Languages for Specific Purposes weblog). She is also the Editor for the Association’s international journal (Scripta Manent) and publication series (Inter Alia).

Written by: Gary Motteram on 7, April 2011.
Last revised by: Richard Fay on 11, May 2011.