Category Archives: The educational technologist

This section of the blog is for anything connected with the educational technology element of our work at Manchester. These postings are managed by Gary but anyone else can also add relevant postings. We particularly welcome postings from current and former students.

Don’t forget IATEFL starts today and runs until Tuesday

From Gary: The IATEFL conference starts today (15th April, 2011) with Pre-Conference Events. The main conference starts tomorrow. Don’t forget that if you can’t make it, you can follow it online. See the recent posting below.

I will be attempting to Tweet at least some of the sessions I go to and writing a couple of blog entries.

Talks from/by students at IATEFL

Isil Boy is giving a talk at IATEFL at 10.25-11.10 on the Monday (18th). She’s going to put a post on her blog: http://isilboy.com/, which I’ve added to the Blogroll. If others are doing talks at IATEFL, or elsewhere, let us know.

Publications of a graduate: Kholode Al-Obaidli

Kholode Al-Obaidli, who graduated with an MA in EdTech and TESOL in 2003 and then went on to do a PhD at Birmingham, but not in the TESOLĀ  area, has published work from her thesis in this book:

Al-Obaidli, Kholode (2011) Educational Reform in Qatar: Women ESL Teachers’ Perceptions about Roles and Professional Development Needs. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing.

She has also had an article published in Women Today Magazine April Issue 2011.

IATEFL Online 2011

IATEFL Online


Again, as in previous years, if you can’t make the physical IATEFL Conference, this year in Brighton, you can follow it online

New book from one of our graduates — Graham Stanley

Graham Stanley, one of our graduates, and his colleague at the British Council in Barcelona, Kyle Mawer, have a new book coming out soon with Delta Publishing on Digital Games in language teaching. Have a look at the book here: http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/uncategorized/why-its-digital-playtime-in-elt and join in the discussion about this topic.

Second Life Teachers Group

For anyone interested in teaching languages in Second Life, we have brought two groups together and amalgamated resources. Announcements of events will happen on the AVALON Project Ning site: http://avalon-project.ning.com/ and the SLExperiments wiki will be used for the storage of teaching ideas, lesson plans and a summary of what happened on the Second Life Events. Meetings are held twice a month, on the First Friday (19.00 GMT) and the third Wednesday (20.00 GMT).

Children’s online habits revealed

You may be interested in this report from the BBC about how children spend their free time.

New edition of a book from CUP

There is a new issue of a book edited by Brian Tomlinson that many of you will be familiar with, but in which this time Gary has a chapter :-)

There is a also downloadedable chapter on using concordancers in materials development and some other useful links to relevant publications concerned with materials development.

Update on the IJCALLT special issue

The articles for this journal have now gone to the publisher and the journal is due out next year. There are two articles by our ex-students in the edition and the co-editor is Graham Stanley, also an ex-student. Pretty neat :-)

‘Changing Communication: New Technologies and their Impact on …

Attached are final details of the the conference, ‘Changing Communication: New Technologies and their Impact on Meaning Making and Pedagogy’, including registration information. This day conference is to be held at the OU on Friday 26th November 2010.