If you’re not a company or someone with a personal brand (I shuddered there as well), then seeing a use for Twitter can be hard.News is a good one, but you still have to know who to follow and curating a good Twitter feed takes work. Just getting into Twitter is quite a bit of work, there needs to be some sort of immediate draw and it’s communities like #ELTChat that create it.
Every Sunday and Wednesday, ELT teachers get together to discuss a topic and learn from each other.
It’s not long winded, it’s not bloated, it’s fast and succinct. It’s a brilliant community. James Taylor described it to be as perfect because it was only 141 characters. As anyone who’s been professional development conferences will know, half the battle is pulling out the gems of knowledge and advice from a hour long presentation that winds and waffles.
Then at the end of each chat one of the community writes up a summary, so even if you missed it you can still get your questions answered. It’s some of the best teacher advice our there.
So here’s five of my favourite #ELTChats about the ELT classroom.
- Tips and Tricks for Teaching Larger Classes – A very practical chat, if you’re teaching in a country like China or Thailand with large classes.
- Using content made by your students – An analysis of whether or not using student made content is good and some ideas on how to do it.
- Starting and Ending Lessons – Possibly my favourite chat. This highly structured chat covered all sorts of little details, like whether or not to write the topic on the board, when to arrive and so on.
- Multicultural Classroom Issues – It’s always nice to have advice when dealing with a tricky topic like cultural differences and so having a bunch of teachers weigh in on how to treat sensitive topics and working is really valuable.
- Do you or don’t you drill? – Drilling can get a bit of a bad rap and this is a well written summary of an insightful chat.
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