Here you can find details of our past meetings. Click on a meeting title to see the original meeting announcement.
Details of meetings held before July 2008 can be found in our archives.
Malcolm Swanson & Paul Collett
13 February, 2010
Dave Pite
Collett and Swanson gave us an inspirational couple of hours regarding CALL in the classroom and out, integrating students’ lives ever more closely with using English in functional and fun ways. Social networking Facebook and micro-blogging Twitter are big, as are all their followers and competitors, and everyone is using them already anyway-- but there are hassles and dangers so why not use their concepts and the services subsequently developed, and design your own system to exploit this opportunity for authentic communicative language practice?
These two experts walked us through the basics of various networking set-up, pointing out further potential exploitation possible with more sophisticated management, and that for a small monthly fee it can all be done for you. Keeping up with current events on the personal and global level is attractive to most people, however it can be de-motivating if students find themselves unable to keep up with the responses—and unwilling to have their mistakes floating around in cyber-space forever, another good reason to set up a closed network for your classroom. And the good news is that Swanson and Collett are both willing to help you do that.
