Tour around the ELT conference circuit as our team shares conference highlights and session reviews.

Conferences

<blockquote>&quot;You had me at ready-made lesson plans.&quot; &mdash;New ESL-Library subscriber</blockquote>

<h3>ESL Library Attends the TESOL Convention in Dallas</h3>

We received hugs at the ESL Library booth at the TESOL convention in Dallas this week. Vee Govan even subscribed to our site before I could show it to her. What does this tell me? Teachers are overworked! And yet, they still take time out of their hectic schedules for professional development. I always come home from teacher conferences feeling inspired and excited to get back to work. TESOL 13 was a fantastic experience, and ESL-Library will be a better resource site for teachers because of it.

<h3>Our Goal at TESOL</h3>

Our goal this year was to discover new trends in ELT publishing and introduce ESL-Library to busy teachers and administrators. Having three members of the team (from Winnipeg, Toronto, and Vancouver) at the convention instead of two allowed us to attend more sessions, have longer chats with teachers, and even take coffee breaks from time to time. Tanya and I taught English together in Vancouver over ten years ago, and it is a pleasure to be working with her again.&nbsp;

<h3>Highlights from TESOL 13</h3>

We attended great sessions on grammar, pronunciation, authentic materials, vocabulary, and publishing. We also chatted with fascinating people who have great ideas about modernizing the ELT industry and making language learning more engaging. Here were some of the most memorable people, places, and things we stumbled upon during our trip to Dallas.

The Incredible Slapping Head Lady -&nbsp;On the plane from Toronto to Dallas, the man sitting beside told me his whole life story. (You can learn a lot about raising chameleons in 3 hours.) I was so busy practising my listening skills that I didn&#39;t notice David Deubelbeiss&nbsp;sitting right behind me. I caught up with David during a shuttle ride from the Dallas airport. As we drove to the convention center we both noticed a female driver (in the fast lane) who was slapping her head repeatedly with one hand while she used the other to hold her cell phone. She went on like this for several minutes, and it wasn&#39;t until our shuttle driver passed her that we all realized she was driving with her knees! &nbsp;When you&#39;re at a teaching conference every experience and observation inspires a classroom activity.&nbsp;Why is the crazy lady slapping her head?&nbsp;We all made our predictions, and David taught our taxi driver some new vocabulary (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

Language Cloud - This learner management system just might take over the ELT world. The platform is still in progress, but we think it&#39;s worth waiting for! Co-founders John and Billy put together an excellent demo for TESOL, and we wish them the best of luck. (Read about the magic behind <a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/20/digital/language-startup-rises-to-cloud-nine/#.UVG3C1vF0hN">Language Cloud in the Japan Times</a>.)

David Harrington&#39;s textbooks - We know what it&#39;s like to be a small publisher in ELT, and we always love catching up with David at the conferences. This year he had some really fun titles to show us.

Nick Robinson&#39;s &#39;Balancing Act&#39; session for materials writers - So it wasn&#39;t Nick&#39;s session per se, but as &#39;the only ELT agent in the world,&#39; he was a key player on the panel and had some excellent advice for materials writers and publishers. We wish Nick the best of luck with his launch of &#39;Small Epic&#39; at IATEFL next week. If you have ever thought about publishing your own materials, be sure to keep @nmkrobinson on your radar.

Cosmic Caf&eacute; - We discovered <a href="http://www.cosmiccafedallas.com/">this great vegetarian restaurant</a>. It had excellent food, service, and atmosphere.

Uptown Dallas - If you&#39;ve ever been to downtown Dallas, you might wonder where all the people are! Thank goodness for chatty cab drivers who helped us find our way around. Uptown Dallas is the place to go if you&#39;re looking for life after 10pm.

<h3>What our subscribers told us about ESL Library</h3>

One of my favourite things to do at the TESOL convention is chat with current subscribers. I take notes madly after they tell me what they love, what they need, and what we can do to improve their user experience. Here are a few things they told us about ESL-Library this year.

<ul>
	<li>It&#39;s easy to navigate.</li>
	<li>They use it to supplement their core textbooks.</li>
	<li>Their teenagers love the content.</li>
	<li>They love the layout of the lesson plans.</li>
	<li>They no longer have to make their own lesson plans.</li>
	<li>They appreciate how integrated the site is.</li>
	<li>They set their accounts to auto renewal.</li>
	<li>They appreciate our customer service.</li>
	<li>They want more academic English materials.</li>
	<li>They want the ability to customize our materials.</li>
	<li>They hope we add more materials for pre and post-assessment.</li>
</ul>

<h3>Thank you!</h3>

I&#39;m going to use this space to say a quick thank you to all of the new subscribers (like Nance from Kuwait, left) who signed up excitedly at our booth. Your enthusiasm made us feel like we are on the right track. Thank you to our long-term subscribers who took the time to stop by to offer us praise and feedback. Thank you also to TESOL for the iPhone app that made it so easy to keep track of the sessions we wanted to attend! And finally, thank you to Ben for the great trip, and for giving us the opportunity to learn and grow.

See you in Portland at TESOL 14!

Highlights of TESOL 13 in Dallas

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We&#39;ve just returned from a busy week in Philadelphia at the annual TESOL convention. This trip started out a bit rocky (no pun intended, Philly), as I realized a few nights before the trip that I was booked on the PM instead of AM flight! I owe a very special thank you to Adam from <a href="http://www.facebook.com/aircanada" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Air Canada&#39;s Facebook</a> team for helping me get on the morning flight. Thanks to Adam, I arrived in time to help Ben set up the ESL Library booth before the big day!

On Day 1 we left our booth in care of our neighbours for an hour, and Ben gave an impressive presentation about using ESL Library to engage teen and adult learners. He shared information about our small, dedicated Red River Press team, and demoed how teachers can use the ready-made lesson plans and flashcards to supplement their curriculums. He also shared a few sneak previews about what&#39;s coming up in the summer and fall. My favourite part was when Ben talked about the making of our <a href="https://ellii.com/courses/98/lessons/1381" target="_blank">Chilean Miner</a> lesson plans. This brought back some great memories, and made me feel very proud to be part of a team that brings materials to teachers in a timely manner. Over 5,000 teachers downloaded this lesson plan in the first ten hours. We published it a few minutes after the last miner was rescued, and made it free for all. Ben talked about how some teachers shared their 33 Things We&#39;re Thankful For lists (an exercise from the lesson), which we published on our blog.

Back at the booth Ben and I spoke with hundreds of teachers, administrators, and authors from all over the world. Many satisfied subscribers, including Erica from Harvey High School in Ohio and Cara from Columbia University (pictured left), came by to tell us how happy they are with the ESL Library. One teacher came by to tell us how much fun her students had with the <a href="https://ellii.com/resource_categories/105/resources/2193" target="_blank">&#39;Chatterbox&#39;</a> warmup we posted on our blog. Another came by to beg us for more <a href="https://ellii.com/courses/73/lessons" target="_blank">Mini-Debates</a>! We received many requests for lower level versions of our <a href="https://ellii.com/courses/80/lessons" target="_blank">Famous People</a>, <a href="https://ellii.com/courses/81/lessons" target="_blank">Places</a>, and <a href="https://ellii.com/courses/82/lessons" target="_blank">Things</a> lessons. This is one of the reasons we go to this convention every year, as we focus on building our library based on teacher requests. We also demonstrated&nbsp;how to use the <a href="https://ellii.com/flashcard_genres" target="_blank">flashcard library</a>, the podcasts, and the&nbsp;<a href="https://ellii.com/calendar" target="_blank">lesson plan calendar</a>. Finally, we exchanged twitter handles and promised to stay in touch in a variety of ways.

<blockquote>&#39;I think most of these things make lazy teachers, but this one (ESL Library) is very helpful.&#39;Daniel Loges, a subscriber who stopped by our booth at TESOL.</blockquote>

If you&#39;ve ever worked in an exhibition hall, you know how hard it can be to get away to grab a coffee, or take in a presentation. This year I insisted on slipping away to a few sessions. I enjoyed a great presentation called Vocabulary Revisited, by American professor Frances Boyd. Frances started out by having us write down a list of body parts in our second language. She gave us two minutes, and I was ashamed to only get nine words down before the time was up (most were spelled incorrectly). It was great to be in the learner&#39;s shoes again. Frances spoke about chunking, sorting, and helping students become proud &#39;collectors&#39; of vocabulary. She stressed the importance of frequent short practice, repeated exposure, and learning words inside out. She also talked about teaching students to become &#39;fluent guessers&#39; by showing them how to dissect vocabulary. The most interesting part for me was about helping learners change their attitude so that they can learn to take control of their own learning journeys. Over the weekend I took this approach while teaching my daughter how to ride a two-wheeler. We set up 8 fifteen-minute focused lessons, and by the end of the 4th she was riding on her own. (We had tried many times before, but her attitude and focus this time made all the difference.) Can you help your students learn that vocabulary building is a lifelong project? One idea Frances shared is to invite them to create (and revisit often) lists of words that they know, half-know, or don&#39;t know at all!

I also enjoyed a well-attended session by Brazilian teacher (and PLN member) Carla Arena, titled &#39;Making Waves Through Online Circles of Learning.&#39; Carla invited participants to expand their learning toolkits. She spoke about several professional development tools that are in my own toolkit, such as <a href="http://twitter.com/ESLLibrary" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">twitter</a>, Facebook, and Scoop.it. She also introduced some tools that I&#39;d love to learn more about such as the Learning2gether Wiki and the Electric Village Online. Carla&#39;s enthusiasm for online collaboration and learning has helped convert many technophobes around the world. She reminded teachers that they can&#39;t wait for their institutions to pay for professional development. The best story from this session was about a tech savvy teacher from Carla&#39;s school who used to lend her flash drive (full of self-created presentations and materials) to any teacher who asked. Over time the school built a wiki that all 2000 teachers could add to and share. One of my favourite lines from Carla&#39;s presentation was, &#39;You don&#39;t need to join twitter. Just search. You&#39;ll see people are talking about serious stuff!&#39;

In addition to meeting teachers, attending sessions, building a toolbox, and giving teachers a free trial of our digital library of materials, I got a new T-shirt! This was not any ordinary shirt, &#39;nor was it something I won in a TESOL raffle. This was an #ELTChat shirt that came all the way from Glasgow, Scotland, special delivery from Alex Williams of Oxford University Press. Like the Facebook miracle I shared at the beginning of this post, this gift arrived thanks to twitter. Just prior to the TESOL conference, I was virtually attending #IATEFL via Glasgow Online (Check out all of the recorded interviews and sessions!). During one of the symposiums I noticed some of my favourite tweechers were wearing #ELTChat shirts. I wished I had one to wear at the TESOL conference. (Twitter is not popular with TESOL attendees, and I figured a T-shirt might speak louder than words.) Within minutes of my twitter request, a special delivery had been arranged. OUP&#39;s social media guru was on his way to Philly from Glasgow and offered to bring a shirt to me.

Though I never got the chance to run &#39;Rocky-style&#39; up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, I did come back to Canada feeling ready to &#39;go the distance&#39; in my work as an ELT materials writer, online teacher/admin, and social media director/curator. Attending a teaching conference fills me up every time. If you were unable to attend any of the local or international teaching conferences this season, it&#39;s not too late! Check out the Virtual Round Table web conference from April 20-22. It&#39;s free and you can learn, share, and connect with hundreds of other teachers (in your&nbsp;pajamas). Finally, I&#39;d like to get it in writing that we&#39;ll be wearing ESL Library T-shirts, jeans, and comfortable running shoes to the next TESOL conference. (Ben promised.) &nbsp; Next year&#39;s TESOL conference is in Texas! Are you in?

TESOL 12 Convention Recap

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Hello&hellip; it&#39;s great to finally meet you.

For the past 10 years of running Red River Press&nbsp;and ESL Library,&nbsp;I have had very little up-close interaction with our customers or even some of our staff for that matter. The more connected the world has become, it seems the farther away we all get from each other. Our office has a small team of people who work here in Winnipeg, but most people who work for my company work from their homes in different countries around the world. Not a single customer has ever visited our offices; we speak only online or on the phone.

In 2004 I commissioned an artist in Poland to draw some images for a new lesson section we were creating called Famous People. He has worked for us on contract ever since. A few months ago it dawned on me that he had been working for us for seven years and I had never once met him in person - never even seen a photo of him. I sent him an email requesting a picture of him. (He was not at all what I had imagined.) I told him that hopefully one day we would meet in person. His reply: &#39;That would be very nice, but I doubt it will ever happen.&#39; And it probably won&#39;t.

This past week I attended the annual TESOL conference which was held in New Orleans this year. (A fabulous city I must say!) For the past seven years in a row, I&#39;ve traveled down from Canada to attend the show - it&#39;s held in a different US city each year. Recently my reasons for going have changed a little. What I love most about attending these large teaching conferences now, is how all of a sudden people whom I&#39;ve worked with, dealt with, or spoken with only by email, Skype, or phone, are all right here, right in front of me. It&#39;s so great to finally meet you in person! Though conferences seem to be going to the way of the dinosaur, and are no longer affordable for many businesses (or schools, or teachers, or anyone), I must say there is something really special about seeing so many people from one industry come together all at once. It is the one chance we get to say hello in person and shake hands &nbsp;and share a smile with the people we speak to every day online. I love meeting and speaking with our ESL Library members, and with all our colleagues in the industry.

In an age where everyone knows everyone and no one knows anyone, conferences really are the last true place we can all get together and finally meet each other in person. It was great meeting you all in New Orleans this year. I really hope to meet more of you at the 2012 TESOL conference too.&nbsp;

TESOL 2011 in New Orleans: Hello World

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When Ben Buckwold of Red River Press&nbsp;invited me to join him at the TESOL conference, I was excited and nervous about the opportunity. Writers like me often end up behind the scenes. We get caught up in deadlines, revisions, and blogs and start to doubt our own ability to interact with the real world. My friends and family are often shocked to hear that I&#39;ve worked with managers, editors, and writers for years at a time without ever meeting these people face-to-face. Tools like email, chat, and even the good old telephone have made it possible for writers to do business without shaking hands or looking real humans in the eye. While I couldn&#39;t do my job without the Internet, I have Boston to thank for reminding me of the importance of real humans.

7 Things I learned at the Boston TESOL Conference

1. New Friends are a Wealth of Inspiration

As a writer I rely heavily on inspiration for my materials. I think this is something teachers and writers have in common. New friends bring new stories, and without stories your well can run dry. Whether they come from a passenger beside you on the airplane or a colleague from across the miles, new stories can renew your creativity. When is the last time you took the time to make a new friend? A teacher&#39;s conference or workshop may be just what you need!

2. Facebook Can Stand In for Face-to-Face

Facebook came in handy this week when an international phone call (just to Canada) rang in at 18 dollars a minute. While saying good night to my six year old via her father&#39;s Facebook page was not the same as reading her a bedtime story, it certainly was better than nothing! ESL Library has recently joined the Facebook world in order to connect with teachers from around the world. If you use materials from the library, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/ESLlibrary" target="_blank">please join us on Facebook</a> so that we can get to know each other and discuss educational trends and needs. Next time we&#39;re at a conference together we can arrange to meet face-to-face!

3. One Creature&#39;s Criticism is another Person&#39;s Praise

While subscription based websites sometimes get criticized by the online community, I was pleased by the number of teachers I met this week who called ESL Library&#39;s $60/per year membership fair, reasonable, and affordable. A representative from one of the larger publishers questioned what right RRP had to practically &#39;give teaching materials away&#39;. While a few teachers admitted they didn&#39;t have room in their budget for another subscription, not one suggested that all flashcards and lessons should be free. Teachers from Egypt, Mexico, and Korea expressed excitement in being able to access the content on a trial basis before joining from across the globe. One American teacher had concerns about Canadianisms that occasionally crop up in our materials, and another international teacher thanked us heartily for the range of content and themes.

4. Teachers Rarely have just One Job

Asking a teacher at a TESOL conference what she does for a living is a dangerous question! I expected teachers to share information about the level or age or skill they taught. Instead many teachers spoke heavily of their multifaceted jobs as administrators, volunteers, board members, teacher-trainers, and examiners. With their heavy bags of books and manuals, teachers at the conference were relieved to find sites like <a href="http://ellii.com" target="_blank">ESL Library</a>, <a href="http://www.brainpop.com/" target="_blank">Brain Pop</a>, and <a href="http://englishcentral.com/en/videos" target="_blank">English Central</a> to offer a helping hand.

5. Tweechers are Celebrities

In the twittersphere we sometimes forget that not all tweechers are teachers. As I tried to find new teachers to follow at the conference I was shocked to learn that there are far more twitter skeptics than believers in the TEFL industry. Meeting <a href="http://twitter.com/JudieHaynes" target="_blank">@JudieHaynes</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/NadiaNassif" target="_blank">@NadiaNassif </a>felt a bit like meeting a famous person! We also found some new tweeters like <a href="http://twitter.com/TeachingIdeas" target="_blank">@TeachingIdeas </a>while following the #TESOL and #tesol2010 tags. Thank you to all of the tweeters like <a href="http://twitter.com/NemaVeze" target="_blank">@NemaVeze</a> who were tweeting from the sessions.

&nbsp;6. The Best Conversations are Overheard

As I sat back to relax on my plane back to Canada, I listened in on a conversation between two teachers behind me sharing impressions about the conference. They discussed their travels in Boston, including a trip to Harvard and a hunt for Betty Azar. Later in the customs line up I heard teachers saying how choosing the right session was &#39;the luck of the draw&#39; and how their presentations had gone better than planned. It confirmed our team&#39;s plan to participate in the sessions next year and take a break from the exhibition hall.

7. Adventures Don&#39;t Need Backup Plans

Do Bostonians have a secret plan to send tourists in the wrong direction? Maybe! We covered a lot more of the city than we would have with just a map. My trip to Boston reminded me that you don&#39;t always need a backup plan. You can bring a phone, but you can&#39;t expect it to work. You can rent a table, or you can improvise with a box. Your USB flash drive might not survive the turbulence, but hopefully you have a husband who can keep you calm. Mine just rescued all of the work I completed in Boston as I wrote this blog! Even if your airplane turns around before you reach your destination, you&#39;ll still find your way. I did!

A special thank you to all of the teachers and administrators who stopped by Red River Press at the TESOL conference. Some of you came by to say hello and tell us you are already satisfied members. Others took a few moments to try out one of our new language learning apps or offer suggestions. It was great chatting with each one of you. See you in New Orleans!&nbsp;

Conferences

Highlights of TESOL 13 in Dallas

TESOL 12 Convention Recap

TESOL 2011 in New Orleans: Hello World

Beyond the Booth at Boston TESOL 2010