Tag Archives: benguilbaud

Bring your own vocab’

Hi! – Thanks for reading! Apologies for being so quiet over the past few months. This first year in my new job (well, not so new anymore) has been keeping me very busy. That’s something I should reflect on in a future blog post.

For now, I just want to talk about last Friday’s conference. I attended and presented at the “Innovative Language Teaching and Learning at University: Enhancing the Learning Experience through Student Engagement” conference, organised by the University of Manchester on Friday 28th June 2013.

First, I want to say a big thanks to my colleagues Catherine France, Annie Morton, Susana Lorenzo-Zamorano and Noelia Alcarazo for organising such a great and fruitful day. Also, I’m very happy that I was invited to present what I’ve been working on this past semester.

The conference (programme here) was a great opportunity to discover what colleagues around the country have been doing, to discuss the state of the language teaching sector under the new fee regime (and the tragedies it’s brought about) and on a lighter note to catch up with colleagues (and by the way, I re-iterate my congratulations to the great @AngloFLE for his new job!). I also got to meet, and briefly chat with, the very inspiring @jwyburd, whom I’d heard so much about here at Manchester.

My contribution to the day was a presentation reporting on how I used the vocabulary app Quizlet with 3 of my classes during this past semester. I’ve expressed my love for Quizlet in a previous post, and if you’re a language teacher, I really recommend you give it a go.

Anyway, if you’re interested, I suggest you have a look at my abstract and check the slides below.

Thanks again for reading!

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Upcoming presentation – HE staff engagement with digital tech

Hello,

Just got news from the LLAS that my presentation proposal for the Edinburgh conference has been accepted. Couldn’t be happier! Now I’ve got to start collecting that data.

The conference is organised by the Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies (LLAS) and is entitled ‘Language Futures: Languages in Higher Education conference 2012‘. It will take place in the John McIntyre Conference Centre, Edinburgh on 5th and 6th July 2012.

Abstract:

A review of staff engagement with digital technologies on an undergraduate language programme

It is often unsurprising to notice a mismatch between theory and practice when it comes to implementation of digital technologies in education.

This presentation presents the results of a review of staff engagement with digital technologies on an undergraduate language programme in a British higher education institution. It is based on a series of interviews aiming at highlighting issues such as barriers to technology uptake, perceptions of usefulness, and discussing incentives and constraints with regards to policy and curriculum.

Looking at technologies such as virtual learning environments, interactive whiteboards and social media, this study concludes by suggesting elements contributing to the design of a Digital Literacy strategy for languages in higher education.

LLAS e-learning symposium 2012 – day 2

Better late than never – I’ve finished my post about the second day of the LLAS e-learning symposium 2012 (#LLASelearn12). It’s been a busy week catching up with everything after spending Thursday and Friday in Southampton.

I particularly enjoyed Professor Claire Warwick (@clhw1)’s keynote entitled ‘Tweeting and teaching: how scholarly is social media?‘. It was really refreshing to listen to Prof. Warwick defend social media as a scholarly practice, as she meticulously dispelled one preconception after the next on the matter. Least I can say is that I wish I could make such a convincing -and so thoroughly informed- case when I try and defend the use of social media in general (and discussion forums in particular) in my job as a language tutor.

Other speakers included Margaret Southgate who gave a very insightful and up-to-date overview of blended language learning and Dr. Mark Stansfield who defended the value and useful of game-based learning. Game-based learning is a topic I’m always very curious to hear about as I haven’t yet seen another practitioner implement  it in my (short) teaching career.

I was lucky enough to have my proposal accepted and the symposium and therefore gave a presentation entitled “Using social media for peer feedback in a translation class: a case-study“.

Although not yet available at the time of writing this post, a video recording of my presentation should shortly be posted on the LLAS website. In this talk, I looked at the set-up of our departmental social network and how I have been using it with my translation class for student peer-feedback. The results discussed are preliminary as the study will be concluded in March 2012.

I was very happy with the feedback I received and it was particularly useful to compare experiences with Andrea Zhok and Elena McNeilly from the University of Bristol, who have been working on a similar (though apparently far more successful) project to mine.

Next step now is finishing my study, hopefully with some useful findings. Fingers crossed…