Venezuela Teachers of English

to Speakers of Other Languages

34th

VenTESOL National Convention

“Reflecting and Taking Actions in ELT”

Hotel Hesperia World Trade Center

VenTESOL Social Media

for Effective Professional

Development

Hotel Hesperia World Trade Center

How can we develop professionally

24/7 all year-round?

We make efforts to attend national and local ELT

conferences; but we long for reliable sources and

ways to coach ourselves and one another, access

to content that can help us make a difference in

our teaching practice. And we need all this

accomplished affordably and realistically, in the

context of our realities and constraints, namely

time and money, as we struggle with the priorities

of our daily lives.

To address this need, let’s look into and use

content for teacher development available on

VenTESOL social media.

Resources available at:

• Presentation file:

http://bit.ly/VTsocmed_s

• Handout:

• http://bit.ly/VTsocmed_d

Two teammates may

open the slides for all.

Are you a user of these social media,

sites or networks?

ventesol.org

ventesol.ning.com

Workshop Aims:

• To raise awareness of social media as a realm for

research conducive to professional development.

• To benefit from the efforts of our national ELT community

of practice which shares and classifies content suitable

for teacher education and collaboration

• To build the skills necessary for engaging with such

information in an effective and realistic way for

improvement of the users’ ESOL practice.

BTW, this is BYOD!!

Activity #1:

Join VenTESOL social media accounts.

• Gather in teams of 4-6.

• Each will join a couple of VenTESOL social media outlets, being

Facebook or Twitter one of them.

• Tweet with the hashtags #VenTESOL2016 and #VenTESOLSocMed.

Page

Nt’l GroupState Groups

@VenTESOL

VenTESOL

user

VenezuelaTESOL

@ven_tesol

ventesol

Your Digital Citizenship Status

• Digital Natives are tech-savvy to use social media for

Teacher Development; but they are random or holistic

users.

• Digital Immigrants, as they have had to “learn” about

social media in a linear fashion, restrict themselves to

use each for a sole purpose.

• Let’s break our molds and rewire ourselves to transfer

skills from our digital citizenship to develop

professionally, by turning them into competencies.

Prensky, 2001; UNESCO, 2002

Research:

An age-old everlasting curiosity

with new toys at hand!

What are the new equivalents to these scholarly

research tools and (re)sources?

• Document center / library

• Book

• Scholarly journal

• Encyclopedia

• Research categories

• Librarian

Why? Because there are offshoots of the Information Society

(UNESCO, 1980) whereby Digital Immigrants’ skills for documentary

research intersect with Digital Natives’ web, app and cloud use skills.

The internet

Website, blog, wiki, e-book

Online journal

Wikipedia et al.

Keywords, hashtags

Curator

Research:

An age-old everlasting curiosity

with new toys at hand!

• A hashtag has the same research value and effectiveness

online as a descriptor or keyword at a library or in the

academic proceedings of a conference.

• A Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), regardless of how

advanced its features may be, is managed under generally

accepted and used instructional planning criteria.

• Top-down and bottom-up organization of a social media

service or app shares the different levels of complexity that

conceptual frameworks in epistemology and research have.

Sánchez-Terrell, 2015; Ramos, 2015; UNESCO, 2011

VenTESOL:

A community of practice for networking,

developing and collaborating!

VenTESOL, as a community of practice, has been deploying different social

media outlets and labeling them with a group of hashtags created and

standardized as search categories:

#TeacherDevelopment

#ELTHowTos

#TeacherManagement

#NurturingTeachers

#ESPSIG

#TEYLSIG

#TechSIG

#SESIG

#TeachersHelpingTeachers

#VenTESOLNews

#ELTComunityNews

Wenger-Trayner, 2011; VenTESOL, 2015

Activity #2:

In teams, make an open search, or one on a specific

social media platform using the hashtags below.

• #TeacherDevelopment

• #ELTHowTos

• #TeacherManagement

• #NurturingTeachers

• Go to one of the results.

• Read its titles and skim its main sections to your teammates.

• Discuss each topic’s usefulness or relevance for you as teachers.

VenTESOL Special Interest Groups: A world of

academic expertise in the making!

VenTESOL, 2015

Our Ning network (ning.ventesol.com) Started SIGs in late

2014 / early 2015. Do date, over 30 discussions are open.

Ways to join the discussions are by posting new ones or

commenting on the ones already open. Each SIG also echoes

on other VenTESOL social media with these hashtags:

#ESPSIG

#TEYLSIG

#TechSIG

#SESIG

Activity #3:

In teams, search Facebook or Twitter for

the hashtags below.

• #ESPSIG

• #TEYLSIG

• #TechSIG

• #SESIG

• Go to one of the results.

• Open it and read it to your teammates.

• React to it (like / love / wow…), comment on it, share it or retweet it

to friends and colleagues.

VenTESOL, the teacher development

curator nearest you:

These results are relevant to you because

VenTESOL aggregates and bookmarks

content on its social media and comes to you

already curated to cater to your needs (Antonio

et al 2012).

Activity #4:

Each team member combines a hashtag from Activity #2

and another one from Activity #3, reads a result, prepares

2-3 questions for discussion or reflection and shares them

as comments, tweet replies.

Using these results for

teacher development:

Discuss how and when you can tap into these resources for

your teacher development.

Study it, apply it, and accredit it by sharing!

Other suggestions:

• Decide on your topic(s) and apply relevant hashtags.

• Check the resulting sources and choose them.

• Allocate two or three 30 min. time slots in a week to read,

view, reflect, make comments, post questions.

• Save and share your favorites.

• Discuss them in a SIG or submit a talk at VenTESOL!

Closing actions

for kicks!

Let’s continue our professional

development!

• For some PLN engagement, select an ELT-related

question and post it in one of our Facebook groups. Then

monitor replies and help from colleagues over the next

weeks.

• Network with new colleagues as you add them to your

scial media accounts.

• Let’s take a selfie (or usie?) per team and post tagged as

#VenTESOL2016 and #TenTESOLSocMed!

AndrsRamos

AndresRamosVE