{"id":89,"date":"2015-07-20T13:56:59","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T13:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/freelanceteacherselfdevelopment.wordpress.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2015-07-20T13:56:59","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T13:56:59","slug":"saitama-nakasendo-conference-2015-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/2015\/07\/20\/saitama-nakasendo-conference-2015-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Saitama Nakasendo Conference 2015 Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had a brilliant time at the Saitama Nakasendo Conference yesterday. I feel I have loads to do because I left with a ton of things to think about and so now have quite a few summer projects on to of DipTESOL portfolio writings and a summer course in writing for a mixture of ESL and EFL kids.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.paulsensei.com\">Paul Raine<\/a>&#8216;s keynote presentation made me regret forgetting most of the little JavaScript, JQuery and Python that I learned but also made me double keen to get back into it. Chatting to him before and after was interesting: plenty of sites and other stuff to read on my list, too.<br \/>\nJesse Ewak demonstrated a bit of Voicethread, which is something I might use in the future after I have a bit of a mess around with it and find out what it can and can&#8217;t do.<br \/>\nI wish I had gone to see <a href=\"http:\/\/vanessaarmandtesol.weebly.com\">Vanessa Armand<\/a>&#8216;s presentation because after seeing her slides I realised that her &#8216;fishbowl&#8217; idea might be useful for a reading class that I teach.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/exploring-elt.wordpress.com\/\">Rob Lowe<\/a>&#8216;s presentation on integrating a blind student into his classroom was a presentation that he gave at the Tokyo JALT\/TEDSIG Teacher Journeys conference a few weeks ago. There were four of us in the audience and basically what seemed to come up was that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>institutions need to provide a bit more notice when assigning students with special needs to teachers;<\/li>\n<li>there is next to no information about integrating blind\/visually impaired students (or any student with special or specific needs) into the EFL\/ESL\/ESOL classroom.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To this end, I decided to set up a Google Plus community, <a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/communities\/104844834759618995884\">SEN in ELT<\/a> as a place for teachers to share information.<br \/>\nMy presentation was quite full, probably because my title was quite simple and something that most teachers need to do (&#8216;<a href=\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/open?id=0B3Mbk94zCF3hSlotSnRyOFFYV3M\" target=\"_blank\">Teaching Listening<\/a>&#8216;). I felt almost clever by involving a bit of research that I had done and using some unusual listening material choices. It seemed to go down quite well and I felt relieved because I feel a bit like somebody&#8217;s going to point out that I&#8217;m talking through an unorthodox orifice whenever I start new classes never mind presenting in front of people with PhDs and publications and stuff.<br \/>\nTo cap it all off, I have ideas about discourse-level language teaching and JQuery-based web apps in my head, a lesson jam to schedule and publicise and other stuff too.<br \/>\nEverybody I met at the conference was lovely, including the mother of one of my former junior high school students, and it was rather a festival atmosphere throughout, except I had convenience store rice balls and canned coffee instead of cold beans and a bottle of vodka for lunch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had a brilliant time at the Saitama Nakasendo Conference yesterday. I feel I have loads to do because I left with a ton of things to think about and so now have quite a few summer projects on to of DipTESOL portfolio writings and a summer course in writing for a mixture of ESL [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[53,67,73,197,245],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa34By-1r","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getgreatenglish.com\/ftsd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}