5 Team Takeaways From InnovateELT 2019

It’s time to wrap up another InnovateELT conference! We listened to your feedback and aimed to create an event that had more impact, started more conversations, and led to more innovations than ever before. 

An argument for equal voices in ELT

At a time when the public is more focused on the benefits of diversity and equality, is the ELT industry in danger of looking old-fashioned and exclusive? We look at the benefits of a diverse and equal workplace and examine what’s being said in the ELT sphere.

Scott Thornbury at iELT18: ‘No pain, no gain’ & ‘All work and no play’

Here’s a look back at the two talks Scott Thornbury gave at InnovateELT in May 2018 about fun in the ELT classroom. We hope they’ll get you thinking about how affective factors impact on learning; give you a sense of how to combine both the serious and the pleasurable and leave you with a more finely-tuned capacity to assess the claims of certain content merchandisers. All the slides are embedded throughout the videos so you won’t miss a thing.

5 tips for choosing & using video in ELT by ITN Productions

During the “Making Effective Use of Video in ELT” pre-conference event at this year’s InnovateELT, ITN Productions shared some practical ideas for creating activities and lesson plans using video which teachers could start using in their classes immediately. This included the five key questions you need to ask when choosing a video for your class. 

2Ts in a Pod: InnovateELT podcast

2Ts in a Pod is a podcast for English learners and teachers alike with each episode focusing on a different theme. The podcast is hosted by Tim Warre and Katy Wright. Tim and Katy joined us at the InnovateELT conference in Barcelona last month and spoke to a selection of speakers and delegates, including Scott Thornbury and our very own Jo Sayers. Check out the interviews here.

All we need is fun? A review of InnovateELT 2018

When I saw the word “fun” in the title of this year’s Innovate conference, I’ll admit I was skeptical. It reminded me of an article I’d read a few months previously entitled, ‘Millennials Don’t Want Fun; They Want You To Lead Better’, which got me thinking: if we replaced ‘millennials’ with ‘students’ and ‘lead’ with ‘teach’, would that be a fair reflection of the needs of our students today? Moreover, could we extend this viewpoint to incorporate teachers, namely that they also don’t want fun at conferences, and instead want their practices to be challenged?

Things we learned from #iELT17

Things we learned from #iELT17

On the weekend of the 5th/6th May, ELTjam and Oxford TEFL organised the InnovateELT Conference in Barcelona. The theme of the weekend was Power to the Learner and we heard from people across the industry about ways in which we can think more about what learners want and need as they progress on their language-learning journey. By way of a summary, here the ELTjam team share some of their most memorable takeaways from the event and we link to other posts that talk about the conference.