If you can’t attend the event in Glasgow, join us online here:

Yesterday during our English360 Community Webinar presented by Mike Hogan we discussed virtual meeting software and enjoyed some tips and tricks shared by Mike.

Here are his slides

Here is the link to the WebEx recording for those who were unable to attend or who would like to review the session.

Thanks everyone for coming, it was great to see you all there. Special thanks to Mike for sharing his knowledge and experience with us.
Our next Community Webinar will be at the end of March. We’ll post more details on this blog and Community forum.

Our next Open Tour will be Tuesday 6 March 10.00 – 11.00 Central European time . The Open tour is a weekly virtual walkthrough for newcomers or all educators interested in finding out more about English360..

We will be holding Open Training sessions for all existing English360 school administrators and / or teachers on

• Friday 2nd March 11.00-12.00 Central European time
• Thursday 8 March 9.00 – 10.00 Central European time

Send an email to  ”teacher support at english 360 dot com”  to register or get more details.

Do you have experience teaching in WebEx, Adobe Connect, or on Skype?

How can these virtual meeting environments be used with learners?

Our next Community webinar will be presented by Mike Hogan.

Mike is  a teacher trainer, author, and ELT consultant. He is experienced in virtual training using a range of synchronous and asynchronous platforms both with corporate clients and in teacher training sessions. He also moderates online workshops as part of the BESIG Online Team. Read more about Mike Hogan here.

Come along to our English360 Open Community Webinar to find out more on delivering lessons in real-time when learners are geographically dispersed or unable to attend face-to-face classroom lessons.

Register now to enjoy Mike Hogan ‘s expertise and experience of using virtual meeting rooms.

Send us an email to Register for the Community Webinar 28th Feb 13.00-14.00 CET

How it all began

English360 was founded 6 years ago as a tiny, teacher-led start-up with big plans but few resources. We presented an alpha version of our web application at BESIG in Berlin in 2007 (it went live on the web for the first time the night before the session!). We had a clear vision, but as a tiny start-up we faced huge challenges when entering into a global ELT community dominated by big players.

BESIG Berlin 2007: The English360 launch session

Now, as it happened, Cambridge University Press was scouting new technology at BESIG that year. They attended our session, and to make an extremely long story short, English360 and Cambridge entered into a joint venture, creating Cambridge-English360 Ltd. It was an inspired partnership for a range of reasons: Cambridge got some cutting-edge technology, together with the team that built it. English360 received:

• a wide range of Cambridge courses and resources to re-purpose in the platform
• support from the global Cambridge sales teams
• financial support (we were now able to pay ourselves a salary)
• co-branding with the strongest brand in ELT

The partnership was successful. Together with Cambridge, we launched over 50 courses in the platform. We signed up thousands of users in dozens of countries and on every continent. We picked up the David Riley Award for Innovation and were shortlisted for an ELTon. We made the software more powerful and added some extremely cool content authoring templates. Many challenges remained, but we had managed to gain traction towards our goal.

So what happened?

And of course what happened is what always happens: this very success stressed the organization. We’d proven the concept: an open platform that gives teachers and schools unprecedented ability to work with publisher content, author their own content, and combine the two into personalized courses, to be delivered online, in class, or as blended learning.

And, now having proven the concept, we were inundated with new ideas and new projects for the platform, from ourselves, from our partner, and from customers. We worked hard to continue to prioritize and execute, but soon both partners realized that we were in danger of losing focus.

So we mutually decided to allow both partners to use the platform as needed, enabling each to dedicate the focus necessary for their own projects. It made perfect sense, and then about a week later we all realized that at this point there was really no reason for a joint venture any more, and that it would be better for both partners to maintain a strong strategic alliance, but without having the complications of a formal joint venture.

So that is what we’ve accomplished: an amicable separation that jettisons the problems but maintains what works. Cambridge University Press deserves tremendous credit for the enlightened, collaborative, teacher-focused business philosophy that provided the flexibility for this new relationship. English360 is now independent, but with the content agreements in place for the all the Cambridge resources currently in the system, and new agreements for new Cambridge content as well (we’re launching the first new course in October).

What does this mean for English360 going forward?

For us, independence has some intriguing advantages, some of which you can probably guess. Everyone on the English360 team is tremendously excited about this next step in our progress. We’ll discuss these advantages in “Part 2” of his post, coming soon.

2nd Sept (16.oo -17.co GMT) English360 – the basics :

• Browse content
• Create course
• Duplicate content
• Use course with learners

13 Sept Sept (14.00 -15.00 GMT) English360  - Online / blended course design

• basic guidelines
• adding structure
• allowing for flexibility
• ongoing course design issues
• folders and task patterns

29nd Sept (10.00-11.oo GMT / 12.00 – 13.00 CET) Giving learners feedback at a distance

• negotiating correction strategies
• monitoring performance
• reviewing learner submission
• giving feedback
• feedforward strategies

Before you join the meeting, please click here to make sure that you have the appropriate players.

For further information, please contact teachersupport@english360.com

Looking forward to meeting virtually!

Even before I’d touched down in the city where I trained as a teacher and spent the early years of my career, I had a sense that we might be in for something special. Organised by the IATEFL Teacher Development Special Interest Group (TDSIG) and sponsored and hosted by OxfordTEFL, we would start by observing a lesson using real learners of English from the local community, led by Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings, authors of the award-winning Teaching Unplugged. It would be a rare chance to see Scott and Luke put their theory into practice. We’d then have the chance to discuss the class with Scott, Luke and the learners themselves before an afternoon of small-group discussion organised around the principles of Open Space Technology. For those unfamiliar with Open Space (I admit that I was), it is an approach to organising events and meetings governed by four guiding principles and one law. The principles are:

1. Whoever comes is [sic] the right people.

2. Whenever it starts is the right time.

3. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.

4. When it’s over, it’s over.

And the “Law of Two Feet” states: “If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet, go someplace else.”

(For more on Open Space, get over to Scott Thornbury’s A-Z of ELT for a great post.)

During my CELTA course, Scott came in to do a session on what he was then calling Dogme (Teaching Unplugged seems to be the preferred term now, but I’ve used them interchangeably in this blog post). The session stuck with me for two reasons: firstly because of a seemingly far-fetched anecdote that Scott told at the start of the session (that I’ve never forgotten but also never completely believed) about a teacher in Papua New Guinea who was forced to embrace materials-free teaching when the pack horse carrying all of the text books to the remote village where he was working fell into a ravine (or was it a river? Scott, please feel free to correct the details in my summary there; it’s been a long time since I heard the story!). To my chagrin (I should be more trusting), I’ve since learnt that the story is completely true. Secondly, I used the activity that Scott showed us in that session with many classes afterwards (it was based entirely around the contents of your learners’ pockets, and it never failed).

Looking back on it now, only two weeks into my teacher training and suffering from the input overload, lack of sleep, and adrenaline highs-and-lows of the CELTA, I think I made a critical mistake in my understanding of Dogme, a mistake that perhaps some of us continue to make: that it is all about what the teacher shouldn’t be doing. I came out of Scott’s CELTA session thinking that Dogme was basically just about not using coursebooks in your teaching. And I’ve since heard criticism leveled at unplugged teaching for the (mistaken) belief that it prohibits the use of technology as part of the learning process. But the Teaching Unplugged “guidelines” (for want of a better word) are not a list of what you shouldn’t be doing as a teacher. Rather, they are a set of useful principles based on the belief that the learner should be at the centre of what happens in the classroom: that lessons should be conversation-driven; that teaching should be “materials-light” (not, you’ll notice, “materials-free”); that lessons should focus on emergent language; and, as Luke put it on the day, that we should draw on “learners’ lives and learners’ language”.

When I later became a publisher, I followed the growing popularity of the Teaching Unplugged movement with interest (a lot of publishers do …). You might assume that ELT publishers consider unplugged teaching a threat to their business, but I didn’t see it like that. For me, the principles behind Dogme were a counterweight to my day job, a way of maintaining a balanced perspective. I could never be completely uncritical of Dogme, and I’m still not. But I couldn’t doubt its importance or deny that a lot of what it stands for appealed to me when I was teaching and still appeals to me now.

None of which is to say that I didn’t feel a *tiny* bit of trepidation about attending this conference. I’ve worked in publishing for longer than I taught. For a time I was in charge of a very well-known and successful adult general English course. I’ve written an ESP course book. My business card reads “Publishing Manager”. How would I be received by the other delegates? Would I be persona non grata? Would anyone else from the publishing industry attend so that we would have strength in numbers?

Of course none of the above turned out to be true (apart from the final point: there was no representation from ELT publishers — a shame, I think). The organisers and delegates welcomed me and showed interest in my perspective. And the more I reflected on it, the more I realised that I would have no qualms talking to a group of unplugged teaching advocates about what I do for a living. Apart from the fact that English360 isn’t a publisher (we’re a tool for teachers, a way for them to use and create learning content), I believe that what we do at English360 is very much aligned with certain elements of the unplugged teaching philosophy, especially in our “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” approach to materials development. At the root of what we do at English360 is the belief that learners and teachers know better than we do what they need most at this particular time, in this particular place, with these particular people. We can’t plan for every context that a teacher will end up in, but we can give them a tool to help them be better prepared for it: a platform for dynamic, flexible, personalised and localised course creation, a way of reinventing (dare I say “unplugging”) the coursebook.

But back to the conference. Scott and Luke did their thing, with the class of 16 learners sitting in a semi-circle, and forty-odd teachers watching attentively. To the students’ credit (and Scott and Luke’s), the large audience didn’t seem to affect the class dynamic. I won’t go into detail here about the class itself and the subsequent discussion and plenary (I’m sure great summaries of both will appear on other blogs), but it was electrifying to have the learners present for the post-class discussion, to hear their thoughts on being taught “unplugged”, to listen to them talking about their experience as learners.

A pause for a quick sandwich and a beer and then it was back to OxfordTEFL for the afternoon sessions. In the spirit of Open Space, it was up to us as delegates to decide what we’d like to spend the rest of the day discussing. We limited ourselves to six questions, each of which we would attempt to answer in a ten-minute presentation at the end of the day. I chose (unsurprisingly) to join a group discussing the question of whether the use of published materials could be compatible with an unplugged approach.

Despite being a small group (Principle 1: “Whoever comes is the right people”), the conversation ran and ran. We all agreed that the use of published materials was not at odds with Teaching Unplugged as such (in fact, it was, for many people, a reality of it): it just required an understanding that in teaching, as in all things, everything must be in moderation, meaning moderation in the use of published materials but also in the application of Dogme principles. When we presented our ideas to the rest of the delegates, we argued for this moderate, “non-dogmatic” approach to Dogme, and for a kind of eclecticism in our choice of materials and approaches. There are good published materials and bad published materials, just as there are good unplugged lessons and bad unplugged lessons. The key for the teacher is to know what will work best in this this context, with these learners.

Despite Principle 4 (“When it’s over, it’s over”), the day was over at exactly the time it was supposed to be, thanks to the organisational skills of Duncan Foord and his team at OxfordTEFL and the TDSIG. There’s an all-too-rare feeling you get as a group when you know that you’ve been part of something special, a kind of collective glow that sadly fades in the subsequent days. It reminded me of my CELTA, in fact. As the post-conference meal turned into post-conference drinks, we said our goodbyes and promised to come back next year and repeat the experience. (As an aside, Lindsay Clandfield made the excellent suggestion of using the “observed-lesson-followed-by-Open-Space-workshops” format as the basis for a “plugged conference” which would examine the use of coursebooks and technology in the same critical way.)

For me this was a benchmark conference, for its format, its content, and its participants. I left feeling energised and keen to deepen my understanding of Dogme, as a teacher, a teacher trainer and (whisper it!) even as a publisher.

Don’t miss it next year!

Some photos of the event courtesy of Graham Stanley.

Mercedes says: “As head of a business English consultancy firm, I work on the design and implementation of Effective Learning Experiences to our clients. I use the word ‘experience’ since this concept moves us from instruction to actions and interactions. I truly believe we need to get off the content bus and start thinking about using, designing and exploiting learning environments full of experiences and interactivity. We need to integrate learning tools that help situate learning and make it more contextual. Collaboration is vital.

Mercedes Viola - IATEFL BESIG prize draw winner

I’m really thrilled to have won one year’s subscription to the English360 blended learning platform since it offers the possibility of creating tailor-made learning environments for my clients where they can enlarge their learning experience at their own pace together with a network of colleagues. It also offers my organization the possibility of exchanging resources with colleagues from all over the world, a crucial ingredient for our continuous professional growth.

I am really looking forward to starting this experience!”

*BESIG, the Business English Special Interest Group of IATEFL, is a professional body which represents the interests and serves the needs of the international business English teaching community.  Its members are based in more than 65 countries, and are mainly teachers of Business English, both native and non-native speakers of English.  BESIG’s aim is to help its members to improve their expertise in teaching Business English, and to facilitate making connections with fellow professionals around the globe.

The winner of the top-prize (a six-month subscription to English360 for a teacher and their 6 students which  includes all 12 Grammar in Practice and Vocabulary in Practice titles from Cambridge University Press available in digital format on the English360 platform) is Femke Kitslaare.

Second prize goes to Giedre Budienne

Second prize (six Grammar in Practice titles) went to Giedre Budienne and third prize (the six Vocabulary in Practice titles) was picked up by John Arnold.

If you haven’t picked up your prize yet, please feel free to drop by stand 15 in the exhibition hall.