Both Valentina Dodge and Nick Robinson from English360 will be talking at the conference.  Don’t miss Valentina’s talk on “Mix & Match – creating personalised blended learning paths for BE students” on Friday 24th June at 16.00.  A little later at 18.00, Nick’s talk is  ”Making it relevant: Dogme, the Web and business English materials”.  Nick will be presenting in the true spirit of Dogme, without a prepared set of slides!

We hope you enjoy the conference, whether you are there in person or are able to watch it online, courtesy of English360.

He goes onto say that “After completing the needs analysis, it is now easier for the average teacher without many tech skills to import, customise and create digital materials. We live in a digital age: publishers, it seems, are finally catching up.”

The problem for business English teachers is that publisher content is just not personalised for the needs of their students. Nothing new there! While digital authoring tools in solutions such as Moodle let teachers address this by creating materials that are relevant for their learners, until now, they fall short of professional designed material.

Enter English360. “Teachers can create and share their own material, from taking a digital photo of the factory floor to an end-of-course quiz. Simple templates mean you don’t have to be a technical wizard to create interactive resources…. one huge benefit of this platform is that the material looks as if it all comes from the same stable rather than being cobbled together.”

To see the full review, login to the EL Gazelle Online and go to page 15 of the May issue.

Saturday 16th April, 12.15pm
“Going digital: English360 for teachers and schools” by Cleve Miller, Managing Director. 
A 45 min overview of the platform in the Regency room.

Saturday 16th April, 4.05pm
“On track – ensuring learners don’t fall through the net” by Valentina Dodge, Learning Manager. 
This 30 min workshop examines how tools such as Moodle, English360 and wikis help learners to maintain the flow and pace of personalised learning paths.  This is also in the Regency room.

Sunday 17th April, 1.35-3.35pm
“Web-based tools: create, configure and deliver courses” by Emma Watson, Community Support. 
Go to the Interactive Language Fair  in Syndicate 2 and Emma will show you how easy it is to create your own personalised courses.

If you can’t be there in person, you can still watch and participate in the conference live at IATEFL Online.

Those attending Valentina’s talk have an opportunity to win a six-month subscription to English360 for a teacher and their 6 students.  This top prize includes all 12 Grammar in Practice and Vocabulary in Practice titles from Cambridge University Press available in digital format on the English360 platform.  Second prize are the six Grammar in Practice titles and third prize the six Vocabulary in Practice titles, both in book form. 

To enter the prize draw come to stand 15 in the exhibition area and pick up an entry form.

The great thing about the top prize is that educators can take as much or as little of these Cambridge titles and incorporate them into purpose-built courses, using their own materials uploaded into English360.  The online authoring tools make it easy to create custom courses, share them with colleagues and store them safely in digital form.

Valentina Dodge, Learning Manager at English360 will give you a 10 minute overview of this web-based learning platform.  Here’s a quick re-cap on why English360 was nominated for the 2011 ELTon Award for Innovation. 

English360 aims to resolve three critical issues for ELT professionals today:

• The need for a quick, easy way for teachers and schools to deliver blended and online learning
• The move towards personalisation, to improve relevance, authenticity, and learning outcomes by going beyond generic, one-size-fits-all courses and lessons
• The opportunity of enhanced social learning and collaborative approaches to language learning, teaching, and materials development

By using user-centered Web 2.0 technologies in an open ELT platform, English360 provides teachers with a solution to these three needs.  Read more….

Why?  Because the digital approach is a fast-track to getting content published  and by sharing the material you authored, you get paid per page click.

This bespoke course investigates the concepts of Social Influence Marketing (SIM) using real-world examples to look at the language of SIM and how it’s used. Focusing on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, learners explore how companies use these applications in marketing and the language they employ. 

In keeping with the spirit of collaboration, Paul and Pete have decided to make their material available under a  Creative Commons license. This means that teachers can not only copy English for Social Influence Marketing into their Courses to use off the shelf, but also edit the copied material to further personalise the content for their learner’s needs.

Here’s some of the other bespoke courses in English360:

• Communicative Business Activities by Marjorie Rosenberg
• Let’s Make a Deal by Eric Baber
• Business Presentations in English by Carl Dowse
• Crossing Culture by Valentina Dodge
• Getting the Message by Jane Howes
• Business Contacts in English by Carl Dowse

The work is essentially copy-editorial in nature and will involve carrying out quality assurance (QA) on ELT material published on the English360 platform. This involves ‘traditional-style’ copy-editing (spelling, fonts, layout, etc.) as well as testing the interactive activities as a user (learner and teacher) to make sure that they work.

We have flexible and ongoing work that can be fitted in around your other projects. Your location and time zone aren’t important, but a fast and reliable internet connection is. For more information, please contact Nick Robinson (Publishing Manager) at nick@english360.com, attaching a copy of your CV (or a link to your LinkedIn profile) and quoting your hourly rate.

But first, here’s some background to why we think English360 is a worthy candidate….

English360 is not a new course or a new product; it is a new approach to ELT, one that harnesses web technology and delivers it into the hands of teachers worldwide. English360 aims to resolve three critical issues for ELT professionals today:

• The need for a quick, easy way for teachers and schools to deliver blended and online learning
• The move towards personalization, to improve relevance, authenticity, and learning outcomes by going beyond generic, one-size-fits-all courses and lessons
• The opportunity of enhanced social learning and collaborative approaches to language learning, teaching, and materials development

By using user-centered Web 2.0 technologies in an open ELT platform, English360 provides teachers with a solution to these three needs, by way of a variety of tools:

Blended and online learning: Teachers and schools can set up their own branded online learning space in a matter of hours. Teachers can collaborate on lesson planning and materials design; class schedules can be managed; and student progress can be measured and reported. Most importantly, online and blended learning can be delivered to students in an easy-to-use social learning environment that meets the expectations of today’s students.

Personalization: The limitations of generic coursebooks is a contentious topic in ELT today. English360 believes that the answer to this debate is always context-specific. There are contexts where coursebooks are appropriate, contexts where heavy supplementation is best, and contexts where materials should emerge from the student, teacher, and school. The English360 platform is specifically designed to give teachers the flexibility to address all contexts across this continuum:

• When a coursebook is appropriate, there are 45 courses from Cambridge University Press in the platform that can be delivered in class or online (new courses from Cambridge University Press are added monthly, and, as English360 is an open platform, we are publisher-agnostic: any publisher can upload their courses).
• When supplementation or emergent materials are appropriate, English360 provides two tools. First, there is a powerful suite of authoring and course design tools for teacher-driven materials development, and, second, mix-and-match capability for all titles in the system: teachers can take units, sections and even individual tasks from any title and re-arrange into custom sequences (“playlists”), together with their own authored content.

In short, English360 sees teachers as true partners in course design; teacher understanding into each individual student’s learning and cultural needs is something no publisher can ever have, and by providing the digital tools to enable materials co-development, English360 sees itself as a first step to “the coursebook of the future”, where each student’s course is, as much as possible, personalised exactly to them.

Social and collaborative approaches: Social software acts as a foundation to the tools above. Forums and messaging, page comments and teacher feedback, collaborative workspaces for both teachers and students, shared spaces and Creative Commons … all are essential to a social constructivist pedagogy, and this level of social interaction is not only intrinsically powerful but is an expectation of today’s tech-savvy students.

The awarding committee stated, “We basically felt that the whole concept of English360 was something completely different and something that hadn’t been done before,” and praised its utility and ease of use for language teachers.

Committee member Paul East stated, “What really stood out for us on the judging panel was how easy to use English360 is. This is really important, as language teachers have little spare time to invest in learning a new system. We can see that English360 has put a lot of energy into creating an intuitive interface.”

The English360 web application provides ELT schools and teachers with a quick, easy, out-of-the-box solution to one of their biggest challenges: delivering the online and blended learning that today’s student expects. With over 40 Cambridge ELT titles in its repository, the platform provides teachers with course design tools that enable the mixing and matching of content from different titles into the personalised courses that the business English and ESP markets demand. Powerful yet intuitive authoring tools allow teachers and schools to also create their own learning content, specific to their students and business customers, to use on its own or to supplement Cambridge content.

When accepting the award, English360 founder and Managing Director Cleve Miller told the audience of 250 or so teachers and school directors, “First of all I have to express our gratitude to Cambridge University Press for being the exemplary partners that they are. They are dedicated to continued innovation and have a unique awareness of the immense value that teachers and schools bring to material selection and material design.”

Listen to Cleve’s acceptance speech on YouTube.

Valentina Dodge will be presenting: English360 – classroom and learning diversity for the 21st Century.    Here’s some background to the presentation:

 The first decade of the 21st Century has seen some strong web 2.0 features emerge which have enabled web users to create, network, personalise, share and self-organise content easily. Such developments present new opportunities to all those involved in education – school owners, teachers and other colleagues, and learners – to shape the courses they deliver in conjunction with ‘expert’ published materials via the web.

The English360 web-based learning platform is easy-to-use and takes a revolutionary approach to materials development, course design and delivery. English teachers can deliver out-of-the-box courses or tailor personalised learning programmes to respond efficiently to wide-ranging learner needs, diverse learning styles, contexts and classrooms.

This presentation will look at practical ways of:

• benefitting from the use of learning technologies and new media;
• taking teachers’ own lesson plans, activities and resources, and combining these with Cambridge content to deliver versatile blended learning programmes using a revolutionary learning platform;
• focusing on, and seamlessly integrating, learner-generated material with relevant authentic resources;
• embracing new roles and effectively using a range (open or private) communication channels to support and extend language learning beyond the physical classroom;
• using time-saving administrative functions such as class scheduling and attendance recording, and easy monitoring of learner progress and results;
• addressing common challenges faced when guiding learners towards achieving their personal objectives.

As part of the 3rd Virtual Roundtable Conference, on Friday 8th October at 17.00 GMT, we will look at how we, as teachers, can make the lessons we deliver more dynamic and ensure that they are highly relevant, and therefore motivating, to our learners. Although we will be using the English360 web-based learning platform to illustrate ways of achieving this, the points we look at will be relevant in a broader context.

This hands-on workshop will give you an opportunity to consider:

• the merits of using authentic content provided by your learners (eg telephone conversations, emails, company reports and PowerPoint presentations)
• issues raised when sourcing authentic content from internet (ie respecting best practice)
• how you can motivate learners by encouraging autonomy (eg monitoring of progress, forum contributions, instant feedback)
• supplementing course content with activities authored by or your colleagues.

For those who haven’t attended a Virtual Roundtable before, it is a semi-annual live online conference on language learning with technology, hosted by LANCELOT School. 

October 12th: Here’s a recording of the session.