Right now I’m at the TESOL Arabia conference in Dubai.  The conference itself has been ok, so far I’ve been to 4 workshops and a plenary (i.e. big speech given in auditorium).

1st Workshop:  Empowering L2 Learners Through Technology

My thoughts going in? Wow!  This should be really good.  I’ve been looking for ways to bring technology into my classes.

My thoughts going out:  Ugh.  40 minutes of talk on theory and not overloading/distracting students.  The presenter finally addressed the titular issue and said, keep the interface clean and simple.

2nd Workshop:  Grammar & What We Should Be Teaching Our Students.

Thoughts going in?  Probably won’t be the most fun but it’s useful, especially since my students need writing help.

Thoughts going out:  Actually the presenter made this pretty interesting,  I don’t know how much of it I’ll use, but it’s always good to see another perspective  and method on teaching.

3rd Workshop:  Immersion Teaching – Challenges and Oppurtunities

Thoughts going in:  Directly applicable to my school and what we are trying to achieve.   The school is after all a Canadian technical college in a non-English country.

Thoughts going out:  I WANT THAT 45 MINUTES OF MY LIFE BACK!  The speaker spent the vast majority of the time defining immersion education.  He ummed and aaaahhed his way through the whole thing.  He was one of those people that like to show you a powerpoint slide, then read off it, show you the next slide, then read off it, show … well you get the idea.  Ultimately much like the first presenter I’d flunk him because his presentation didn’t ultimately address the topic.

4th workshop:  Longterm Vocabulary Teaching and Strategies

Thoughts going in:  This should be very useful.  Especially since we’re currently piloting a syllabus at my school.  After my couple workshops I realize these things are going to be largely hit or miss.

Thoughts going out:  Finally!  This guy was good!  Really good!   I don’t want to go into the details of the presentation.  But it was informed, relevant, and he even included a couple of tasks to illustrate his points which broke up the power points and kept participants involved.

The plenary was useful but nothing earth shattering.  Respect the culture of the community in which you are living teaching.

After the conference I caught the metro and went to ‘The Irish Village” for a pint of Guiness and some fish and chips.  Good good eats.  I wanted to do more, but I was just too tired.

Today’s first workshop Emirati Ss attitudes and motivations towards English.  I was gonna check out the Burj Khalifa today but I thought this one was too important to miss.  Uhhhh.  It had potential but never delivered.  It was essentially ‘here’s my research project’  and here are the mean scores of the respondents.’  Yay!  Statistics, and the presenter didn’t even explain them that well.  For example the (loaded) question ‘ I understand that reading is important.”  got a mean score of 1.1.  That’s great ( is it?!)  but could you explain the scale you’re using?  (I take it to be a Strongly Agree—Strongly disagree cline).

The next workshop is ‘Integrating Culture into the Classroom’.  It could be useful, after all, I’m not really that familiar with the Gulf region and culture.  We’ll see.