Off we go!!!

Our seminar season is about to begin - in Spain and Portugal, we are set to go!

Last Friday, we held our annual Spain and Portugal Presenters' Meeting in Madrid.

Here, you can see us in action!!  It was a very dynamic get-together, with a considerable amount of sharing of ideas.

The Portugal team has lots of new members - so lots more seminars should be taking place!!!
Welcome back to Lucy Bravo and Antonio Malva!
And welcome to the team Idalia Luz, Martin Heslop, Robin Barnes!

The Spanish team also welcomes two new members - Gabby Hewitt, based in Cordoba and Karen Ludlow, who lives in Madrid.

We have many, many sessions lined up so hopefully many of the readers of this blog will see us some time, somewhere!

Useful tools and free resources

Earlier this year, I came across a blog written by Adam Simpson.  Here is how Adam himself describes his blog, Teach them English:

Hi, my name is Adam and I teach English at Sabancı University, on the outskirts of Istanbul. I am an award winning teacher and blogger.

This blog is about various aspects of my life as a teacher.

Thanks for dropping by, I hope you find something of interest.

 I found some interesting things on Adam's blog and subscribed to email alerts about new content.

For the past two weeks or so, I've been receiving emails with some great links to materials and websites on various themes such as

6 Useful tools for teaching and learning vocabulary

15 more free resources for teaching classroom language

 Adam has obviously spent a lot of time looking for these resources and I thought I'd mention them to save you time too!

Where are we heading? Revisited....

Back in April 2007, I was asked to give a workshop and a session at the APPI conference in Lisbon about the situation in Europe regarding the teaching of English.

I spent a good month preparing the session because I wanted the information I was sharing to be as accurate and up to date as possible.

A lot of work, believe me, but as so often happens, I've found that the information that I discovered has come to be so useful since then.  Facts like the percentage of teachers in Europe who were set to retire in the following 10 years (opening the doors to new teachers and maybe the chance to make changes in a school).  I know one school locally that is doing just that.  They wanted to introduce a bilingual project and teach subjects through English.  As teachers retire, the new staff member they take on has a good level of English.  If only this kind of forward planning could take place more often ..... .

Which brings me to what caused me to write today's post.  The school year is kicking off.  The number of emails I'm receiving every day has grown tremendously and suddenly.  I was looking through some of them and clicked on the links in the TeachingEnglish newsletter.

One of the links took me to the

I remember drawing on the information in the previous survey when I prepared my APPI presentation.

I think it will make interesting reading for many of us.  Just added it to my 'to do' list for today!

(Now I can cross off 'Write a blog post' from my list!  Done!!!)

A little help from pins

Many of us are back to work now.  Schools here locally are with teachers, without students at the moment.  Timetables are being finalised, maintenance work being carried out and preparations to welcome the students back to class being made.

I've mentioned Pinterest before on this Blog.  I'm using it more and more both for work and hobbies.  The number of boards I have is growing all the time and I must admit, that the weekly email I get with 'Your weekly inspiration' from Pinterest is one of the emails I look forward to receiving.

So, when I received a second email from Pinterest a couple of weeks ago with the Title 'Teach with a little help from pins', I checked out the suggested pins and boards in it.  I was impressed and made a mental note to share some of them with you via this Blog.

I checked out (and have clicked to follow) the following boards:

Reading ideas.  There are some great ideas here for activities and displays.

Bulletin Boards and Charts

Where I found this:

So, I hope you enjoy my 'important thoughts' for today.  I'm going to press on and get myself geared up for this academic year.  May it be a great experience for everyone!