ICT – SOCIAL MEDIA IN EDUCATION, PILGRIMS English Language Courses.

Last summer I decided to do a more focused teacher training course at Pilgrims in Canterbury, Kent. This time I picked a weekly seminar on ICT& the Use of Social Media in Education which is a field I’m particularly interested in. Kristina Smith, Işil Boy and Beyza Yilmaz earnestly shared their knowledge on how language teachers can make good use of major social media like Facebook and Twitter as well as a set of amazing Web 2.0 tools like Goggle docs, Jing, Diigo, Animoto, Scoop.it and Pinterest, while making sure that students are safe online and familiar with copyright issues. What’s more, they encouraged us to develop and extend our PLN (Personal Learning Network) and this is one of the main reasons I decided to start this blog :-)!

What made a very positive impression on me is the fact that the majority of my classmates were people in their 40s- 50s.  My fellow trainees were proof of very committed teachers, determined  to become tech- savvy despite the age factor so as to meet their students’ contemporary expectations and needs. Respect :-)!

This experience differed from the one in Oxford but it was surely beautiful in itself. The campus at the University of Kent was wonderful and we were lucky to enjoy the sunny weather during our stay!

Hopefully, I’ll get to meet some of my fellow trainees and our three lovely trainers in December at the 1st International Symposium on educational technology at the Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul.

I really look forward to it! In case you are interested in attending this conference too, visit the relevant website here: http://www.ybd.yildiz.edu.tr/eltwebsite/conference.html

Christina