Saturday, April 25, 2009

IATEFL 09 conference


Dear members and all:

As you might know, IATEFL 09 conference was held in Cardiff from March 31st to April 4th. All Avealmec members were proud to be represented by Dafne González (USB), Rubena St. Louis (USB) and Teadira Pérez (ULA) who attended the event in the UK and made very interesting presentations. Our honorary members Nicky Hockly, Gavin Dudeney and Graham Stanley were also very active at the conference and made excellent presentations. Besides, there was an online version of IATEFL and Evelyn Izquierdo (UCV) co-moderated the Learning Technologies Forum. Congratulations to all!!!



Our president, Teadira Pérez, was asked to share with us her opinion about the conference and this is what she wrote:

"This year IATEFL conference was a wonderful experience for me. I went with four of my Venezuelan colleagues and we did enjoy the astonishing places of historical Cardiff. The conference itself was outstanding – a great variety of parallel sessions. Unfortunately, I could not attend all the sessions I highlighted in the programme: there were so many people that conference rooms were full even before the sessions started. Cardiff Online, then, represented a stupendous alternative for me. I went online to listen to recorded sessions and to read forum discussions. One of my colleagues, working with me in AVEALMEC, was moderating two forums in the Learning Technologies area. It was also great to observe my MA students taking part in different forum discussions.
I consider that Cardiff online 2009 is a fantastic initiative because it gives communities of practice worldwide the opportunity to share and exchange ideas related to different state of the art topics. I am thrilled to announce that Cardiff online will continue for a year. The discussion, then, will go on".

Thanks, Teadira!
If you all want to have further details about our members' presentations, you are cordially invited to read our next Newsletter issue. It's coming soon!!!

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Avealmec and ARCALL bound together

Last April 3, Jennifer Verschoor (president of the Argentinian CALL Association - ARCALL) and Evelyn Izquierdo (ESP teacher at Universidad Central de Venezuela and Avealmec member) got together to make a presentation on Social Bookmarking. It was a presentation offered to participants of the blended course "21st Century for the EFL Class" currently carried out by Professor Doris Molero at Universidad Rafael Belloso Chacín, Maracaibo-Venezuela.

This course, sponsored by Integrating Technology for Instruction and Learning and led by Nellie Deutsch and Doris Molero, is being supported with live presentations every Friday by Webheads in Action members.

It was not only a real pleasure to work with Jennifer again, but also to share knowledge and experiences with colleagues from all over the world. We appreciate very much Nellie and Doris's invitation to collaborate with this course, and also congratulate them for such a great contribution to the ELT community.

Below you will find the PPT presentation.

Evelyn