Re-blog: #ELTchat: the loss of eltchat.com – Plan B

This post was originally posted by Marisa Constantinides on TEFL Matters. I may not be a frequent attendee in the regular #ELTChat on Twitter, but I do pop in from time to time and I greatly admire and respect the organisers, moderators and the participants. It is a blow what has happened with eltchat.com but it isn't the end of the world. If anything, eltchat.org will grow and dwarf its predecessor, of that I'm sure.

For the last – well, almost two years now, since September 15 2010, #ELTchat has kept us on our toes and forged hundreds of professional and personal relationships amongst its followers who turn up on Twitter every Wednesday to talk about topics they have suggested and voted on – a community of peers which was created by a small group of colleagues – which grew and grew some more and became something that counts as an important part of our continuous professional development.

Like many great ideas, it didn’t hit just one person but several.

And that is how #ELTchat was created.    

The website to keep up the communication of its members, a base and repository of our ideas was one of the first things we all thought of creating – the wiki came later.

Andy Chaplin was keen to join the moderation team and help with podcasts and technical stuff; he was quick to buy eltchat.com and announced the good news to us after the fact.

A few months later, right after TESOL France 2011,  he suddenly disappeared – some say for reasons of health.

We never found out for sure.

We never received a single word of response to our emails.

eltchat.com was and still is registered in his name.

And yesterday we lost it

On August 8 the domain expired and we have no way of taking over unless it goes up for sale again; it was very sad that Andy Chaplin did not find it appropriate to renew.

The news is really upsetting.

The work we have put in on this website cannot be told in a few simple words – but it has been a labour of love and we have got so much out of it that we have never regretted one single moment

We are pretty upset at the behaviour of this individual – disappointment is one big understatement.

But we trust that our community of #ELTchatters, our PLN for short, will again gather round the new domain which we have purchased – eltchat.org

It will take us a few days to put the website back on its feet

And all will be as it was before – all the posts in place all your thoughts and comments, all the polls and great summaries which got us on the shortlist of the ELTon Awards nominations

We will be back with a vengeance

We are not just a website – we did not get on the ELTon awards shortlist as just another website!!!

We are a great community of teachers and we have a Plan B!

See you all in September!!!

Marisa Constantinides – Shaun Wilden

Chiew Pang

P.S. We would greatly appreciate it if any of you belonging to this great community of teachers,  teacher educators, bloggers, #ELTchat followers,  reposted this on your blog

If you decide to do this, please add your name to the post under ours.

Coconut carrot cake recipe, mmm... scrumptious!

I had some almonds and hazelnuts leftover from the chocolate cake I made almost a month and a half ago so I'd been thinking of baking another since then. Those of you who are following this blog and my Twitter account would probably have heard of (and seen) my healthy carrot cake recipe, so I thought I'd try to vary it a little and make it somewhat naughtier!

So, here goes.

Ingredients:

200g corn oil (you can use any vegetable oil or if you can handle the cholesterol, butter)

200g brown sugar (you can reduce this a little if you wish, to about 150-175g)

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

4 small eggs (approximately 55g each)

200g wholemeal flour

2 teaspoons (10g) baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

50g dessicated coconut

200g carrots, grated

1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon cloves

150g almond-hazelnut mix, grounded

Procedure:

1. Heat the oven to 180ºC and grease a cake tin with butter or oil.
2. Pour the corn oil into a large bowl. If using butter, melt it gently and leave to cool before pouring it in.
3. Stir in the sugar, vanilla essence, eggs, flour, baking powder, salt and the dessicated coconut.
4. Mix it well.
5. Add in the grated carrots, spices and the nuts.
6. Blend it all thoroughly.
7. Pour the mixture into the greased cake tin.
8. Bake on a lower rack at 180ºC for about 40 minutes.
9. Turn off the oven and leave the cake in there for a further 10 minutes.
10. If an inserted skewer comes out clean, it's done.
11. Leave to cool.
12. When cool, slide a thin spatula along the edges to loosen the cake before attempting to remove it from the mould.

This turned out really good. My son thinks it's the best carrot cake I've done!

Enjoy!

  

Basic parts of a bicycle

It's been a long time since I created a tagging game, so it's about time I rectify that. Here's one on the basic parts of a bicycle. These are the answers. To play the game, click on the image.

1. bell
2. brake lever
3. stem
4. cable
5. top tube
6. brakes
7. spoke
8. fork
9. valve
10. flat tyre (puncture)
11. front reflector
12. down tube
13. saddle (seat)
14. seat post
15. seat post clamp
16. seat tube
17. tyre
18. chain
19. crank arm
20. pedal
21. rear reflector

If you need higher-resolution images, click on the following images.

Image by C. Pang

Image by C. Pang

A case for CPD and PLN...

Photos by me. See more here.

Here's an example of how a seed is taken and planted with care many miles away where it soon grows into a pretty flower. This flowering stem is again taken some distance away, where it grows and grows and we now have a lush beautiful garden...

It all started with a comment I made in Scott Thornbury's post on iTDi's blog "How important is homework?" I'd first talked about it in The Dogme Diaries, but I don't suppose many people read that ;-)

I mentioned that the homework I set a class of adult teachers was basically three questions:

• What have you learnt today?
• What part of the lesson did you like or dislike in the class today?
• What would you like to do in class next week?

A couple of months later, Alexandra Chistyakova wrote to say that she'd used the questions with her class of university students, and how well that had gone down. You can read about how she moulded my homework to suit her personality and that of her class here:

http://eltdiary.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/who-to-ask/  and

http://eltdiary.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/who-to-ask2-or-what-do-students-want/

Then, a little while later, Barbara Bujtás read Alexandra's posts and decided to adapt it to her class of 3-year-olds! You can read about it here:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=458868754141154&set=a.420855051275858.108546.100000541016537&type=1&theater

You can see the beauty of her work here:

So, if you're not involved in a PLN (personal learning network) or have not been convinced of it, I hope this little episode will serve to change your mind!

Alexandra and Barbara, you both rock!

Learn about continuing professional development here: http://www.scoop.it/t/continuing-teacher-development

Learn about the benefits of Twitter here: http://www.scoop.it/t/why-twitter-for-teachers

Twitter hashtags for educators: an index, at last!

If you're using Twitter, chances are that you are at least aware of hashtags, even if you don't use them. And if you do use them, no doubt, you've sometimes felt somewhat overwhelmed and confused. Part of the problem is it's a free-for-all concept. There's no official body to register hashtags and everyone can use any words as hashtags, and as many as they want.

Through time, nevertheless, regular tweeps (people who tweet) tend to stick to a few they use for their own interests but still feel at a lost to what unfamiliar ones mean. Worse, for me, is the duplication of tags and the long ones, especially when abbreviation is possible. Bear in mind that each tag eats up on the 140-character limit that Twitter has!

A recent confusion on a tag was the impetus I needed to create an index, unofficial as it may be. Whether it works depends on the will of others to keep it going. It's done on Google Doc, free for everyone to update. As long as it's not vandalised, I'll keep it public. My wish is that educators would start streamlining hashtags and mark unused ones as OBSOLETE or REPLACED BY... so that the community will grow even more.

What's your opinion? Will you start using it and let others know, too?

Top 100 Language Lovers 2012 - Who are you voting for?

The Top 100 Language Lovers 2012 competition is on again! This year, there had been 935 nominations! A CLIL TO CLIMB has been included for voting in the language learning blogs category. There are four categories in all.

50% of the final score is based on user votes; the other 50% is based on Lexiophiles' judging team's criteria. If you have found this blog useful, your vote will be most appreciated!


Each person can vote once in all four categories.

 

The voting phase started on May 15th, and ends on May 28th, 23:59 German time. Read more about the voting phase here.

The results will be published on May 31st.

What would you do if...?

Image by Chiew Pang

When I saw this...

At first, I just walked past. Later I thought, what if...

And I started fantasizing about the briefcase holding wads of crisp bills...

Then the language teacher ego took hold of me and said, hell, there's an awful lot of possibilities there for a conversation lesson, full of lexical challenges.

So, what would you do if you saw something like this? Ponder over it while I go back to my fantasies...

This image is part of the Project 366 series. If you're involved in it, (and if not, why don't you start?) please let us know in this Google Doc. My images are in Flickr, free for non-commercial use as long as they are properly attributed.