IHTOC9 Conference Blog

On Friday 19th May 2017 IH World hosted the 9th International House Teachers Online Conference – IHTOC9, which was a fabulous demonstration of the strength and quality of our network with over 30 talks given by IH teachers.  Throughout the day, we travelled virtually around the world to hear talks from as far afield as Buenos Aries and Sydney.   With talks in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish, the conference reflected the diverse spectrum of languages we teach.

In addition to the excellent teacher-led talks, this year we had two plenaries kindly sponsored by ETpedia with Lindsay Clandfield and Vanessa Reis Esteves bringing us ideas for using games and storytelling, so a big thanks to them for being involved.

Since the end of the conference Shaun Wilden, the teacher training coordinator and conference co-organiser, has been working hard to make all the recordings available at https://sites.google.com/site/ihtoc9/.  Here you can find all of the recordings and the slides of every talk.  Please do share this fabulous teacher development resource site with your colleagues.

Thank you once again to everyone who worked to make this conference a success and we look forward to doing it all again next May!

My slowest, shortest Fast – an achievement all the same

Fast by mcneilmahon at Garmin Connect – Details.

Seems a bit odd to call last night’s run a fast one since I averaged around 6:30/km, not to mention the fact I only ran 5.3k.  But this all just goes to show how far I went and how far behind I now am.  The important thing is I managed to run 5k as fast as I can now without giving up and without injuring myself.

I managed to go 8 days without a run beforehand, which wasn’t part of the plan.  I need to be stricter with the days when Mer can’t run and go anyway.  The Nike 10k is only 10 days away now and I’ve only managed to run half the distance.  I need to go out every other day between now and the race, which is doable: Friday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday and try and get up to at least 8k during these races.  It will actually be fun to not have run 10k before the big day, a long way away from the days of running 20k three days before a 10k race, but then it was overdoing it like that that got me injured and where I’m at now anyway.

Today the foot doctor, tomorrow the knee doctor.  Let’s hope they give me the all clear and I can continue the comeback.

Last night’s thoughts: what do I have to do nd when do I have to do it.  Professionally Developing talk for IH Recoleta?belgrano on Friday, needs to be finished off tomorrow.  It’s going to be completely different to the times I’ve done it before in Mexico and ABS, since the audience will have heard of almost if not all the means of developing, so it’s gonna be more of a refelction on what suits each of us best.

Feedback Fiesta for Montevideo on the 19th November.  Again, very different since a three hour talk instead of an hour.  Lots more time to focus on error correction and separate out the three types of feedback and look at each in more detail.  Will need quite a bit of work mind to get it ready, though that will have to wait until the weekend after next, since this weekend is dedicated to preparing for the first IH Teachers Online Conference on Friday 25th November.  Really exciting project, I just hope the teachers hear about it and decide to come share with us.