My first day at IATEFL 2015 was a YL & Teens bonanza, having never managed to get to pre-conference day before I didn’t know what to expect, although I thought it would be great and of course I wasn’t disappointed, despite only four hours sleep!

Firstly Joanna Budden told us a bit about the learnenglish teens website, I must recommend the magazine to my students – I’ve been looking for something to get the readerphobic students reading and this could be it!

She then went on to discuss various obstacles to learner-first learning, I was particularly interested in her ideas on digital obstacles, my students find it difficult to research information well, without resorting to copying wikipedia entries! Jo  showed us how to judge a wikipedia page and mentioned this TED talk – the Filter Bubble.

Jo also suggested avoiding the omnipresent google by using an alternative search engine such as duckduckgo and also pointed me in the direction of allaboutexplorers.com, a website with fake information that can be used for teaching digital safety, along the lines of the famous tree octopus.

I’m looking forward to sharing this with my colleague who teaches internet safety in our school, maybe I’ll add my own lesson to his.

I’m afraid I had to sneak off during Olha Madylus’ talk on what makes teens tick, so my homework for this evening will include checking out her blog.

Herbert Puchta was as warm and wonderful as ever discussing the importance of values in teaching teens, but it was Joe Dale who really shook us up at the end of the afternoon.

Joe showed us some great apps for moviemaking in the classroom, for some reason the wifi & internet are misbehaving so I can’t upload the films I made -probably something to do with a thousand or so teachers having descended on Manchester! However I’ll tempt you with the screen snaps of the following apps:

Tellegami-

I hope you recognise me in front of the conference centre!

This is Yakit Kids, great for  funking up inanimate objects!

OK, I’m off to do my homework for tomorrow – see you then!