IHWO News – Autumn 2010
______________________________________________________________________
Lucy Horsefield – Chief Operating Officer,
International House World Organisation lucy.horsefield@ihworld.co.uk
______________________________________________________________________
The IHWO office enjoyed a busy summer with new schools joining the IH network in Aberdeen, Astana (Kazakhstan), Donetsk (Ukraine), Heidelberg and Sao Paulo. September and October flew by with a constant stream of fairs and events to attend. Highlights included the LTM Star Awards where IHWO Ltd received a nomination, IH Donetsk’s Opening Ceremony at the fabulous new Donbass Arena and IH Rome Manzoni’s 50th Anniversary. IH Rome Manzoni celebrated 50 years of teaching English with a free conference for 200 participants on the theme of ‘Biodiversity in ELT’.
IHWO’s November Online Teacher Development Seminars
The IH Online Teacher Training Institute (OTTI) has gone from strength to strength in recent years as we continue to provide low cost, high quality online teacher development courses for teachers around the world. In addition to our certificated courses that last between 6 – 20 weeks we have also been running regular free online seminars for teachers; these are equivalent to a 90 minute face to face seminar but run over a two week period online. To date these seminars have always been for English teachers but this November for the first time we hosted seminars in Spanish, French, German and Italian. We hope this could be the start of more IHWO online teacher development for our ever growing community of modern language teachers within the network.
IHWO Competitions
This summer saw the launch of two IHWO global competitions. The IHWO You Tube competition set students the challenge of creating a You Tube video about their experience of learning a language with IH. We have already received some really imaginative entries and we are looking forward to choosing the winner in December.
On the academic side, we decided it was time to provide all those budding coursebook writers in IH schools with an opportunity to showcase and share their best material. The IHWO Materials Writing Competition took place during the months of October and November when IH teachers were asked to upload their best supplementary materials onto the IH Language Resources Moodle site. There is a first prize of £250 for the teacher who submits the resource judged by our panel of esteemed EFL materials writers to be the most usable, creative, simple and adaptable. The winner will be announced at the IHWO DOS Conference in January 2011.
IHWO DOS Conference – January 2011
As dark nights and wintery weather descends upon London we are busily preparing to host the IH DOS Conference in early January. After the roaring success of 2010’s DOS Conference held on the HMS Belfast we knew we had to find an equally impressive location for 2011. Continuing with the naval theme the 2011 conference will be held at Devonport House, in Maritime Greenwich, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our theme for this year is ‘On trend. What’s hot and what’s not in language teaching today?’ and keynote speakers include Scott Thornbury, Nik Peachey, Keith Morrow, Jeremy Harmer, Lindsay Clandfield and Jamie Keddie. We will be filming the event again and videos of the sessions will be uploaded onto the homepage of the IH World website for all interested parties to view.
