At the end of
July (July 20th - August 17th), the iTDI (International
Teachers Development Institute) Summer School MOOC for English Teachers
offered four weeks of daily on-line
immersion in TEFL teacher development training, delivering one session at a
time by the faculty, mentors, associates, and leading community members of
iTDI.
This MOOC was my first step on an
exciting journey taken with teachers from over 90 countries, learning to be
better teachers together. In the
beginning, I felt lost getting started, especially when downloading the course
program into my iPAD (Thank you so much, Cláudio Fleury and Danny Lyra, for
your precious help!) and handling the initial session details, especially the
necessary audio adjustments. Sometimes, I felt as if I were drowning while I was
watching the live discussions and struggled to follow the different types of
information I’d get on the screen: listening to the presenters who were usually
shown in the right upper corner of the screen; viewing the slides display in a
larger portion of the screen; and following the comments in the chat room in
the lower right corner of the screen. That seemed too demanding for me! I felt
like my brain would go out of orbit and burn! But it didn’t. Thank god, experiencing the so much celebrated
plasticity of brain became a concrete reality to me – sometimes at a high
energy cost, I must admit. However, I’ve
learned some strategies and now I know I can do it faster and more comfortably
next summer.
All sessions were one hour long, live,
conducted in a virtual classroom in Wiziq, and included a pre-session task and
a post-session quiz. In accordance with the number of sessions one attended,
different certificate participation credits were available. This year’s program included a wide range of
topics such as ‘Teaching English Through Art’, ‘Preflective Lesson Prep: Ideas
and Inspirations’, and some curiosity-raising ones, such as ‘#Flashmob ELT’. A
variety of inspiring teaching specialists - such as Michael Griffin, Anna
Loseva, Matthew Noble, Vicky Loras, Rosely Serra and Ana Menezes - were invited
to present in one of the 29 daily sessions in this year’s program.
Experiencing doing this MOOC course
was certainly a turning point in my career. Actually, I’m looking forward to watching the
recording of the sessions I’ve missed due to the natural rush and usual demands
with coachees and related issues in the beginning of the semester. The fact
that the sessions were on a daily basis forced me to miss some of them. The
good point about this MOOC is that I can catch up and do the rest of the
viewing and tasks at my own pace now at the end of our school semester. Yes. I highly recommend this MOOC for English
Teachers. Fly high with iTDI!
Eneida Coaracy
