KEYNOTE Sirin Soyoz: Story Sharing Web Conference

[Heike Philp]

Recording (25min): http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/p9u5ol0r3t8/

The British Council English Language Team (ELT) in Turkey, ran their first ever web conference on 9 and 10 February 2013, called, “Story Sharing Web Conference”. 642 teachers from all over the world participated in the programme of real-time webinars over the two days. Not everyone can afford to attend a conference or has the time to do so. By choosing to organise a virtual conference and making it free to attend, the British Council was able to reach a wide cross section of people globally. The training and development was at the fingertips of teaching professionals. Web conferencing aimed to transform teaching and learning experience connecting colleagues at a distance. We had presenters from Macau to Vancouver via mouseclick and participants in 55 countries turned this into an amazing experience. If you would like to lose yourself with the wonderful world of stories, you can watch the recordings of our event online at TeachingEnglish website http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/turkey

In this session, I will talk about the highlights of our web conference and how we flipped a conference online with various different types of activities.

Şirin Soyöz is the ELT E-learning Coordinator for the British Council in Turkey. She holds a BA degree in education from METU (Middle East Technical University) in 2004 and is studying at post-graduate level in Online and Distance Education at the UK’s Open University. She provides workshops on technology, including its practical application. She develops digital projects for teachers and learners of English using the Web, broadcast and social media. Her research interests are learning technologies, e-learning innovations, e-portfolios and mobile learning. (@sirin)