How can we develop professionally 24/7 all year-round? We make efforts to attend national and local ELT conferences; but we long for reliable sources and ways to coach ourselves and one another, access to content that can help us make a difference in our teaching practice. And we need all this accomplished affordably and realistically, in the context of our realities and constraints, namely time and money, as we struggle with the priorities of our daily lives. To address this need, along with ELT events, projects and activities, VenTESOL has been deploying a variety of social media outlets where we can access and engage with content and contacts that we can customize to our teacher development purposes, the coverage of our cell phones, the capacity of our devices and the width of our internet connection. Let’s connect age-old principles of research methodology to our personal use of simple, ubiquitous social media platforms at this BYOD (bring your own device) workshop where you have the power of knowledge at your fingertips. Discover the hashtags, tips, and shortcuts where a community of teachers helping teachers will help you succeed at your strife for excellence.

2. Venezuela Teachers of English
to Speakers of Other Languages
34th VenTESOL National Convention
“Reflecting and Taking Actions in ELT”
Hotel Hesperia World Trade Center
VenTESOL Social Media
for Effective Professional
Development
Hotel Hesperia World Trade Center

3. How can we develop professionally
24/7 all year-round?
We make efforts to attend national and local ELT
conferences; but we long for reliable sources and
ways to coach ourselves and one another, access
to content that can help us make a difference in
our teaching practice. And we need all this
accomplished affordably and realistically, in the
context of our realities and constraints, namely
time and money, as we struggle with the priorities
of our daily lives.
To address this need, let’s look into and use
content for teacher development available on
VenTESOL social media.

4. Resources available at:
• Presentation file:
http://bit.ly/VTsocmed_s
• Handout:
• http://bit.ly/VTsocmed_d
Two teammates may
open the slides for all.

5. Are you a user of these social media,
sites or networks?
ventesol.org
ventesol.ning.com

6. Workshop Aims:
• To raise awareness of social media as a realm for
research conducive to professional development.
• To benefit from the efforts of our national ELT community
of practice which shares and classifies content suitable
for teacher education and collaboration
• To build the skills necessary for engaging with such
information in an effective and realistic way for
improvement of the users’ ESOL practice.
BTW, this is BYOD!!

7. Activity #1:
Join VenTESOL social media accounts.
• Gather in teams of 4-6.
• Each will join a couple of VenTESOL social media outlets, being
Facebook or Twitter one of them.
• Tweet with the hashtags #VenTESOL2016 and #VenTESOLSocMed.
Page
Nt’l Group
State Groups
@VenTESOL
VenTESOL
user
Venezuela
TESOL
@ven_tesol
ventesol

8. Your Digital Citizenship Status
• Digital Natives are tech-savvy to use social media for
Teacher Development; but they are random or holistic
users.
• Digital Immigrants, as they have had to “learn” about
social media in a linear fashion, restrict themselves to
use each for a sole purpose.
• Let’s break our molds and rewire ourselves to transfer
skills from our digital citizenship to develop
professionally, by turning them into competencies.
Prensky, 2001; UNESCO, 2002

9. Research:
An age-old everlasting curiosity
with new toys at hand!
What are the new equivalents to these scholarly
research tools and (re)sources?
• Document center / library
• Book
• Scholarly journal
• Encyclopedia
• Research categories
• Librarian
Why? Because there are offshoots of the Information Society
(UNESCO, 1980) whereby Digital Immigrants’ skills for documentary
research intersect with Digital Natives’ web, app and cloud use skills.
The internet
Website, blog, wiki, e-book
Online journal
Wikipedia et al.
Keywords, hashtags
Curator

10. Research:
An age-old everlasting curiosity
with new toys at hand!
• A hashtag has the same research value and effectiveness
online as a descriptor or keyword at a library or in the
academic proceedings of a conference.
• A Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), regardless of how
advanced its features may be, is managed under generally
accepted and used instructional planning criteria.
• Top-down and bottom-up organization of a social media
service or app shares the different levels of complexity that
conceptual frameworks in epistemology and research have.
Sánchez-Terrell, 2015; Ramos, 2015; UNESCO, 2011

11. VenTESOL:
A community of practice for networking,
developing and collaborating!
VenTESOL, as a community of practice, has been deploying different social
media outlets and labeling them with a group of hashtags created and
standardized as search categories:
#TeacherDevelopment
#ELTHowTos
#TeacherManagement
#NurturingTeachers
#ESPSIG
#TEYLSIG
#TechSIG
#SESIG
#TeachersHelpingTeachers
#VenTESOLNews
#ELTComunityNews
Wenger-Trayner, 2011; VenTESOL, 2015

16. Activity #2:
In teams, make an open search, or one on a specific
social media platform using the hashtags below.
• #TeacherDevelopment
• #ELTHowTos
• #TeacherManagement
• #NurturingTeachers
• Go to one of the results.
• Read its titles and skim its main sections to your teammates.
• Discuss each topic’s usefulness or relevance for you as teachers.

20. VenTESOL Special Interest Groups: A world of
academic expertise in the making!
VenTESOL, 2015
Our Ning network (ning.ventesol.com) Started SIGs in late
2014 / early 2015. Do date, over 30 discussions are open.
Ways to join the discussions are by posting new ones or
commenting on the ones already open. Each SIG also echoes
on other VenTESOL social media with these hashtags:
#ESPSIG
#TEYLSIG
#TechSIG
#SESIG

24. Activity #3:
In teams, search Facebook or Twitter for
the hashtags below.
• #ESPSIG
• #TEYLSIG
• #TechSIG
• #SESIG
• Go to one of the results.
• Open it and read it to your teammates.
• React to it (like / love / wow…), comment on it, share it or retweet it
to friends and colleagues.

25. VenTESOL, the teacher development
curator nearest you:
These results are relevant to you because
VenTESOL aggregates and bookmarks
content on its social media and comes to you
already curated to cater to your needs (Antonio
et al 2012).
Activity #4:
Each team member combines a hashtag from Activity #2
and another one from Activity #3, reads a result, prepares
2-3 questions for discussion or reflection and shares them
as comments, tweet replies.

26. Using these results for
teacher development:
Discuss how and when you can tap into these resources for
your teacher development.
Study it, apply it, and accredit it by sharing!
Other suggestions:
• Decide on your topic(s) and apply relevant hashtags.
• Check the resulting sources and choose them.
• Allocate two or three 30 min. time slots in a week to read,
view, reflect, make comments, post questions.
• Save and share your favorites.
• Discuss them in a SIG or submit a talk at VenTESOL!

28. Closing actions
for kicks!
Let’s continue our professional
development!
• For some PLN engagement, select an ELT-related
question and post it in one of our Facebook groups. Then
monitor replies and help from colleagues over the next
weeks.
• Network with new colleagues as you add them to your
scial media accounts.
• Let’s take a selfie (or usie?) per team and post tagged as
#VenTESOL2016 and #TenTESOLSocMed!

29. AndrsRamos
AndresRamosVE