Going Mobile: a motivating trend

We had the pleasure to attend a conference delivered by Nicky Hockly. She is an international speaker and Director of Pedagogy at The Consultants-E, and has wide experience in the field of face to face and distance language education. Besides, she runs workshops and teacher training courses for language teachers all over the world. She is also a well-known author of methodology books on the application of technology to language teaching.

The conference we attended was named “Going mobile” because the author talked about how challenging is for teachers to incorporate technology in the classroom. That is why it was really interesting and useful since she showed us great examples of how to use students’ mobiles in and outside the classroom, and encourage them during the lesson and the tasks proposed. We could benefit a lot from this talk, since it was planned as a workshop, in which we experienced what Nicky was teaching us. For example, she recommended us some apps, such as Aurasma which can be used in and out of the classroom, by aucmencted reality.

Also, she suggested using mobile phones in class to look for photographs, in order to carry out speaking tasks. It was really engaging, and very coherent to what students are accustomed to seeing every day. Since students are now digital natives (see post about it) we as teacher need to offer them something appealing and visual, as well as to provide many ways to approach an open task, by letting their creativity flow.What is more, she was so charming and the talk was extremely enjoyable. At the end of the talk, we took a photo with her and some of our classmates.

Sources: https://www.theconsultants-e.com/consultancy/our-team/nicky-hockly/
                 https://www.aurasma.com/

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