This year’s national conference has been gamified. The games being played are more than just a way to bring fun and delight to the conference. They are a way to get attendees more involved with our online conference, which will hopefully bring about more interactions with each other and contribute to participants feeling more connected despite being online and not collected in a traditional conference space. Additionally, the games serve the purpose of putting educators in their students’ shoes. One of the biggest things teachers seem to be looking for when it comes to their classes, whether its online or offline, are ways to engage students with the lessons learned in class. By playing through the games being put on by the conference you can experience fun new ways of learning and engaging with materials. You will learn about the games in play at the conference and you will also learn how to put together something for your own students using Discord, Flipgrid, and Google Workspace applications such as Forms, Sites, and Slides. EASTER EGG 1

Envision a classroom where rich, compelling, fun content captivates students who effortlessly develop language skills while expanding their cultural awareness. Could these ideals become realities? This workshop proclaims: Yes! For five years as a university professor in S. Korea, I have been developing ways to infuse music into ELT. Music content is often transformative as students seamlessly enrich their cultural appreciation while concurrently improving their L2. Considering Stephen Krashen’s Compelling Input Hypothesis framework, music and movies together may provide content so compelling, some students will improve their L2 automatically, without giving conscious effort. Beyond compelling content, this workshop will introduce the most effective content delivery strategies -- including OST-centered formative tasks -- I have conducted, fully online, over the past three semesters. I will also summarize a 'History of Rock' course I taught twice, from 2017-2018. During multiple small and whole group discussions, attendee participation is highly encouraged. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

Anyone who's taught long enough has been forced to teach lessons using materials that are at least less than ideal for their students. Sometimes we have the options of choosing our own textbooks, and other materials; other times... not so much. Sometimes administrators or superiors demand that we teach with the materials they want rather than what would be best for the students overall. Even if the materials themselves are good, administrators may demand we teach it at a rate faster than our students can even absorb! In this presentation, I will give a basic overview of the most common types of bad materials, and will offer tips and tricks for how to make each of them into the best lesson for your classrooms! MYSTERY EASTER EGG

When asked what the hardest part of a live presentation is, whether face-to-face or online, a reply I regularly receive from presenters is: the audience and their feedback. The reasons vary from anxieties surrounding public speaking to how the audience will receive and react to the contents and design of their presentations.

During the presentation design process, presenters find varying ways to represent their ideas using presentation software. A key component to effective presentation design is designing the presentation with the audience in mind. In these audience-centred presentations, there is deliberate movement away from presenter-centred presentations, in which the focus is solely on what the presenter has to say, and toward the audience –students and professionals alike– and how well the information can be relayed to them for maximal impact and understanding.

In this presentation, we will explore how we can design more effective audience-centred presentations.

This talk will be a self-reflective and autoethnographic account of the speaker’s experience guiding filmmaking projects with English language learners and the evolution of these projects over 10 years, in 3 different institutions, as well during the COVID-19 pandemic. The speaker will talk about the early days when she first began doing these projects, important lessons learned along the way, and identify and highlight changes made in her approach based on experiences, institutional and environmental factors, as well as changing student demographics. Participants will see the history of a filmmaking project with English language learners from the beginning, it’s adaptations and transformations over time, and the project’s current incarnation today. Participants can also engage in an open QnA and discussion by sharing their own experiences filmmaking with second language learners. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

Many teachers overestimate the difficulty of creating personalized videos for their classes. It can be fun and easy to build up a library of videos on a wide range of topics applicable to ESL, EFL, and other subject-based courses. This workshop will take participants through a few basic strategies designed to kickstart the creative process. For one, we will be looking at some lesson types that can be enhanced by personalized videos. We will also discuss the ways in which videos can allow for leveling. Most importantly, we will discuss the reality that making "perfect videos" is not the goal. The value of the videos is not their production value, it is the personal touch it will allow you to give your lessons. Small investments of time, compounded over a few years, will pay off a vast dividend of fun and useful videos that are very "you!" This workshop is an opportunity for teachers who want to try bringing more modern technology into their lesson planning, but don't know where to start. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

Pixton is a web-based cartoon-making site. It is used to let all levels of students make more from their writings. Low-Level students can express more with a cartoon than they can with just words and higher-level students can expand their thoughts. Pixton makes it interesting and fun for the students. In return, your students try harder, are more passionate about their writings, and learning in general.

I will show you how to use this to help advance your student's creativity and confidence in their Language abilities. As well as creating a "class" for us to play around with. My knowledge comes from practical use of the program. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

For many years, academics, psychologists, teacher trainers and teachers have been trying to define how to motivate students. We read about these techniques every day but we never find out if they are finally implemented or work out.

The assumption that, maybe, instead of trying to find out how we motivate “students”, we first try to find out how to motivate “people” will be primarily discussed. The speaker will also try to demonstrate that the motivation we are seeking for learning a language is the same that we need in our everyday lives. We also need to be aware of the “dark side of motivation” as a pitfall that teachers may be falling into often without realizing it. All these assumptions and ideas will be accompanied by suggestions on how they can be positively transferred through ELT tasks.

Let’s help any teacher transform from an educator into a motivator. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

World communication has shifted to more visual content and consumption. As ELL educators, embracing this shift with the use of graphic novels is crucial to developing engaged readers and contextual thinkers. The visual nature of graphic novels results in a familiar format for readers to acquire information, which engages reluctant readers. In addition, graphic novels combine images and text to convey critical and contextual storytelling elements, supporting and strengthening ELLs’ comprehension. This workshop explores a variety of graphic novels and how they act as a medium for literacy development by appealing to visual learners. Participants will examine graphic novel adaptation of traditional literature texts and experience how to apply them in the EFL classroom. In addition, participants will discuss their students' needs and make connections to practical classroom application of graphic novels. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

This workshop will introduce educators to the powerful and easy-to-use program OBS Studio. OBS Studio is a free, open-source streaming and recording program with hundreds of user-created plugins available for users to customize their content. There are versions available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

This hands-on workshop will cover how to simply install and set up OBS Studio, find and use plugins to enhance a user’s video and audio, and how to use OBS Studio in conjunction with popular online teaching platforms such as Zoom and MS Teams. OBS Studio can capture any program, image, audio, or video source on your computer and integrate them together in one video. We will discuss how to use OBS Studio to record videos of any length for use as asynchronous teaching materials as well as using it to enhance live online teaching.

Attendees of all levels of technical expertise are encouraged to participate. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

This year is the tenth anniversary of the birth of the Performance in Education (PIE) SIG of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT). The presenter, the founder of the SIG, will describe its founding, purpose, structure, highlights of its history, its present situation and its possible future. The purpose is to show that a performance in education SIG would be a valuable addition to KOTESOL. The presentation also serves as an invitation for collaborative efforts between the two language organizations and to encourage individual KOTESOL members to participate in our conferences. Popular venues have been Okinawa and Sapporo where we have annual conferences, and Kyoto, Kobe, and hot springs resort towns like Gero. There will be a Q&A session at the end. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

Acting and teaching how do they go hand in hand? How can one help the other and vice versa? Learn the pros and cons and dos and don’ts of both, from one who has been through it all. Explore how teaching can open up the door to finding your calling, and finding yourself. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

In this seminar, I will give shortcuts to graduate students, recent graduates, and developing professionals on how to design research and publish quickly. My talking points will emanate from personal experience, literature review, and interviews with research associates. To this end, I hope to provide strategies to help others graduate and publish on time. Attaining a graduate degree is an early step in starting a professional career in academics. However, graduate supervisors cannot always find time to help students with research designs and write-ups. Further, graduate degree programs often focus more on coursework than writing which creates an abundance of graduate degree holders ill-prepared for publishing in their careers. To remedy this, my presentation will explore solutions to research and academic writing challenges reported by graduate students and early professionals, including issues related to work-life balance, the co-author relationship, the write-up, and the strategies to publish in academic journals. The interactive component of this workshop entails voluntary participation in designing your own moc (or real) research projects which we can critique together. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

This workshop is intended for teachers who use online techniques but encounter passive (or not-so-passive) pushback from students or administrators. While teachers have learned much about online education in the past two years, journal entries and interviews with university students show that they have not yet fully integrated online methodologies into their learner identities, causing a gap between our expectations and their expectations. For the same reason, administrators may have overly-inflated or outright inaccurate ideas about online learning. (We can double the size of our classes!) During this workshop, we’ll describe and discuss the changing role of classroom (face-to-face) time from both pedagogical and personal perspectives, and examine common problems of online learning from the viewpoint of our students. Participants will be invited to share relevant experiences, and will leave with two or three specific plans (“I will…” statements) for increasing awareness of both the potential and the limitations of online learning among students and, if applicable, administrators. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

In preparation for Reel to Real Film Festival and KOTESOL National Conference 2021, Rhea Metituk, the conference chair for the event, suggested that the three of us get together to write a promotion for the film festival/conference. This started us on an amazing creative journey that ended in a short article/promotion in The English Connection and an extended version that ended up as a podcast. The presenters will introduce the short article, play the podcast, and then will share their stories of how these two projects came to be. It is a story of unbridled creativity matched with quick collaboration and technical and dramatic talent. The presentation will end with reflections on how to structure successful creative collaboration projects. A question and answer session will conclude the presentation. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

Motivating students is critical to the success of extensive reading programs. Therefore, intentional and creative motivational strategies can maximize the efficacy of extensive reading programs by fostering students’ will and desire to read. This presentation explores four different areas to increase students’ motivation: 1. Reducing the amount of effort students need to put forth to read. 2. Increasing the enjoyment of reading (affective aspects). 3. Developing students’ want and will to read (cognitive aspects). 4. Maximizing the use of social factors.

The presenter will offer a wide variety of strategies, considerations, and practical implications related to motivational theory and research. Some strategies focus on generating motivation while others focus on maintaining motivation. Ultimately, the teacher holds the power to effectively nurture self-motivated readers, so come and learn which strategies you can implement in your classroom and how you can make your current strategies more effective.

Handouts shared. Active participation anticipated. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

Currently I teach English to college students who major in early childhood education. However, my students dislike the textbook that I teach, but respond well to the activities. I have a background in holistic education. and I decided a new curriculum, with an active learning element would better meet their needs . Therefore, in order to improve the curriculum and add a more holistic approach I studied more about curriculum design and holistic education. I also interviewed students who graduated three years before and , who were in the workforce to find out if they could apply anything from my classes that they had learned. I interviewed these students by phone and in person. I went from a textbook based curriculum to an more practical and active curriculum. In this presentation I will explain what I learned from the research, the results of the student interviews, various activities I use to enhance learning, and how I improved curriculum. Finally, this presentation will show how holistic education best prepares students for a globalized workplace and a better future. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

This workshop starts with a brief discussion on the definition of, and need for incorporating environmental themes and content within our EFL lessons, and then continues by offering practical ideas for creative content for classes and curricula via a focus on the experiences of nine EFL teachers teaching about environmental issues within South Korea over the last decade, and two more based in Japan. Participants will have the opportunity to share their own experiences of teaching material with an environmental theme, and ask questions at the end. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

The COVID-19 pandemic has led the world into an online teaching mode that has impacted every aspect of education. This presentation will explain the importance of how reflective practice on teaching online can lead to successful learning outcomes and better teaching practices. The reflections come from the presenter’s own writings while teaching writing online during a virtual camp for middle school students, which have helped in self-awareness and increased confidence when converting to a new platform of teaching. Through observing the progress of students while collaborating in class and submitting their assignments on Google Classroom, and receiving feedback through surveys about the overall impressions of the class, the teacher could see the development of his students. Finally, the presentation will highlight the reflections of the instructor on mental health amid teaching during the pandemic and how managing the complex challenges of online teaching has helped him improve his teaching. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

Do you know about the different shots used in film and video, such as close-up, medium shot, and wide shot? Have you tried storyboarding a video project? How about your students? Whether to spend time introducing these is an important consideration when setting a video project. Although it is often said that secondary and university-age students are already fluent in video, they may not have been introduced to these features, so this session will explore the benefits of a “focus on form” in video. As well as getting hands-on and learning about these features ourselves, we will discuss potential benefits for learners’ language use, including supporting more language use throughout project processes, and encouraging more ideas about using language in their finished videos. We will consider some possibilities for introducing these ideas, and also discuss strategies for scaffolding a project sequence to help students come alive as filmmakers. MYSTERY EASTER EGG