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

Videogames have evolved from an emerging fad of the Super Mario Bros. era to perhaps the dominant media past time. Yet with this colossal growth videogames have not seen the classroom adoption we might expect. The challenge for educators is in how to incorporate videogames into the classroom when they are fundamentally different from the traditional media we use such as film, books, and music.

In this session we explore that difference and how we can structure and scaffold our classroom activities to best support the interactivity, and choices that videogames provide. Along the way we will investigate the research on how videogames can support language learning, how gaming culture can provide career opportunities for our students, and the ways educators can more effectively support students hoping to enter the US$150 billion-a-year videogame industry.

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.

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

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

Since the emergence of Covid-19 in 2020, the use and necessity for education settings to adapt to an online format has led to the creation of many exciting and innovative teaching and learning tools. It has encouraged educators to make the online classroom more engaging by using innovative technology tools to benefit the learner. In this panel, we aim to showcase some English learning applications and websites that we feel have benefitted both communication channels and English language acquisition with students at the tertiary level such as Screencast-O-Matic and BAND. We will include a 5-minute window at the end of this panel to welcome the audience to share further online language learning tools or websites that others have found beneficial. We are looking forward to meeting you all and sharing ideas on how to improve the online classroom for both students and educators. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

Filmmaking has never been easier thanks to the widespread use of social media and mobile devices. While its educational value has been widely acknowledged, its role in the language classroom is rather underexplored. However, in a world where communication is becoming increasingly multimodal, short film creation can offer tremendous learning opportunities for students of almost any age.

Informed by the PPR framework (Mavridi, 2019) and digital literacy pedagogies, this session will explore the role of filmmaking in supporting the development of language skills and digital literacies. We will also look at how teachers can guide students through the process of planning, drafting, editing and revising short films and how they can embed this process in a student-centred and engaging way.

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 this panel, a group of instructors will discuss their ongoing experiences of delivering a presentation course to Korean undergraduate freshmen at the University of Ulsan. The course in question essentially covers 'Presentation Basics' and aims to equip students with universally applicable skills for making direct, effective and watchable presentations. During the session, we'll look at the positives we've encountered and the things that have gone well, along with sharing any areas we have struggled with or tips we have come up with for delivering a more effective course. There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion and ideas sharing, so come along with your own experiences (both positive and not so positive!) of teaching presentations, and add to the discussion on how best to teach this critical 21st century skill! MYSTERY EASTER EGG

Let’s assume you’re a dynamic, trained professional with something to say… but you’re not famous enough to get invitations to present here and publish there. How do you break in? This presentation outlines practical steps you can take to showcase your talents and contributions and advance your career to the next level. Come prepared to take notes and leave with an action plan!

Soft skills have long been hailed as being of fundamental value to young people’s education. This talk considers why certain new competencies are increasingly being recognised as vital by employers and societies around the world. Based on what current research indicates as being instrumental for young people seeking to achieve success in their professional and personal lives, this talk also consists of some suggestions for how students in ELT contexts can be enabled to develop these competencies.

The 21st century ESP learner is required to demonstrate a broad range of communicative and professional skills in their chosen vocation. In order to facilitate the development of such skills, ESP instructors must be aware of the specific communicative needs of their students, while also considering the growing importance of soft skills in the modern workplace. This session will examine the terms ‘specificity’ and ‘soft skills’ and their role in ESP teaching. A clear distinction will be made between hard and soft skills and how they contribute to professional success. The speaker will then introduce practical methodologies and techniques to help learners develop specific communicative and professional skills simultaneously. Special attention will be paid to the implementation of these strategies, which include scaffolding techniques, use of authentic and specific materials, in addition to the integration and use of functional language and topic specific vocabulary. MYSTERY EASTER EGG

In our increasingly interconnected world, people are learning, creating, and interacting in unprecedented ways, but maximizing these opportunities also requires emotional and social skills for creative thinking, solving problems, and implementing solutions. English for 21st Century Skills can help educators achieve this goal. In this forum discussion, the book company and the editors will explore ways in which creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, inclusion, wellbeing, leadership, and other 21st century skills can be integrated and developed in language learning contexts. If you wish to keep up to date with the latest developments in this increasingly important field of language education, please join us. MYSTERY EASTER EGG