Thanks to Martin (mmcmorrow for pointing this one out on the ELT World Forums).

That’s right folks, ELT oligarchs TESOL are offering a fairly comprehensive range of free six-week online teacher training courses. You don’t even have to be a member of TESOL to participate, although lunch is not included, apparently. Seriously though, all those organising and running the online courses are giving their time and expertise freely in order to ‘serve the profession.’ How noble.

There are a quite stunning number of courses open; here are details of some of them. ‘Becoming a Webhead’ proposes to be a hands-on workshop where participants explore Web 2.0 tools and share the best ways of using them in their teaching practices. ‘Blog-based Lesson & e-Portfolios’ will provide basic notions like planning a lesson and put into practice what you might have learned about blogs to design a lesson supported with e-portfolios to collect students’ activities for evaluation. In the ‘Collaborative Writing’ session, the most popular computer-mediated communication tools for collaborative writing, blogs and wikis, will be introduced and some activities with word processors will be carried out. Discussions and exchanging of points of view will be provided by WiZiQ sessions in this comprehensive workshop. The interestingly titled ‘Conflict Resolutions for English’ is designed around a curriculum guide for teaching conflict resolution with English language learners. Participants will engage in conversations on prejudice awareness and reduction, communication, and conflict management and will discuss challenges and opportunities to bringing these conversations into their classroom. The ‘Designing Interactive Activities for the Young learner EFL Classroom’ session, meanwhile, will enable participants to learn how to use Hot Potatoes to create activities for the young learner EFL classroom. The ‘Digifolios and Personal Learning Spaces’ workshop aims at providing awareness of the way the web can empower the individual not only to learn, but also to present what, how and with whom he/she learns, while ‘Digital Storytelling in ELT Classrooms’ will show how to use Windows Movie Maker software while creating and editing videos; and at the end of the session participants will have the chance to create their own videos and publish them online. In ‘Enhancing Lessons with Web 2.0’, participants will create their own blogs and Web 2.0 instructional items, participate in asynchronous and live discussions, complete topic-specific readings, and develop a lesson plan applying web tools to a relevant teaching/learning context, while the ‘Planning Video Projects’ session will help teachers of EFL/ESL develop lesson plans for video projects to use with their students of various levels. The ‘Exploring Images in the 21st Century Classroom’ online workshop introduces participants to various online image manipulation tools and will learn how to effectively incorporate these resources into their teaching practices. The promisingly named ‘Internet for Beginners’ is designed to help inexperienced Internet users learn how to develop and use the Web in their classes either as bridging activities (like homework, but beyond fill in the blank), as class projects or even in the computer lab as a class activity, while ‘Mentor2Mentor’ is for those interested in mentoring new or struggling ESOL teachers. Basic mentoring skills will be explored and online resources will be identified. Extremely long-winded title it may have, but ‘Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments’ will basically focus on the fact that multiliterate individuals are aware of the pitfalls inherent in technology while striving for empowerment through effective strategies for first discerning and then taking advantage of those aspects of changing technologies most appropriate to their situations. These strategies include managing, processing, and interpreting a constant influx of information, filtering what is useful, and then enhancing the learning environment with the most appropriate applications. This course seeks to heighten awareness of these considerations, and to enable participants to explore ways of dealing with them in professional and interpersonal development as well as work with students.

Believe it or not, that isn’t the full list, which means that there’s probably something for everyone. However, you’d better get a shift on as registration finishes on 12th January. Click here for more details.

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