12 from ’12

After the successful 11 from ’11 challenge which Adam Simpson did last year, he decided to run a 12 from ’12 follow-up. Not having much time to blog at the moment, it’s taken a while for me to reply to the challenge, so I hope it was worth the wait!

The biggest thing I’ve ever been involved in…

…and not related to teaching at all! Regular followers of this blog will know that my summer was mostly taken up with two things:

The Olympics

The Paralympics

where I worked as a volunteer, or Games Maker as we were called. It was an amazing experience, probably once-in-a-lifetime, and I still get tears in my eyes every time I talk about it. If you ever get the opportunity to be involved in a big sporting event, whether it has -lympics at the end or not, grab it with both hands. My posts about the Games include my selection of the best of my photos from back of house, the events I saw, the technical rehearsal for the Olympics opening ceremony and the athletes’ parade celebrating the success of TeamGB and ParalympicsGB athletes.

2012 Gold Medal in the British Museum (phot0 by Sandy Millin)

The teaching

Delta has taken over my life, and my blog. I explained what it is in this post, and have started a series of posts reflecting on some of the things Delta has changed in my classroom. There aren’t many yet, but more will be added over the next six months, time permitting!

In April I had one of the best weeks of my life at the IATEFL conference in Glasgow. I learnt a lot, and really enjoyed meeting so many people from Twitter and the teaching world. I wrote about it here. I presented about how to help your students take advantage of online resources.

In May I appeared in print for the first time. This was very important for me as it marked the next stage in my career. I’ve now had two columns in the IH Journal, and two articles in the IATEFL Learner Autonomy Special Interest Group journal.

I’ve shared quite a few posts with ideas for activities this year. These are my favourites:

• Motivation Stations – a series of activities to help intermediate students think about what motivates them. This post was chosen as the Teaching English British Council featured blog post in January.
• Immigration: Belongings – practising relative clauses using stories of immigrants to New York.
• Spelling game – one of my favourite classroom games, and one my students always seem to enjoy.
• Photo box – a series of activities using only a box of pictures as prompts.

And finally, at the start of the year I put together a list of Useful FCE Websites. This has become by far my most successful blog post ever, with three times as many hits as the next most popular post on my blog. Pretty good for a few hours’ work, even if I do say so myself!

Best of the rest

To stop this post sounding completely self-indulgent, I’d also like to share a few of my favourite blogs which I’ve discovered this year. These are:

Kevin Stein’s The Other Things Matter

Carol Goodey’s new blog

Chris Wilson’s ELT Squared (I think I discovered Chris’ blog this year, but even if I didn’t, it’s always worth recommending!)

Leo Selivan’s Leoxicon

That’s it!

I’ve had a very eventful 2012, which I’ve really enjoyed. I’m quite tired now though, so here’s hoping 2013 is a little more relaxing…