#ELTchat on Teaching English through songs: activities, resources and benefits of using songs for teaching.

#ELTchat is a twice-weekly one-hour session on Twitter where English langauge teachers from all over the world share ideas, resources, opinions, and more, all up it is simply fantastic PD!  I haven't ever learnt so much in one hour in my life.  To give you some idea of the volume and intensity, here are the stats from this morning's session:

• 13 readings and resources
• 68 ideas for using songs
• 50 example songs with links
• 11 music-related web 2.0 tools

It is, quite frankly, too much for anyone to take in 'live', so fortunately the transcripts are saved and someone usually (? not too sure about this) summarises the discussion, posts it somewhere and alerts everyone on Twitter through the hashtag, #ELTchat.

For this chat on using songs, one of the participants - Vicky Saumell @vickysaumell - has summarised the chat discussion into 4 blog posts (I'll link to each from here as she finishes them):

• Part 1: Background readings and resources related to teaching English through songs
• Part 2: Ideas of tasks for using songs
• Part 3: Specific songs and their uses
• Part 4: Music-related web 2.0 tools

The transcript of the discussion is on the #ELTchat website - look for other chats in the Old Topics archive.

There are two chats each week, both on Wednesdays, GMT time. The first one is at 11pm-midnight  and the second at 8-9am Thursday, Australian EDT time.  There is a call for suggestions for topics a day before, on Twitter, then a poll runs for a few hours and the top polling topic gets discussed at the first session, the second one in the second session - simple!

As it says on the website #ELTchat is a ready made PLN for ELT professionals! 


[ More on PLNs to come - watch this space! ]