We are lucky to have worked with some of the most respected educators in English Language Teaching. Click on their names to learn more about our faculty, and which courses they have taught.
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We are lucky to have worked with some of the most respected educators in English Language Teaching. Click on their names to learn more about our faculty, and which courses they have taught.
Scott Thornbury is a teacher and teacher educator, with over 40 years’ experience in English language teaching. He currently teaches on an online MA TESOL program for The New School in New York. His previous experience includes teaching and teacher training in Egypt, UK, Spain, and his native New Zealand. Scott’s writing credits include several award-winning books for teachers on language and methodology including “The A-Z of ELT”, “How to Teach Grammar” and “Teaching Unplugged”. He is series editor for the “Cambridge Handbooks for Teachers” (CUP) and was also the co-founder of the dogme ELT group. Scott’s thought-provoking blog, An A-Z of ELT, is a popular site for many teachers and has been adapted as an e-book, “Big Questions in ELT”. His most recent books are “Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods” and “Scott Thornbury’s 101 Grammar Questions”
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Penny Ur has thirty-five years’ experience as an English teacher in elementary, middle and high schools in Israel. Now retired, she has taught B.A. and M.A. courses at Oranim Academic College of Education and Haifa University. She has presented papers at TESOL, IATEFL and other English teachers’ conferences worldwide. She was for ten years the editor of the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series. Her books include Discussions that work (1981), Five minute activities (co authored with Andrew Wright) (1992), Grammar practice activities (2nd Edition) (2009), Vocabulary activities (2012), and A course in English language teaching (2012), all published by Cambridge University Press. A new book, Discussions and more, was published in 2015.
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Stephen Krashen is a linguist, educational researcher, and activist. Dr. Krashen has published nearly 500 papers and books, contributing to the fields of second-language acquisition, bilingual education, and reading. He is credited with introducing various influential concepts and terms in the study of second-language acquisition, including the acquisition-learning hypothesis, the input hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the affective filter, and the natural order hypothesis. Most recently, Krashen promotes the use of free voluntary reading during second-language acquisition, which he says “is the most powerful tool we have in language education, first and second.” Dr. Krashen is currently professor emeritus at University of Southern California.
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John F. Fanselow became involved in ESOL by becoming a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa in the first group to go to Nigeria in 1961 where he taught at a teacher training college. Upon completion of his Ph.D. at Columbia University, Teachers College, he was invited to join the faculty.
At Teachers College, his main interest was observation and analysis of interactions, both inside and outside of classrooms. “Beyond Rashomon” and “Let’s see,” two of his seminal articles in the TESOL Quarterly, have been reprinted in many anthologies.“Beyond Rashomon” was the basis of Breaking Rules (Longman, 1987) and “Let’s See “was the basis of Contrasting Conversations (Longman,1992, reprinted 2010).
With colleagues at Teachers College and Tatsuya Komatsu from SIMUL, he started an off-campus M.A. Program in Tokyo for Columbia University, Teachers College in 1987. Try the Opposite (Tokyo: SIMUL Press, 1992, 2011) grew out of his work with teachers in Japan.
His latest book, Small Changes in teaching, Big Results in learning—videos, activities and essays to stimulate fresh thinking about language learning was published by iTDi in 2017, on the 30th anniversary of Breaking Rules.
When he became Professor Emeritus in 1996, his students established the John F. Fanselow Scholarship fund to encourage “Fanslovian” ideas and practices among MA students in TESOL at Teachers College in New York and in the off-campus program he established in Tokyo. When he stopped teaching in TC in Tokyo, be was invited to be the president of International Pacific College (Now International Pacific University)in NZ. During his 8 years there, he introduced recording and analyzing classroom interaction that has not likely been done in a systematic way in any other tertiary institution in the world.
He has been active professionally, serving as president of TESOL International and president of New York TESOL. When he completed his work in NZ was a visiting professor at The New School in New York and at Akita International University and Kanda University of International Studies in Japan. In 2005, he was presented with the Distinguished Alumni Award from Columbia University, Teachers College. Each year, Teachers College presents 3 to 5 Distinguished Alumni Awards who are selected from the more than 80,000 alumni of the institution.
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Katherine has worked in ELT for nearly 30 years, first as a teacher, then as a teacher trainer, materials writer and author. She developed a passion for writing in the early years of her career when she would spend hours preparing supplementary materials for her own classes. Since then she has published course books and materials for most ages and levels. She writes regularly for Oxford University Press, Macmillan, The British Council and BBC English. She writes blog posts and bi-monthly lesson plans for British Council Teaching English. Katherine is founding member of the Facebook page Free and Fair ELT which finds and shares free resources for teachers each week. She has recently published How to Write Primary Materials a guide for teachers who want to write primary materials professionally or for their own classes. Katherine speaks regularly at conferences and teaching events and when she isn’t working she can be found in her vegetable garden.
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Creating ELT Materials
Philip Kerr is a teacher trainer, lecturer and materials writer who lives in Vienna, Austria. His publications include the award-winning ‘Translation and Own-Language Activities’ (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and a chapter entitled ‘Questioning ‘English-only’ classrooms: own-language use in ELT’ in the ‘Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching’ (forthcoming). Coursebooks he has written or co-written include ‘Straightforward’ and Inside Out’ (both Macmillan). He is also the author of ‘How to Write Vocabulary Presentations and Practice’ (ELT Teacher 2 Writer). Philip is a consultant for Cambridge English Teacher and he blogs about technology and English language teaching.
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Marc Helgesen, Professor, Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University, Sendai, Japan has written over 150 articles, books and textbooks on English Language Teaching including the English Firsthand series for Pearson Education. He has been an invited speaker at conferences on 5 continents. He maintains two public websites: www.ELTandHappiness.com and www.HelgesenHandouts.weebly.com
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Jill Hadfield has worked as a teacher trainer in Britain, France and New Zealand and worked on development projects with Ministries of Education and aid agencies in China, Tibet and Madagascar. She has also conducted short courses, seminars and workshops for teachers in many other countries. She is currently Associate Professor on the Language Teacher Education team in the Department of Language Studies at Unitec, New Zealand and has been appointed International Ambassador for IATEFL. She has written over thirty books, including the Communication Games series (Pearson),Excellent!, a three-level primary course (Pearson), the Oxford Basics series, Classroom Dynamicsand An Introduction to Teaching English (OUP). Her latest book, Motivating Learning, co-authored with Zoltan Dornyei, was published in 2013 by Routledge in the Research and Resources in Language Teaching series, of which she is also series editor.
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Kevin Ryan has taught in Barcelona, Chicago, Nanjing, and for the last 35 years, in Tokyo where he is a Professor at Showa Women’s University at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.
A scholarship led him to a summer TESOL institute at Northwestern with Michael Long, which led to a scholarship at the University of Illinois at Chicago under Elliot Judd. During the year in Nanjing, he trained post-doc Ministry of Agriculture scientists from all over China for grad school in the US. He has also taught at the Unversity of Tokyo and Keio University.
Most of Kevin’s research has focused on CALL, which developed from leading the Tokyo PC User Group through the transition from BBSs to the web in the early 90s, then as leader of the JALT CALL SIG along with editing publications like Recipes for Wired Teachers. He has been involved in many aspects of JALT, with two stints on the Board of Directors. For four summers up to the pandemic he has done teacher training for the NLD in several locations in Myanmar.
Dorothy Zemach holds an MA in TEFL and has been teaching English for 30 years. Since turning to materials writing, she has penned everything from the Teddy Bear’s Magic Music teacher’s book to the lowest and highest levels of Macmillan’s flagship course Open Mind to the groundbreaking English for Scammers (self-published). She’s worked with CUP as an in-house senior development editor, and has written and/or edited as well for OUP, Macmillan, Pearson, Cengage, and University of Michigan Press, among others. In 2012, she founded Wayzgoose Press, an independent publisher of fiction, literary non-fiction, and educational materials.
Dorothy’s website: http://www.dorothyzemach.com
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Pete Sharma is a Director of Pete Sharma Associates Ltd, a consultancy and training organisation. [http://www.psa.eu.com] He lecturers in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) and has co-written many books on technology including Blended Learning, 400 Ideas for Interactive Whiteboards, Apptivities for business English and How to write for Digital Media. Pete is a well-known international conference presenter and has given talks at IATEFL, BESIG, TESOL, JALT and MICELT. He has a Masters in Educational Technology, wrote Blended Learning – Key Concepts in ELT in the ELTJ and is co-author of the chapter on Blended and Online learning in the Routledge Handbook of Language Learning and Technology.
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Now based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Susan Hillyard has work experience in seventeen countries as a teacher, Head of Department, Director, speaker, workshop facilitator, consultant, researcher, Professor, materials writer, webinar presenter and on-line tutor. She was a Professor at two training colleges in Buenos Aires. She has co-authored a Resource Book for Teachers Global Issues for OUP and also TDI-TKT On-line Course for Pearson, New York. She has been involved with two Theatre in Education troupes as diction teacher and as an adviser. Former Coordinator, English in Action, in Special Education, Ministry of Education, City of Bs As, Argentina, training 20 teachers, through blended learning courses, to teach English through Drama in Special Education.
Connect with Susan online:
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Marcos Benevides teaches at J. F. Oberlin University in Tokyo, where he is the Reading and Writing Curriculum Coordinator for the English Language Program. He is an internationally recognized ELT writer and series editor, having co-authored the critically acclaimed Widgets: a task-based course in practical English (Pearson, 2008) and the multiple award-winning Fiction in Action: Whodunit (Abax, 2010), as well as having edited the popular Choose Your Own Adventure graded reader series (McGraw-Hill, 2011). His current project is the Atama iiBooks series of easy-English multi-path adventure stories.
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Joseph Shaules (PhD) has been a tenured faculty at Rikkyo University and a special associate professor at Rikkyo’s Graduate School of Intercultural Communication. He directs the Japan Intercultural Institute (JII) and is Japan specialist for Intercultures, Germany. Books include Identity (OUP),Deep Culture (Multilingual Matters) andThe Intercultural Mind: Connecting Culture, Cognition and Global Living. (Intercultural Press).
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Vicki Hollett was an EFL teacher for more than forty years. She was an award winning author of many ELT courses for Oxford University Press and Pearson, but chose to work with a camera instead. Together with her film maker husband, she produced videos for corporate clients and also free videos for their Simple English Videos website and YouTube channel. Simple English Videos was a winner in YouTube’s prestigious NextUp 2016 competition for fast rising channels and the prize included a week of training at the YouTube studios in NYC.
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Philip Shigeo Brown is Course Director and Tutor for the iTDi TESOL Certificate Course. He has volunteered as a Mentor for the International Teacher Development Institute (iTDi) since 2012 and, together with Steven Herder, cohosts iTDi’s Facebook Live sessions.
Phil started his career teaching in Japan from 2001-2014 in various contexts (from kindergarten, secondary school, and university to private language schools, businesses, government ministries, and Peace Boat). From 2009-2019, he served as a Postgraduate Programmes Tutor on the University of Birmingham’s Masters and PG Cert in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. He has also taught in Malaysia and is now based in Qatar. In addition to teaching online, Phil enjoys conducting teacher development workshops, editing, writing, and acting in random productions.
Seeking to further understand and promote ELT, especially in Asia, Phil is a co-editor of Innovating EFL Teaching in Asia (2012, Palgrave MacMillan), Exploring EFL Fluency in Asia (2014, Palgrave MacMillan), and Re-Envisioning EFL Education in Asia (2023, International Teacher Development Institute), alongside Theron Muller, John Adamson, and Steven Herder. His teaching interests also include learner and teacher development and autonomy, motivation, learning strategies, vocabulary, content-based instruction (CBI), content and integrated learning (CLIL), global issues, and critical thinking.
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Jason R Levine is Ambassador and Knowledge Entertainer at Gallery Languages, where he conducts webinars and workshops for English students and teachers at schools worldwide. He has eighteen years of experience as an English teacher, teacher trainer, and materials writer. Jason is the creator of ColloLearn, an approach to English language learning based on the songs he writes and performs as Fluency MC. He also writes songs and chants for several publishers, including Oxford University Press. As an English Specialist with the U.S. Department of State, Jason has led teacher training programs in fourteen countries in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East. After earning an MA in TESOL from Hunter College in 1999, Jase taught at several schools before becoming the director of curriculum development for Embassy English. In 2002, he co-founded a TOEFL preparation school for international students in New York City. Jase maintains the ColloLearn YouTube channel, the Fluency MC Facebook page, and Fluency MC on Twitter. He is an active administrator of many Facebook groups for English language teachers and learners, including Innovative Teachers of English, Gallery Teachers, Teachers Teaching Online, and Gallery Languages Rhyme On Time Workshops.
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Curtis Kelly (EdD), Professor, Kandai University, Osaka, has spent most of his life developing learner-centered materials for “3L” students, students with low ability, low confidence, and low motivation. He has given over 350 presentations and written over 30 books, including Active Skills for Communication (Cengage), and Writing from Within (Cambridge). He is also the coordinator of the JALT Brain Special Interest Group.
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Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto holds a US English teaching license and an MATESOL, and has taught Language Arts, ESL, and EFL. Barbara is co-author of one of the world’s best-selling textbook series for children learning English, Let’s Go (Oxford University Press), co-author of the online course, English for Teachers (International Teacher Development Institute), and author of the chapter, The role of technology in early years language education, in Early Years Second Language Education (Routledge, 2015). She is an English Language Specialist with the United States State Department and is Course Director for International Teacher Development Institute (iTDi.pro). Barbara has been invited to give keynote and plenary talks at international conferences, has conducted face-to-face teacher training workshops in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and online workshops with teachers around the world.
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Katy Simpson is an English language teacher, teacher trainer, and materials writer. She was a finalist in the 2017 ELTons, shortlisted for her website My English Voice. The site is a library of self-study pronunciation and listening resources featuring a range of accents from around the world, aimed at helping learners who use English internationally (as a Lingua Franca). Since completing her MA research in the field of English as a Lingua Franca in 2013, Katy has been working to bridge the gap between academia and classroom practice by sharing pronunciation materials on the teaching site she co-authors, elfpron.wordpress.com. She writes materials for Oxford University Press, has published articles about ELF (e.g. for One Stop English), and regularly presents on the topic (e.g. for the British Council’s Seminar Series). She is co-author of ELT Teacher 2 Writer’s How to Write Pronunciation Activities.
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Kate has taught English for over 20 years in Spain, Tanzania, Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador. She earned her Bachelor’s and post-graduate degrees from the University of London and the University of York (UK). Kate has written a variety of successful EFL coursebooks, supplementary books, and teacher’s materials. Her co-publications include: Interchange Teacher’s Editions (Cambridge University Press), Mastermind workbooks (Macmillan) and Teacher Resource Books for Kid’s Box (CUP). She is author of two Student Books for the new primary series Our World (National Geographic Learning). Kate has conducted workshps, seminars and plenaries in 23 countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. she currently lives in Ecuador and works as a freelance author, teacher, and teacher trainer.
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Chuck Sandy is a teacher, teacher trainer, and author whose many books include the Passages andConnect series from Cambridge University Press, the Active Skills For Communication series from Cengage Learning, and English For Scammers from Wayzgoose Press. He’s also an essayist who writes most frequently for the iTDi Blog as well a poet whose work has appeared in little magazines and journals you’ve most likely never heard of before. Although Chuck leads face-to-face workshops and presentations at conferences and events around the world, he does most of his work with teachers online in the International Teacher Development Intstitute (iTDi) and Gallery Teacher communities. Chuck is a cofounder and director of iTDi and the curator of GalleryTeachers.com. He’s currently at work on a new book of reflections forthcoming from Wayzgoose Press. Connect with Chuck on Facebook and on Twitter and visit his Amazon page.
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Heike Philp is CEO of Let’s talk online sprl, based in Brussels, Belgium, immersive education specialist for language learning and events in real-time via the internet since 2003. Heike co-initiated four European funded projects: LANCELOT (LANguage learning with CErtified Live OnlineTeachers, 2005-2007) and AVALON (Access to Virtual and Action Learning live Online, 2009-2011), CAMELOT (CreAting Machinima Empowers Live Online language Teaching and learning, since 2013) and GUINEVERE (Games Used IN Engaging Virtual Environments for Real-time language Education, 2017-2019). Heike runs her own web conferences: Virtual Round Table Web Conference on Language Learning Technologies, DaFWEBKON for teachers of German and Annual Symposium. She co-owns EduNation islands in Second Life.
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Adrian Doff has taught English and trained teachers in Finland, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Egypt, Germany and the UK. He has written a wide range of EFL coursebooks, supplementary books and teacher training material, mostly for Cambridge University Press. These include the coursebooks Meanings into Words, Language in Use and English Unlimited, the teacher-training book Teach English, the listening skills books in the Cambridge Skills for Fluency series and the self-study reference and practice series Language Links. He is currently living in Germany and working as a free-lance writer and teacher trainer, and works as a tutor on training courses for the CELTA and DELTA certificates. Adrian brings vast experience in teacher training to the iTDi online platform context.
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Steven Herder, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Kyoto Notre Dame University
Steven has been teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) for over 25 years at the elementary, junior and senior high school level, and now coordinates the Global English Class (GEC) at Kyoto Notre Dame Women’s University in Kyoto Japan. He teaches Before Study Abroad (BSA) preparation, courses on Women in Leadership, and Global Human Resources Development, as well as a 3rd/4th year seminar on Exploring Leadership.
He is an author and editor of two Palgrave Macmillan teacher resources, Innovating EFL Teaching in Asia (2012) and Exploring EFL Fluency in Asia (2014). Since 2010, he has been working with Suken Publishing in Kyoto for the past 10 years on high school textbook series such as Big Dipper Series I, II, III, DUALSCOPE, as well as writing various workbooks and graded readers. He co-founded MASH Collaboration in 2007, believing that “Collaboration creates just the right amount of tension to get lots done” and over the years he has come to realize that, “being a teacher means a never-ending commitment to learning”.
In 2012, he and a network of like-minded educators co-founded the International Teacher Development Institute, an online community for teachers by teachers, with over 5000 members and a growing global reach into over 100 countries.
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Luke Meddings is an international speaker, author and teacher trainer with over 25 years experience in ELT. In that time he has worked as a teacher, journalist and school manager, and wrote an online column for Guardian Education. In 2000 he co-founded the Dogme in ELT movement with Scott Thornbury, and their book Teaching Unplugged (Delta, 2009) won a British Council ELTon Award for Innovation in 2010. In 2011 he started the independent e-publishing collective, the round, with Lindsay Clandfield: their first book, 52: a year of subversive activity for the ELT classroom, appeared in 2012. His teacher training in 2015 includes work in Brazil, Mexico, Greece, Ireland and Malta.
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Learning Space: A Guide to Teaching Unplugged
Nicola started her teaching career in Barcelona, Spain in 1999. She is still based there and is now a freelance teacher and teacher trainer. Nicola’s current roles include Course Director of a Diploma TESOL course, designing online courses for teachers and learners, tutoring on Cert. TESOL courses and coaching ESP learners. As well as helping to organize local teacher development events, Nicola has delivered workshops all over Spain for primary and secondary school teachers on a variety of topics. She has also written a wide range of articles and teaching materials. Her current area of research interest is in involving language learners more in teacher training courses and she recently presented on this topic at the IATEFL conference.
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Juan Uribe is a teacher and a teacher educator who has researched, taught, and shared affective language learning since 1994. He is the founding director of Juan Uribe Ensino Afetivo, a language school for young learners, where children learn English affectively through play, games, storytelling, and puppeteering.
His focus is on empowering language teachers to create rich learning environments in which young learners are truly engaged, motivated, and energized. Juan has been in an amazing journey visiting language schools for children around the world where he has both conducted teacher development programs as well as enchanted young audiences with Buddy the Frog.
Juan holds a Bachelors degree in Education from the Catholic University in São Paulo (PUC-SP) and a Masters in Education in Human Development and Applied Psychology from the University of Toronto. He writes a blog called Children Learning English Affectively.
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Paul Raine has been teaching English in Japan since 2006. He has taught a vast range of different learners, from kindergartners to retired businessmen, and all ages in between. He has two bachelor’s degrees: one in Law and the other in Imaginative Writing. He obtained a Master’s degree in TEFL from the University of Birmingham in 2012, and has since presented widely at academic conferences both in Japan and abroad. He has published several research articles and two books; the first an innovative multi-path graded reader, and the second a guide for teaching English with technology. He has also developed his own website for teachers and learners of EFL (www.zengengo.com) and maintains his own professional blog.
Paul currently teaches at two universities in Tokyo, Japan, and is particularly interested in Computer Assisted Language Learning. Follow him on Twitter at @paul_sensei
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Frances is a teacher and trainer, though she currently spends much of her time writing EFL materials: in the past few years she has contributed to website materials, written teachers’ books, resource materials and she has also worked on student books, mainly for Macmillan publishers. She has spent many years working as a teacher and trainer in Hungary, Singapore, Oman and the UK, both on pre-service and in-service courses. At some points in her life she can honestly say that she ‘lived’ for EFL! She still feels very passionate about it, but these days she also likes to pursue other interests: She enjoys knitting and embroidery and also loves walking, yoga and travel.
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Shelly Sanchez Terrell is a teacher trainer, online instructor, and author. She has been recognized by various notable entities, such as the ELTon Awards, The New York Times, Microsoft’s Heroes for Education, and the Bammy Awards as a leader, innovator, and visionary in the movement of teacher driven professional development. She is the co-founder of the award-winning#Edchat movement, #ELTChat, the Reform Symposium Global E-Conference, and The 30 Goals Challenge for Educators. She has trained teachers and taught learners in over 25 countries and has consulted with organizations such as UNESCO Bangkok, The European Union aPLaNet Project, Cultura Iglesa of Brazil, the British Council in Tel Aviv, IATEFL Slovenia, HUPE Croatia, and the British Council in South East Asia. She is the host of American TESOL’s Free Friday Webinars and shares regularly via TeacherRebootCamp.com, Twitter (@ShellTerrell), Facebook.com/shellyterrell, andGPlus.to/shellyterrell.
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