Glenn Standish was originally born in New Zealand but was brought up in Saudi Arabia and the UK. He has been teaching English in Poland for almost 18 years and is the Director of Studies of IH Torun. He is also a Cambridge FCE & CAE oral examiner and an IHCAM & IHCYLT tutor. He has written articles for several teaching magazines and enjoys presenting on the conference circuit. Email:  glennstandish@gmail.com

 

A brief summary of the talk

Moving from offline to online, the natural assumption is that we have to abandon the activities we have come to know and love - but as I showed in my talk, that does not have to be the case. My session introduced a set of freer speaking activities that can be used online, and by showcasing these activities I think I managed to convince the audience that making the transition from what we know to what we don’t doesn’t have to mean leaving everything else behind.

 

How you felt before the conference

I have done many, many conferences, mostly face-to-face with audiences up to a hundred and fifty, and online with as many as five or six hundred watching me. I am glad to say that the nerves have dissipated over the years - and the fact that I had presented the same general content area before assisted me further in terms of my overall preparation for the talk.

 

What your feelings were during the talk itself

I don’t like working from a script - I think that if you’re going to present at a conference, it makes a lot of sense to speak contemporaneously. It adds a dramatic feel to the experience that you don’t get when you watch the recording on YouTube. And even without a script, I don’t seem to suffer from the problem of going markedly over or under time in any of my talks - I think this is one of the great values of experience, as you soon get a feel for how much time a particular point is going to take you to make.

I had been concerned that there would be technical problems. Zoom is a powerful platform, but the free version has its limitations, most notably that only the host can manage the Breakout Rooms - there’s no option to assign a co-host so that the speaker can take charge. However, I still managed to get the participants talking - that was the whole point of the session, really - by coordinating closely with the host on the Bielsko side: when I wanted a Breakout Room, I simply relayed my instructions and they were put immediately into effect. On the whole I think it worked well, showing that even with built-in limitations such as licence restrictions, it’s still possible to do almost everything you would want to do.

The black-screen effect of online conferences isn’t something that bothers me anymore - if you expect something to be the case, you can plan around it, and I did that here by telling the participants that there would be an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the session. I was helped here once again by the coordinator, who closely observed the chat box during the talk, and was ready with a kind of Q&A summary at the end.

 

Post-conference reflections

I was pleased with how the session went. I would have appreciated a little more control over the Breakout Rooms, but otherwise I think the talk went smoothly. I doubt I’d have done anything different given the opportunity - the talk covered what I wished to cover, and from the feedback I’ve received since the conference I can see that the participants felt likewise.

As for future conferences - most definitely. Although I have a deep desire to resume face-to-face conferences as soon as it is safe to do so, there are definite advantages to hosting conferences online, the main one being that you can attend or speak at a conference anywhere in the world, without having to leave your living room. The opportunities for speakers have multiplied - a rare silver lining to the cloud that was 2020.

 

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