Ester de Jong, Sunshine State TESOL

Sunshine State TESOL is a 400+ member TESOL affiliate in Florida, USA. In addition to chapter-led meetings and conferences throughout the state, we hold an annual conference in May, and maintain a Facebook website. This year, our Board engaged in a three-step, shortened strategic planning process. To get everybody on the same page, we first looked at our mission statement and considered what this mission meant to us, given our professional contexts. We divided our Board into three groups to reflect three contexts: K–12, teacher preparation, and English teaching to adults. We talked about what we thought was missing from the statement and what needed to be clarified or emphasized. Our second step was to reflect on what it means to be successful. We tried to finish the sentence “Sunshine State TESOL will be successful when…”. This vision statement resulted in different themes or areas, including advocacy, professional development, community building/networking, and building strong relationships with the local chapters. Next, we generated short-term, mid-term, and long-term strategies for each of these areas. Our last step was to prioritize our activities for this coming year. This year, our focus will be on creating new opportunities for professional development using available technologies and examining new ways of disseminating resources for our members.

We took this vision into our 38th conference. Our theme, “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast,”challenged presenters to think outside the box.Thanks to the amazing outreach by local chapter members and a great conference team who worked endlessly to put together a program at the Marriot Hotel in West Palm Beach, Florida. Almost 400 teachers, teacher educators, and researchers attended the conference. We had a great line-up of keynote speakers who challenged us to consider the implications of current educational technologies (James May), lessons from school change and reform (Paul Gavoni and Scott Neil), research on learning mind sets (Janna Peskett), and looking at academic language through state and national standards (Luciana de Oliveira). We invite you to take a look at our program at http://sstesol.org/?page_id=11.

One of our goals this year was to engage attendees throughout the conference and to build community beyond attending a keynote or a session. Several events contributed to this goal, including our traditional welcome reception and luncheon. We also used technology, however, to accomplish our goal.

Strategy #1: Gamification

James May, professor at Valencia State College and long-term leader in our affiliate, helped us with this goal. James has been recognized in the state and nationally for his expertise in educational technology. He created multiple challenges for our conference attendees—they were asked to complete certain tasks (using technology) on a daily basis. Among the challenges was the Selfie/Groupie Challenge, where we had to take selfies/groupies and share our favorite conference pictures. The more you shared, the more experience points (XP) you would earn. Praise-a-Presenter was another challenge where we invited participants to share their conference experience.Each “game” was purposefully designed to encourage participants to become more familiar with a technology that could be easily translated to classroom use. Each day, the scores of those who participated were displayed on a real leadership board and the person with the highest score received a technology gift, such as Google cardboard VR Box Reality 3D glasses, helmets, and 3D coloring books. The Gamification outline and two participants’ videos can be found on our Sunshine TESOL website at http://sstesol.org/?p=1809.

Strategy #2: Bricks, clicks, and teacher tricks

Tony Erben (Professor at the University of Tampa) and James May facilitated two sessions on using technological applications in the language teaching classrooms. Particularly effective were the hands-on opportunities for participants to experience and try out multiple applications that could simultaneously support listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills

We will continue to look for innovative, new ways to connect, build community, and acknowledge and share the amazing expertise that our members have at the conference and throughout the year.

Ester de Jong is currently Past President of Sunshine State TESOL and President-Elect for TESOL International Association. She is a Professor in ESOL/Bilingual Education at the University of Florida.