Natalia Pontalti Azize

I have been an English Language Teacher for over 10 years. I have a BA in Language Teaching by the Methodist University of Sao Paulo (2011) a CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching for Adults, by Cambridge (2012), and I’m starting an MA in Educational Technology and Learning Design at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, this Fall, 2018. In my career, I had the amazing opportunity of teaching in two countries, Brazil and Turkey, which gave me incredible experiences and brought me awareness of the role of culture in ESL teaching and learning. In Brazil, I taught mainly in Language Academies, where my students were mostly teenagers and adults. In Turkey, my teaching experience consists of 18 months teaching General English to adults in a Languages School, and 4 years teaching young adults (students between 18-21 years of age) in the English Language Preparatory Program (ELPP) at MEF University in Istanbul, the first fully flipped University in the world. At MEF, I was hired into a team to design the flipped curriculum of the ELPP from scratch. At the time, I was already an enthusiast of Learning Technologies and had a good deal of knowledge of Blended and Flipped Learning, so I was more than eager to be part of this challenge. During this process, I had to switch hats from English instructor, to curriculum designer, to assessment writer, to educational technologies researcher, all of which allowed me to learn and grow remarkably. In the past four years working with the flipped model, I was given the opportunity to design and teach my own seven-week flipped elective course on film analysis, where freshmen students could learn or sharpen a range of skills in English, while learning various aspects of film criticism. Also, I was part of the Google Apps for Education pilot team (a.k.a. Google Suite for Education). Along with two more peers, I designed and delivered training sessions to encourage and educate other instructors in the use of these technologies to enhance the flipped experience for both educators and learners.