Sunday 29 March 2009

Hello world

Hi, I'm the director of Aviation English Asia. In this post, I'm going to introduce you to the way in which we are going to use blogging platforms and social networking sites.

We will be updating our blogs when we feel we have something beneficial to share with you. We don't want to make empty posts that waste your attention. However, we welcome our teachers and students to make posts and contribute to our blogs independently. We really want to help our learning community thrive. So, if you would like to contribute please email me and I will send you a login code. This applies to pilots and ATCOs, cabin crew, trainers, flight schools and airlines. We are interested in your progress.

We particularly want to keep you updated about the world of Aviation English and its development as a distinct form of ESL. This could be in the form of news from regulatory bodies and advances in teaching. As Aviation English teachers, we learn a lot from our students - our students are the real Subject Matter Experts - teachers just have the advantage of being able to communicate our thoughts in English.

We care about the development of our students, so we like to hear about progress in your careers. This is applies to both the ICAO Aviation English and the In-flight English students. To this end we are displaying links to job adverts on our sites. If you are successful in your career as a result of training at Aviation English Asia, please let us know. We all want to hear about your successes.

Some students are aware that we also have a Wordpress blog and presence on a few other social networking sites. The content is different in that the Blogger.com blog is focused on Flight Attendants whereas the Wordpress.com blog is focused on ICAO Aviation English for pilots and ATCOs, though readers are free to post comments on any of the sites that they choose. We chose to do this because we operate Asia wide and some platforms are more popular is some countries.

Blogs and social networking sites are important as they allow transparency in our organisation. We like to hear what you think, and also what you think we could do better. Every criticism is a gift so that we know what we can do better next time. You can give feedback on particular parts of the course, onsite sessions, instructors and any great ideas for the future that you may have.

So, here's what you can do. If you want to contribute send me an email at mje@aviationenglish.asia.