Valentina Dodge

Valentina is a teacher, teacher trainer and online tutor. She works part-time at the University of Naples. She co-manages a small business consultancy specializing in tailor-made Business courses in the Salerno area and helps develop educational material.

She has worked in the field of education for the past twenty years and as a consultant for local and European projects for the past five. She is actively involved in setting up, running and mentoring trans-national projects at secondary school level involving learning technologies. In 2003 she coordinated a project (Liceo Scientifico Statale "Leonardo da Vinci" Salerno Due porti, due realtà a confronto (PON, misura 1.1.c ) which was selected for a European Day of Languages award and last year was actively involved in preparing webquests, podcast material and tutorials for funded curriculum projects between schools in Europe- guidance and training session for British Council eTwinning projects http://www.britishcouncil.org/etwinning-project-plans.htm

Valentina has also worked freelance for the British Council on a blended e-learning course for Italian school teachers in the Campania region. She is a regular contributor at British Council conferences nationally and has published articles on e-moderation and virtual teams. She writes a regular ICT column “Webtoo” for the TESOL Italy newsletter www.tesol.it. Valentina gives regular seminars, holds in-service workshops and teacher training courses on project work, Task-Based Learning and in recent years has helped teachers acquire the necessary pedagogical and technical skills ICT in the ELT classroom and she collaborates closely with the Trinity College Centres in Italy.

With Sheila Vine she helped develop and co presented the free exchange mechanism www.echatbox.com at the IATEFL National conference in April 2006. They also collaborated on a Blended Books workshop covering the blending of webquests and Business English textbooks /companion websites at Aberdeen IATEFL April 2007. Together they co-authored "eChatBox - dynamically creating a resource for real-time emoderators for HLT- Humanizing Language Teaching online pilgrims publication. Year 8; Issue 3; May 06. http://www.hltmag.co.uk/may06/index.htm ,and  “Cornered- The Experiences of Freelance Business English Teacher in Europe” for the same publisher. Year 8; Issue 5; September 06 http://www.hltmag.co.uk/sep06/sart04.htm

Valentina’s and Sheila’s chapter on Virtual Communities of Practice "Gender and moderation: the style's the thing" a book edited by Chris Kimble and Paul Hildreth is published by Information Age Publishing 2007 - " Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators" http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/mis/CLEE/Draft_Contents.html Volume 2, chapter 6

Valentina holds a University of Westminster BA, an International House RSA Cert (1986), Trinity College LTCL Diploma in TESOL (1993) and University of Sheffield Hallam TESOL PGDip (1994). She has also gained online teaching qualifications such as E-moderation skills and the Trinity quality- assured ‘ICT in the Classroom’ with The Consultants-E (2005-2006).