A+personal+introduction-Gary

Hello, my name is Gary Betney and I'm your ESP teacher for this semester.

I'm from Manchester which is in the North-West of England so therefore I am English, but I could also describe myself as British as England is a part of Great Britain. My home city is famous for football as Manchester United play there. However it is also the home of the Industrial Revolution and the Cooperative Movement. The University of Manchester is where the world's first stored program electronic computer was developed and Alan Turing, who is generally regarded as one of the fathers of Computer Science, also worked at the University. The first computer built at the University was called the Baby and was 5.2m wide and 2.24m long. A very big baby!

I studied Psychology at the University and learnt to program in BASIC over thirty years ago in order to be able to design and run computer based experiments. Later I studied Educational Technology for my Masters Degree. Here at Rustaq College I teach Educational Technology Using I.T. on the ELT program as well as English. The other part of my job here involves training the teachers to use BlackBoard, SIS and other E-Learning applications.

In the past I have lived and worked in Spain, France, Germany, Venezuela, India and Kuwait as well as the U.K., however my main home now is in Tenerife which is a small Spanish island just off the coast of Morocco and this is where I spend my summer holidays.

We will use the books and materials that the other sections are using as the exam will be based on these, but I will also include a greater element of I.T. related topics and vocabulary to help you with your major and hopefully to make the subject more relevant and interesting.

I hope you enjoy the course!

Gary (gary.betney@cas.edu.om)