Traveloteacher

Last year I made some New Year resolutions: one was to meet my Twitter friends f2f, the other was to share with Croatian teachers everything I learned on Twitter. A year later, I think I may say I've accomplished my goals - to a certain extent. My blog for Cro teachers is still alive - by no means is it a lively, dynamic site, because only three people are subscribed to it and only rarely (actually: never) have my posts been inspirational or catchy to make my visitors leave a comment. However, there have been more than 2500 visits to the blog and more importantly, I've written 45 posts about different web tools that can be used in the classroom. Perhaps one day someone finds something useful in one of my posts. The tweet-ups began early in January when I met @kenwilsonlondon (and his wonderful wife Dede) in London. March brought a fantastic opportunity for a tweet-meet with @cheimi10 in Zagreb. In April I went to Berlin and met @janwebb21, @MrMalcontent, @w2YDAvid , @jugosl...

Merry Christmas to all the visitors of my blog! May your holidays be filled with joy, peace and love.

It's this Oscar-ish feeling again. Indescribable. Deena from Edu.Glogster created a glogster to celebrate ME ! Thank you!

Huge congrats to Viviana, Rose, Eva, Culya, Judy, Clara V., Clara G., , Shyam, Vicki, Gyöngyi, Jesstern, José, Candace, Valerie, Monika, Shannon, Heidi, Dan and Claudia. It's because of you and your wonderful students.

To my absolute delight, our Greetings From The World wiki has been shortlisted for the Best Educational Wiki Award. A big thank you to kind educators out there who nominated it this year again. A big thank you to those wonderful teachers and their amazing students who have been part of it since we started it in October 2009. (Do I sound a bit Oscar-ish? Well, I can't help it, that's who I am:) But what makes me the happiest teacher in the world right now is the fact that this wiki has grown from one single class of 24 students to 18 classes with 420 students from 12 different countries on 5 continents. Here they are, those wonderful teachers, my real virtual friends: Viviana Alayo , Colegio Machado de Assis, Joinville, Brazil Candace Townsley , Owasso Public School, Owasso, Oklahoma, USA Valerie Burton , West Jefferson School, Harvey, Lousiana, USA Dan Roberts , Saltash Community Schools, Saltash, UK Eva Büyüksimkeşyan and Culya Yapici , Esayan Armenian High School, Istanbul, T...

Quite a few members of my PLN spent the last weekend at a conference in Paris. I couldn't be there with them, (I strongly believe the time will come when I too will go to a conference and meet my PLN:-) but now I'm enjoying reading their reflections on their very special tweet-ups and the fabulous TESOL conference. One of the brilliant presenters and speakers at the conference was David Crystal. This weekend, imagine that, I had a fantastic opportunity to hear David Crystal give two talks at the 10th OUP Conference in Zagreb: Advanced Conversational English: fact and fiction and The perils of being a linguist. David Crystal held his audience of about 400 (or maybe even 500) teachers enthralled for over two hours. David Crystal didn't use power point. He didn't need it. His speech was powerful without it.

On December 1, 2009 an ICT teacher, a math teacher and an English teacher launched a website for their school-leavers with nothing but boundless enthusiasm. The website contained links to free exercises on the Internet as well as interactive exercises created by the above said teachers for their students. They also created a facebook fan page, a ning site and a twitter account for the website. The word about this free site for online preparation for the standardized school-leaving exam spread incredibly quickly all around the country. The website is no longer the place to practise writing, reading and listening skills, math and ICT for the students from one school only. It is THE place where school-leavers from the most southern island to the most northern village can get ready for their exams, provided they have internet access. And they do - in their schools if not in their homes. In the past year, more than 400 links to English exercises have been posted on the website, together wit...

This time last year I was beside myself when I heard that my wiki Greetings from the world was shortlisted for the Best Educational Wiki Award. And I will never forget the wee hours of one Friday in December when the winners were announced. Just don't ask me what I said in my winner speech. That I don't remember. But here I go with this year's nominations : Best individual blog: Janet's Abruzzo Edublog by Janet Bianchini Best individual tweeter: @europeaantje Best new blog: Webb's Wide World by Jan Webb. Best resource sharing blog: Esolcourses by Sue Lyon Jones Most influential blog post: The 30 Goals Challenge by Shelly Terrell Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion: #eltpics by @VictoriaB52, @cgoodey and @vickyloras Best teacher blog: Kalinago English by Karenne Silvester Best educational tech support blog: iLearn Technology by Kelly Tenkely Best educational use of audio: Breaking News English by Sean Banville Best educational use of v...