Traveloteacher

This twitter thing is absolutely amazing. Not only do you learn about various new tools that can be used in the classroom, but you also get invited to join webinars, online conferences and virtual round table discussions. Yesterday, I jumped at the opportunity to join my first Pecha Kucha night, held in a virtual classroom on The Virtual Round Table site, where over the past two days the first virtual conference on language learning with technology took place. The conference was coordinated by Heike Philp from Lancelot school, and the Pecha Kucha was moderated by Shelly Terrell . I first heard about Pecha Kucha, when some teachers from my PLN tweeted about it as preparation for the TESOL France conference. Then I saw the recordings on Shelly's YouTube channel . The presenters were fabulous, just like the ones I saw yesterday. It was a fantastic experience, thanks to the brilliant presenters sharing 20 slides in 6 minutes and 40 seconds each. I liked it so much that I immediately ...

Whenever I start a new project with my students I have great, usually unrealistic expectations. It wasn't any different this September when I opened up a Ning site for my students. But life works in mysterious ways. Not in my wildest dreams could I imagine what my Ning will turn into. It took only one tweet to set the things in motion: @monk51295 read your post - we're experiencing the same with our class ning... i'm in colorado, usa, math, we should colab... :) #unboxed This is what it looked like at that time: Two schools on two continents, two classes eager to collaborate, two teachers keen on using web 2.0 tools in class. This is what we have today: One online class, one Ning for math, one Ning for English, one voicethread for Croatian, one project for learning to respect and to understand, one (better) world. And there's more to come, brilliant plans are afoot. The students have so many ideas, and we just need to hear what they want to say.

I can hardly believe that it's been a month since my last post. But what a month! Full of amazing web 2.0 adventures. In my last post I wrote about the successful launch of Ning with my 16-year old students as part of their Elective English Class. Only two students didn't join as they claimed they didn't have either a computer or the Internet access. However, after seeing what fun the other students were having, they suddenly got both a computer and the Internet access. Now I can't say they are eagerly participating in our online class, but they're there with us, and that's what matters. With time, their attitude might change. Anyway, I decided to integrate glogsterEDU , an excellent tool for creating mulitmedia posters, in my classroom. I wanted my students to present parts of Croatia to their peers from all over the world so I set up a wiki where they could display their glogs. We called it the Greetings from the world project and after several weeks of total...

Students in Croatian high school have three hours a week of the first foreign language (mostly English), but at my school we offer them an extra lesson, called Elective English, where we usually do tons of reading/listening/writing/speaking exercises as a preparation for the unified school leaving exams. This year, however, I decided to try out some of the web 2.0 technologies as part of my elective English class. Both the principal and the ICT teacher were entirely supportive of this idea and even offered to put me on the computer lab reservation list for the whole school year, which will probably make my fellow teachers frown on me, but I can live with that as long as I can use the lab with my class. As I couldn't make up my mind on whether to use Ning or Moodle for my first e-learning class, I decided to try out both, which turned out to be an impossible task. The first problem we encountered were the students' electronic identities and passwords which were given to them whe...