Traveloteacher

I have just noticed that I tend to put my computer on stand by rather than shut it down. Firstly, because I don't have time to exit all those open tabs and applications as I sit at my computer until I have to literally run off if I want to avoid being late to school. Secondly, my computer is ready to take me back to where I left it in a jiffy. Am I hooked on technology? I don't think so. It's all about relationships and learning , says Kevin Jarrett in his thought-provoking post.

This fantastic video was created by a dear twitter friend of mine, Tomaz Lasic, an English teacher from Australia.

One of the most influential Croatian computer magazines published an article about the failures and successes of 2009 in its December issue. Twitter, according to them, was a failure of the year. I freaked out when I saw it and didn't waste a second to write them a letter and teach them what twitter is about. Can you imagine that they ran it in their January issue on the letters-to-the-editor page with the headline The Fellowship of Twitter . I mean, I'm just an ordinary language arts teacher, no one would say that I'm a computer geek, and my letter was published in a computer magazine?! How cool is that? And BTW, doesn't the title brilliantly depict the true essence of twitter?

I was tagged by Shelly Terrell in her wonderful challenge to write about our most inspirational educators. German was my first foreign language. I studied it for 5 years before other languages came along. These days, however, it's all about English. At school, out of 21 classes that I teach per week only two are German. I write my blog in English, I google in English, I tweet in English, I sometimes communicate with other German teachers in English. However, the most inspirational educators who have deeply influenced me belong to the German side of my education. Mr. Kazimir Sviben was my primary school German teacher. It was him who opened the door to the amazing world of foreign languages. He was one of the first multitaskers and lifelong learners I have ever met and he always encouraged us to pursue our dreams. His teaching instilled a love of languages in his students, many of whom became language teachers later on. Professor Viktor Zmegac, my German Literature professor, is on...

Yes, I'm thrilled, I'm overwhelmed with joy and I'm sure this is how the Oscar winners feel.... Thank you Eva, Valentina and Karenne for nominating my wiki project Greetings from the world . Thank you Edublogs judges for shortlisting it. My heartfelt thanks to all the members of the wiki who created such amazing glogsters. You're awesome!!! If you feel like voting, just click here . There's another nomination I want the world to know about: talk.ed is nominated for the Best Educational Use of a Social networking Service. Monika and her webclass definitely deserve this award because they help, they encourage, they support.... they care !

It's 7 pm in our virtual room. Monika and I extend a warm welcome to our students. The long awaited virtual lesson begins. We listen to American students talking about Thanksgiving. Croatian students ask questions. Whoever wants to speak next, raises their hand. At the end, they all deserve a round of applause. The 'freedom bloggers' in two classrooms on two continents raise their glass of sparkling cider and toast to change. Tupac Shakur is singing in the background. Everybody is happy. Too good to be true? Unfortunately, yes. Our first Connect Pro Meeting was complete chaos. The beginning was almost perfect, though. A very friendly CARNet guy went over the whole meeting with me. I was even sent a tweet by @connectusers, the official community for users of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro wishing us fun: Then I sent the address of the site to Monika, but she just couldn't open it. Later we found out that it was blocked by her school district! However, after 29 hours of phone...

When @shellterrell tweeted about glogster, I immediately set up a glogster project called Greetings from the world. @monk51295 showed me her voicethread presentation for the district people and it didn't take me long to start my own voicethread for teaching Croatian. @chickensaltash blogged about Dvolver and soon movie making was the new game in my classroom. I don't remember who first tweeted about wallwisher, but, yes, I have one of these too. I took part at the Pecha Kucha night last week and my students already know how to avoid death by PowerPoint. But the PK night made an even deeper impact on me. Ever since then I've been dreaming about Adobe Connect Pro Meeting and its use in the classroom. And guess what! Today, only ten days after I first heard about this Adobe application, I have a virtual room scheduled on the Croatian Academic and Research Network site. CARNet implemented this video conferencing software so that we, teachers and students can use it in order ...

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...

Every now and then my students are assigned a task to create posters on different topics. Some of them turn out great and are then displayed in the classroom for a while, but all of them end up in the waste paper basket at the end of the school year. I'm happy to announce that web 2.0 has brought an end to these ecologically unconscious habits. Glogging is a new game in town. Edu.Glogster is an amazing tool that enables students to create online posters. It's easy to use and can be embedded in a blog, wiki or website. I believe that glogster is a great collaboration tool that allows valuable cross-cultural communication. That's why I've set up a new project called Gloggings from ... the world. Students of all ages and from all parts of the world are invited to create online posters about their country, which will be published in the wiki I created specifically for this purpose. Their glogs are similar to postcards or greetings that we send when traveling (or better: us...

Less than an hour ago, Shelly Terrell published my post on her blog as part of the series Investigating International Edtech Issues, called Sweet High-Tech Dreams . Shelly told me that I write just like a professional native speaker . Then within minutes the link got retweeted on twitter by Jason Renshaw , who left a comment saying excellent article, extremely well-written and illuminating . Today is my birthday and these two comments are a wonderful present. Thank you Shelly and Jason! I like writing but sometimes it is a long and difficult process. I'm a slow writer. Maybe because I'm a perfectionist. I don't know what's wrong, I just know that something is not right. I'm simply not satisfied with it. I struggle with words, I fight with my feelings, I contend for my thoughts. Then suddenly I can feel it and I know this is what I was looking for. However, after it's finished, I'm sure that I've given my best, but still have doubts and think that nobody ...