Traveloteacher

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...

This is my first glog! I created it to show my students the exciting possibilities of web 2.0 technologies. It's an amazing tool so I'm going to use it with my class, as of tomorrow morning. I learned about Glogster from tweets by my PLN and my special thanks go to @ShellTerrell, @vale24 and @cristama who provided valuable links to this brilliant site and also to @NikPeachey for his comprehensive manual on Web 2.0 tools and @josepicardo for his remarkable Box of Tricks .

I'd given a lot of thought to travelblogging vs. edublogging and eventually I reached a decision to blog on two fronts: keep writing my travelogue and create a brand new educational blog. Unfortunately, this got me into another predicament: choosing a perfect name for my new blog. Different names kept popping into my head, such as A life in the day of a ..... teacher, Getting there, The smiling teacher, The happy teacher, etc. but Google ruthlessly showed me that all the best names had already been taken. Suddenly it occurred to me that Traveloteacher would be a perfect name for my edublog, not only because it is such a splendid, cool, unique, already well-known, ....(you name it...) blog name, but also because it shows who I am - both a teacher and a traveler. On the other hand, is it really of the utmost importance for your blog to have a catchy name? What's in a name? That which we call an edublog By any other name would inspire as profoundly. So I created a new traveloteac...

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 ...

Travelers don’t teach, teachers don’t travel, right? No, absolutely not! Take this blog's name, for instance. Traveloteacher. I invented it because I wanted to write not only about my own travels, but also about school exchanges and projects I organize with my students. But, to be honest, my blog has always been more about traveling, and much less about teaching. Then suddenly and for a reason as silly as following Ashton Kutcher, Twitter became a site I couldn't do without, although not before I got to know some amazing people from the ELT world, most of whom write brilliant edublogs and who have all contributed to my professional development as a teacher. I've been teaching for 23 years, and although I've been trying really hard to use new technologies for almost 13 years, I'm still a newbie, a digital immigrant in the e-world. Some of these blogs that I've been following ever since, are a real eye-opener, and have made me contemplate the idea about starting m...

Here are the reasons why we, a decent, law abiding family of four, decided to sleep at Dublin Airport. The first Lufthansa flight from Dublin was scheduled very early in the morning, with the check in starting at 5. This meant we had to get up at 4. The four of us exceeded the capacity of the rooms in most of the hotels in the airport area (children stop being children at the age of twelve in European hotels!) so we were supposed to book two rooms at a price that definitely exceeded the money we were willing to spend for such a short stay. There might be other people sleeping at the airport so we won't be standing out. If we get arrested, we'll sheepishly apologise and promise not to do that ever again, after which they might let us go find a room, well, two rooms in the nearest hotel. But it turned out to be an awesome experience, which we shared with people of all ages from different parts of the world. We ended up at a Starbucks on the third floor, where there are large armc...