Traveloteacher

One the tasks that our Embedded-in-EU students had to do as part of our collaborative project was to create their own digital identity. First they discussed the importance of their own sensible and responsible behaviour in the cyberspace. Then they watched the Lorenzo video clip and we showed them our own examples of how to use different photo editors and MS Autoshapes to create their internet ID. We turned all their avatars into this PhotoSory slide show, which shows how creative and imaginative our students are.

Kelly Tenkely from iLearn Technology has recently blogged about The Bookshelf Muse, a blog that every English teacher should know about. The Bookshelf Muse is run by two writers, Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman or better to say two muses who unselfishly share their knowledge and want to help all those writers who suffer from writer's block. On their blog you can find several comprehensive thesauruses with lists of all the words and expressions that might come in handy when writing a blog post, a short story or just an ordinary descriptive essay. The Bookshelf Muse can be really useful for English language learners on the (upper-)intermediate to advanced level. Not only do the muses create lists of words used to describe the sight, the sounds, the smell, the taste or the touch, but they also provide helpful hints and tips on how to improve your writing skills. I highly recommend the Bookshelf Muse:

Last week I had a great privilege to attend the 2nd ISTEK ELT conference in Istanbul. Upon coming back I wanted to write a blog post about it, but then I thought Prezi might be a bit more convenient for me to say what it was like. ISTEK ELT Conference on Prezi

Yesterday was my second Twitter birthday. I got the most wonderful present ever – a tweet up in Istanbul! Who could have imagined it two years ago when I signed up for Twitter with a nickname that still sounds so meaningless, but which actually says who I am and where I from? Yesterday I met my virtual Twitter friends in person for the first time, but it felt as if I'd known them for my whole life. We all came to Istanbul to attend the 2nd ISTEK conference, an event that I only watched in my twitterfeed last year. I was thrilled to see Burcu and Shelly face to face, because they were the first two teachers who I stumbled upon by pure chance one day in May 2009 and who introduced me to this amazing world of educators. It was great to talk to Sue, Elizabeth, Willy, Petra, Ken, Gavin, Mark, Russell, Dave, Anna, Luke, Lindsay, Eric and David without being limited to 140 characters. (No, I have nothing against 140, quite to the contrary, I love it, we all do). I got a chance to meet R...

This year my students and I have started a new project with a school from Belgium. In the project, the students explore the world of widgets and "embeds", they collaborate and share what they have learned. Their first task was to set up their blogs and create headers with images of the networks they are "embedded" in. In order to make posters for headers they used MS AutoCollage. The full version of Autocollage can be downloaded from the Partners in Learning website and it's absolutely free for educators. Our students come from two different countries, but their networks seem to be so similar - almost all of them feel "embedded" in Facebook and YouTube. In the video below you can see how creative the students are. We are also holding a competition to choose the nicest header. Feel free to drop by and cast your vote .

Recently I've become an associate partner in a newly launched European project called APLaNet (Autonomous "Personal Learning Networks" for Language Teachers). The aim of the project is to introduce language teachers to social networking sites and help them build their personal learning networks. You can read more about this exemplary project in the post by Burcu Akyol , one of the coordinators of the project. I'm a strong supporter of social networks, especially Twitter, and I've already tried to introduce Twitter to newbies many times before - with a disastrous result! I failed every time but once. Now, I don't want to lament about that, but I've been thinking about what I've done wrong. And I think I might know the reason why my mentees haven't made it further than a couple of introductory tweets. What they needed was a constant, gentle push, which I didn't give, simply because I didn't want to be a bore. I used to tell them that Twitter ...

In support of Safer Internet Day, my students and I did some of the actitivies I wrote about in my last post. After seeing the video clip about parental protection and online dangers, my students took part in a walking debate. The idea for this activity came from the Debating the issues activity, which I downloaded from the excellent Think B4U Click Click website. However, unlike the suggested procedure, I decided to go paperless, so I created a short Power Point with five issues to be discussed. After reading out loud each of the statements, they took a stand and explained why they agree or disagree with it. What really surprised me was the fact that most of the students feel safe on the Internet. Some of them supported their feeling of safety with the fact that teachers and parents constantly talk about it. Others explained that they are very careful about the stuff they publish on their blogs or on Facebook. Only some of them think that adjusting Facebook privacy settings keeps ...