Traveloteacher

I'm a perfectionist and I'm hardly ever totally satisfied with the workshops and seminars that I deliver. But last weekend at the eTwinning contact seminar in Dubrovnik I was completely totally fully satisfied and euphorically happy with my workshops A Little Bit of Magic with Collaboration Tools . It was magical indeed! And I even had a magic wand and a magician hat filled with -I'm sure you would never guess! - with chocolate and gingerbread hearts, and what's more I also had my own (magician) assistant - Bart , with whom I also gave the opening plenary workshop called eTwinning on the Beach . In my Magic Workshop I introduced some useful web 2.0 tools to the participants from 9 European countries, but the best part of the workshop had nothing to do with technology - it was all about collaboration: it was about singing karaoke and making a lip dub together!  The participants were so enthusiastic and passionate about it and I immensely enjoyed every second of t...

I've been on eTwinning since May 2010 and have connected with many teachers from all over Europe. My students have collaborated with peers from Belgium, Germany, France, Romania and Turkey. I myself have launched several projects which have been more or less successful. But somehow I had always felt less  close to my fellow eTwinners than to my Twitter PLN - until last week when I attended the annual eTwinning conference in Berlin. 600 teachers from all over Europe gathered in Berlin to share ideas, to get inspired, to find new partners, to discover new worlds and above all to learn, learn, learn! Three days filled with passion and commitment, creativity and innovation passed in a flash. Such an event where you mingle with hundreds of enthusiastic life-long learners who are on the same wave length is bound to exceed all your expectations. When it comes to the incredible ease of connecting with teachers from all nationalities, the effortless flow of communication and a genu...

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.