Traveloteacher

No one has ever taught me how to present. I learned it first by watching good and not so good speakers at virtual and IRL conferences, then by reading about it online and finally by doing it. And I'm still learning. No one has ever taught me how to teach presenting. I have never been asked to teach my students how to acquire presentation skills. But I'm doing it because I strongly believe that presentation skills are as essential for 21st century students as are critical thinking or problem-solving skills. My students learn how to present by doing it, not only in front of their classmates, but also in front of an international audience of their peers. Yes, I'm talking about StudentsMeet , an informal gathering of students, which we first organized in February and which gave the students from ten schools in seven countries a great opportunity to talk about their interests, to connect with their peers in real time, to speak English, to listen to many different accents, a...

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 ...