Traveloteacher

It's been almost a year since I attended the first Partners in Learning Institute in Seattle along with 49 innovative educators from all over the world. We've stayed in contact ever since on the various social networking sites, the Dirty Fifty Facebook page being the one I like most.  All these educators have inspired and motivated not only their students, but also their fellow teachers. That's why they've been interviewed for Daily Edventures , a blog by Anthony Salcito, Vice President of Worldwide Education at Microsoft. I'm really proud and honored to be one of these global heroes in education . You can read more about what we've been doing and how we've been trying to change education and bring innovation into our classrooms. Here are the interviews in the order they were were published. Learn from your students and don't be afraid to fail Teaching teachers Learning and teaching: The twins of eTwinning Education is a fundamental...

As the school year is getting to its end, I've been thinking about how my teaching has changed over the past year or years. Not much, I regret to say! I preach 21st century teaching and learning, but when it comes to applying it in the classroom, it just doesn't seem to work in the way I want it to work. Maybe I'm too harsh on myself, but I feel that there's a missing link between the theory and (my) practice. So much has been written about the 21th C skills and as usual, I feel kind of lost in it. That's why I made a Pinterest board and now I'm pinning all the relevant websites to it so that they're at hand. I'm going to delve more deeply into them over the forthcoming holidays and hopefully be ready to roll in September.

Last week I had a wonderful opportunity to attend a Master Teachers Course organized in Prague by Intel Teacher Engage  and led by the one and only Ollie Bray . Ollie had 18 of us from Eastern Europe + Spain glued to every word he said and  made us do all the activities eagerly and enthusiastically for almost ten hours every day. He's an exceptional presenter, a skilful teacher trainer and a great person. Everything was meticulously organized by the wonderful Ruth Merrett from Intel who made it all run smoothly and who took care of all of us with a smile on her face. It was an absolute honour for me to be there with teachers from different countries, some of them Glogster ambassadors like myself, and to learn together with them and from them. One of the teachers in the course was my dear friend Rose, who I had the pleasure of meeting virtually almost three years ago when she joined my Greetings from the world project. It was a special moment when we first met in person - o...

Last year my students did a webquest on English speaking countries. They showed their findings in presentations that they delivered to their peers in the classroom. I uploaded some of their presos to my Slideshare account (I still have more than a half to upload). One of their tasks was to create interactive quizzes in power point, which are absolutely meaningless on Slideshare. However, last week I  came across QuizSlides , a great tool for ppts. QuizSlides enables you to keep interactive ppt multiple-choice quizzes interactive. QuizSlides is still in Beta and it's still free (The authors are planning to introduce premium features in the future, unfortunately.) But for the time being we can take advantage of this nice tool. I created a ppt  quiz based on the questions made by my students in their presentations and uploaded it to QuizSlides. Then I took the test myself to mark the answers. I got the embed code, but for some reason, it doesn't seem to work. There a...

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...

Richard Byrne from The Free Tech for Teachers first wrote about LyricsGaps in September 2011, but I introduced it to my students only recently. They loved it so much that they didn't want to leave the classroom. LyricGaps is a fun way to learn languages with songs. At the moment there are song-based quizzes in18 different languages, submitted by users from all over the world. For each song there are different modes for the user to choose from - Karaoke, Beginner (with a drop-down menu), Intermediate and Expert (fill in the gaps). The video clip is embedded on the page so that can  listen to the song and do the task at the same time. The quiz can also be printed out. What I like most about this application is the built -in dictionary which allows students to double click the word they don't know and the dictionary entry pops out. What's more, they can listen to the pronunciation of the word. The LyricsGaps authors invite teachers to create their own quizzes ...

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...