Traveloteacher

Back in June when we scheduled the third Teachmeet Int'l for September 29, I had no idea that I would spend my whole summer preparing for the workshops that I gave to teachers all over Croatia at the end of August (as part of the School 2.0 project by CARNet). I had no idea that September was going to be filled with so many projects and very tight deadlines that I had to beat. Add to this the massive school paperwork that is always due by the end of September and you'll understand that I was so terribly tired and exhausted that the thought of calling off the Teachmeet crossed my mind! But luckily, I don't give up that easily! And I'm glad I didn't because the very minute that all these educators from the four corners of the globe started coming to the Adobe room, all my tiredness disappeared into thin air. I enjoyed every single minute of the event! So much so that we even danced, both on the stage and in the chatbox! These two hours of pure enthusiasm, passion a...

SMILE (Social Media in Education and Learning) is a project launched by European Schoolnet (EUN) with the goal to improve our understanding of the challenges and opportunities of using social media in education. The EUN has been awarded an inaugural Digital Citizenship Research Grant by Facebook. It's a year-long project divided into three parts.The first, six-week long part was an online laboratoy for 100 European teachers led by Ollie Bray, during which we investigated different educational opportunities that social media offers. In the second part we have formed 6 Communities of Practice in order to highlight trends and best practices of how social media can be used in education. I'm the deputy leader of CoP 4 - Social Media for Professional Development. We have just created a questionnaire and we'd like to hear from as many teachers as possible how they use Facebook. The results of the poll will be published on our Facebook page as well as our blogs and we hope to ...

One of the columns on my Tweetdeck is reserved for #eltchat - and it has been so since the first #eltchat was held back in September 2010 - even though I've taken part only in a handful of #eltchats myself! #eltchat, in case you still don't know, is a fast, furious and focussed form of CPD for English language teachers held on Twitter. I was really taken aback to find out about the loss of eltchat.com, but am convinced that #eltchat will survive and continue to bring fantastic discussions which teachers can take part in or read about in transcripts that are regulary published and from which one can learn a lot. So I'm reposting Marisa and Shaun's post right here: For the last – well, almost two years now, since September 15 2010, #ELTchat has kept us on our toes and forged hundreds of professional and personal relationships amongst its followers who turn up on Twitter every Wednesday to talk about topics they have suggested and voted on – a community of peers...

I just found out about TypoEffects on the Educational Technology and Mobile Learning website and since it seemed fun and useful, I gave it a try. TypoEffects is still in beta and free for the time being, at least. It converts your images into typographical images or word clouds. There are two types of generators -  the Row-Text Image Generator allows you to insert an unlimited (?) number of words, while with the Word Cloud Generator you can use up to 16 words  only.. What I like most about this tool is that it lets me choose which parts of the photo I want to leave without the text. Also, it's possible to zoom in/out and there are a lot of colours to choose from.

In my presentations on the skills of the 21st century I often share with my audience the famous quote by William Glasser: "We learn... 10% of what we READ 20% of what we HEAR 30% of what we SEE 50% of what we SEE and HEAR 70% of what we DISCUSS with OTHERS 80% of what we EXPERIENCE PERSONALLY 95% of what we TEACH TO SOMEONE ELSE." Well, today I found out that William Glasser never said that. Who did, I have no idea. It might have been Edgar Dale , whose cone is frequently used to show how we learn. Some people say that these numbers are misleading and have no scientific acuracy . Nevertheless, I still believe that this quote is a good description of learning retention rates. All the learning pyramids that can be found on the Internet are in English, of course, so I made my own pyramid with numbers and icons only, so that it can be used in different  linguistic settings. For those who don't like pink, I made a more calming variant: .

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.