Miss Homophone

I created the image above during the April 2019 NaPoWriMo/ GloPoWriMo challenge. If you are unfamiliar with GloPoWriMo, the purpose of the challenge is to write a poem a day and the participants are provided with a new (optional) prompt every day. This is the seventh GloPoWriMo I have completed. If you would like to read my poetry, it is in my other blog.

I wrote Miss Homophone on Day 14, when the prompt was to use homophones/homographs/homonyms. It is a silly little poem, but I wrote it with my students in mind. Then I decided to share it with other teachers, which is why I have created this handy shareable image and equipped it with a Creative Commons licence.

There are several ways this poem can be used:

1. to teach the students the concept of homophones (which is why I have given the lady this very unusual surname)

2. to teach them some of the more common homophones

3. as a dictation (OK, this could be a little cruel, I admit)

These are just a few ideas. I am sure you can think of more ways to use this poem with your students.

Enjoy!

The Tree: Some Viideo Activities

I am republishing one of my old posts here. I believe The Tree is a great clip for those first classes when your students are getting to know each other and you want them to learn how to work as a team.

The Tree is one of my favourite short videos of all times. It always puts me in a good mood. You can read the story behind this clip here.

How would you use this video in class?

Here are some ideas:

1. Why did the boy try to move the tree? Surely he knew he wasn't strong enough for that?

2. Why was the boy first joined by the children? Why did they look so happy?

3. Discuss: "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” How would you define the boy? A born leader? A crazy kid? Or just someone who felt that he had to do something?

4. Why did the people join the boy?

5. Give the clip a new title.

6. If you had to define the force that moved the tree, what would you say? Was it the boy's initiative? Or the team spirit of everybody else? Both? Something else?

7. Can we always change the circumstances in which we live, or are we sometimes helpless? Discuss.

8. How important is team work in today's society?

9. How important is team work in a language classroom?

10. Do you feel that you are a part of a team in your classroom? Why/not?

Now retell the story in the first person singular, pretending to be one of the people you saw in the clip.

What would you do with The Tree in your classroom? Please add your ideas in the Comments section.


Image of the fallen tree: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Fallen_Tree_%282451075658%29.jpg By Mary-Lynn from Taos, NM, United States (Fallen TreeUploaded by Vux) [CC BY 2.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Keep Your Online Learners Motivated

Another round of EVO sessions ended some time ago and this post has been sitting for some time in my Drafts folder, so it's time I finished it. You can see here which sessions were on offer and, if you want to keep up with EVO all year round, you can join our Facebook group, or our Google+ community. EVO is a great way for teachers to learn new skills and to connect. EVO 2018 was no exception and the discussions were lively.

This year I took Nelly Deutch's wonderful Moodle for Teachers session. It was the only session I took, contrary to my habit to multitask, but I was more than busy. In Week 4 we created collaborative courses and I teamed up with my BFF Sneza Filipovic and Kim Z. to create a teacher training course on Moodle. My segment of the course was called Keep Them Motivated and in it I revisited a topic that is very dear to my heart - student motivation. I focused specifically on the motivation of online course participants. I believe this topic is very relevant, so I would like to present it here as well.

What I tried to do was examine common reasons for high dropout rates in online courses and explore the use of icebreakers, forum discussions and badges as ways to engage and motivate our online learners.

As you may be aware, creators of MOOCs and free online courses in general often complain of high dropout rates. When you join an online session, you are often guided by your natural curiosity only and that sometimes makes it hard to stick around until the end. I myself have dropped out of more free online courses than I can remember, but I did get hooked a couple of times. I am addicted to online learning, and I looked at the topic from the point of view of a learner, rather than that of a teacher. And, while I don't have any magic solutions, I did come up with a couple of things that might help.

Most of the students who drop out of an online course apparently do so during the first week. Again, a large number of dropouts will be those who never even logged in. Those people might be lost as course participants, unless you are willing to write a personal email to each and every one of them (which might not be very practical in a MOOC). One way to prevent this might be sending an email with instructions on how to join and how to use the platform before the course starts. Or you might try one of the solutions I offered in this short tutorial:

Icebreakers are very important during the first week and they can serve both to introduce the participants to the platform and to each other.

I looked at icebreakers in more detail here:

If you have managed to get your course participants to join and introduce themselves, you are off to a good start. If you want to keep your learners engaged, however, you need to prepare well before that first week. I think the battle for participation is won or lost before the course begins and that's where course design plays a vital role. Still, even if you have designed a most wonderful, most engaging course and survived the first week, don't sit back and relax just yet. A lot of people disengage soon after the first week and again, as a learner, I have done this many times. Some of the courses I dropped out of were really great and I am sorry I didn't persevere, but, you know, life happens.

In my second PowerPoint presentation I looked at some ways you can keep your learners engaged in later weeks and some measures you can take if things don't go all that well:

And I apologise for the way that video ended abruptly. I was using the free version of Screencast-o-matic back then. I have upgraded in the meantime and I hope to write a separate blog post about this great and inexpensive tool. I also hope to write a blog post about badges. I love badges as a learner and I find them very motivating, but they deserve a separate blog post.

There are no easy answers to how you motivate your online learners. The fact that you have created a great course and offered it for free should be enough to make you proud. Online learning is different from face-to-face learning and we shouldn't expect the same level of commitment from our online participants that we get in our classrooms. Besides, if the course stays online and if it stays open, people will keep returning to it, the way I returned to this post after almost two months. I would love to see more online courses that stay open for participation year-round and where people can keep connecting to each other and to the instructor whenever they decide to.

My Blog is Ten Years Old

I started this blog ten years ago on this very day. I had just bought my first internet-enabled computer (back then the digital divide was a real thing and Serbia was really lagging behind other countries). The whole wide world was opening before my eyes and that's when I joined my first two EVO sessions. One of the sessions I had joined was Blogging for Educators and, with the help of the moderators, I started this blog. It was January 2008.

I have always liked writing, so I quickly became passionate about blogging. Back then, many English teachers were. There was a whole network of bloggers and we supported each other. Then, one by one, we got a little tired. A lot of us started blogging less and less often. To me, this happened gradually and I was in denial for a long time. No, my blog was doing fine, no, I was still passionate about blogging, I just didn't update as often any more. Several times I declared that my blog was out of hibernation, that I was back. Then, some two years ago, I had to admit it to myself: I had given up blogging, maybe for good.

This wasn't happening to me only. Others were giving up blogging and some blogs I enjoyed reading were no longer being updated. I am talking about English language teaching blogs here and I am not generalising. The blogs I have in mind are the ones that originated around 2008, more or less at the same time as mine. We were just tired, I suppose.

Then, about a month ago, Janet Bianchini brought her blog back to life. Janet and I have been blogging buddies for a long time now. We have encouraged each other with comments and kept each other going. When Janet stopped blogging, I told myself that it was OK to stop too. But now her blog is back and thriving, so I have no more excuses not to do the same. I have promised Janet I would get back to blogging. Also, I believe if a blog has been online for ten years, it deserves to be treated well. So, here I am. EVO sessions are back and I always have so much to say during EVO sessions. I have some other ideas too (I have basically planned my next few posts), but more about that later. I even have an idea about another blog I would like to start (maybe next summer, during the holidays) and it will be something completely different from what I have been doing so far. I will say no more except that this new blog will not be about English language teaching at all. And, of course, there is always my poetry blog, which comes to life every April, during the GloPoWriMo challenge. So, once a blogger, always a blogger, I suppose.

50 Activities for the First Day of School - A Review

The first day of school is always stressful for me. I believe this is true for most teachers. During the school year, we try to adapt to our students' needs and expectations and to fine-tune our teaching to help each individual student make progress. We find out about their hobbies and interests and try to provide materials that will keep them motivated. We lack all this vital information about them on the first day. We don't even know their names. In return, they know nothing about us.

So, we use icebreakers. Icebreakers serve multiple purposes - they can help you learn their names or assess their English in an informal way. They also relax the students and create that group spirit which is so important.

It is that time of the year again and warm-up activites are very important during these first few weeks of school, which is why I was really happy when Walton Burnes asked me to review his new book, 50 Activities for the First Day of School.

The book is divided into three sections: Getting to Know Them, Assessing and Evaluating and Setting the Tone. The first section is devoted to activities aimed at helping the teacher learn more about the students and helping the students learn more about each other and the teacher. The first few activities help with learning the names, such as Name Chain and Memory Chain for example. I like Going on a Picnic, which combines name learning with a nice vocabulary revision. Like most other activities in the book, this one can be modified to suit your current teaching needs and I believe it can be used later on in the course too, with the accent on vocabulary recycling, rather than on learning the names. There are activites which help the learners find out more about their teacher, such as Ask the Teacher or the more unusual Tell Me about Me. There are some activities which promise to be madly fun, such as Snowball Fight or Snowball Texting, those that focus on their hobbies and areas of interest, such as Expert Game, old classics like Desert Island Choices and Simon Says. I love Walton's version of Time Capsule, which focuses a lot on the language.

Assessing and Evaluating, as its name says, is there to help you assess their English in an informal way. Label the Classroom is a simple activity that is great for learning or recycling vocabulary. Classroom Scavenger Hunt requires a little more preparation on the side of the teacher, but is very much worth it.  You will again meet some old friends here, such as Sentence Auction Assessment, or Needs Association Survey, but they will always come with a new idea for using them. There are a lot of suggestions for how these activities can be modified to suit each teacher's individual situation. Complete the Sentence and Goal Setting are also very useful and adaptable.

The final section is Setting the Tone. It is there to set and negotiate classroom rules, give advice on how to learn and introduce them to the book and the syllabus. My favourite is the Rule-Breaking Role Play, which will definitely generate a lot of laughter in the classroom. Two other activities I recomment are Study Habit Myths and Syllabus Scavenger Hunt, which are both interactive and fun, while at the same time they introduce the students to the course and teach them how to study.

I give this book five stars. I feel privileged for the opportunity to review it on my blog. The book is inexpensive and affordable. You can buy it in paperback or as an ebook. Go to this page if you would like to buy it or just take a closer look at it. On the book page you will also find some sample activities, advice for the first day of school, as well as a collection of resources and a great Pinterest board to follow.

And if you try some of the activities from the book, please feel free to write about how it went in the Comments area. 

Let's Map It Out

By Nicoguaro - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0



This is my "moderator post" for Week 3 in eTextbook Teachers (#ebookevo). This is where I will offer some advice and support. I will try to be useful, I know you have a lot of work to do. Week 3 is going to be the week in which you map out your ebook chapter and make a final choice of the publishing option for your ebook.

I will focus on mind mapping here, simply because I already wrote a blog post about publishing last year.  Feel free to read that too, even though most of what I wrote about there refers to Week 4.

And, if you are wondering which publishing option I will choose, it will be FLIPHTML5. I used it last year and I was happy with the result. It looks like a digital book and you can embed videos, links and images. There is also the option of enabling PDF download, which is perfect if the students want to print your book or read it offline. FLIPHTML5 can be used online, or downloaded to your computer. And it is free.

So, mind mapping. Why should you do it? I can think of three reasons:

1. Mind mapping will help you think and brainstorm. I literally brainstormed my ebook chapter into my mind map this year. I started with two separate ideas. Idea 1 was that I wanted this chapter to be about learning vocabulary. I wanted my upper-intermediate students to learn some new vocabulary and I wanted them to become more effective vocabulary learners. Idea 2 was that I wanted to use a poem and create some activities connected to it. This second idea came to me thanks to one of the #ebookevo participants, Mary Hillis, who suggested it to me in the first week of our workshop. The poem is called When I Am Old, I Shall Wear Purple. So how do I connect a poem about old age and learning vocabulary? Here's what I came up with:

2. The second reason is that mapping it out will help you organise yourself better once you start writing your chapter, by providing a visual reminder about what your chapter should contain. Of course it is not final, you can keep adding to it. And, by creating it, you are not committing yourself to everything that you have included. You are still in the brainstorming stage and you are allowed to change your mind.

3. Last but not least, a mind map is a beautiful visual. You can use it at the beginning of your chapter to let your students know what it is going to be about. You can use it at the end of the chapter to remind them what they have learnt, or as a benchmark. You can even invite them to add their own comments and visuals to the map.

There are many mind mapping tools and they are mostly easy to use. It all depends on your preferences and the device you are using. If you want to create it on your phone, you will want a phone app. I have used my Windows tablet and Nova Mind was my app of choice. It is relatively easy to use and the Lite (free) version is quite decent. You can save the map in a variety of formats and they even provide a free cloud for your maps. Here's what mine looks like online, in the cloud. And here's the one I created for my last year's chapter.

I would love to hear about other ways you use mind mapping in TEFL, as well as your experience with other mind mapping tools you have tried. Please post the comments here in the blog, or in our Google+ group.

EVO 2016 - Week 1

It's the busiest time of the year. EVO sessions have started. I am one of the eTextbook Teachers (#ebookevo) moderators, but I wasn't too busy last week. I am moderating Week 3, which means that I am warming up right now (expect another blog post really soon). In Week 1 I re-introduced myself to the community, caught up with some old friends and met a few new ones. We have 100 new members! This promises to be another great year for #ebookevo.

I have joined three other sessions: Media Resources and Emotions (a fascinating topic), Teachers as Designers and Class-Based Research. I have also signed up for ICT4ELT. I take this course every year simply because I like to be a part of the community, but I don't always participate. Last year I decided to take a refresher and to devote my time to doing the exercises. I collected the badges and received the certificate. Which means that I will not be participating so regularly in ICT4ELT this year. I did sign up and I'll check in from time to time. One of the reasons I want to do this is to support my BFF Sneza, who is a first-time moderator this year. I am so proud of her.

In most courses this was the intro week, but we also learnt a lot. In Class-Based Research we watched this video and read this text about action research. Some of you may remember that I did action research in 2012 as a part of my Oregon Webskills course. It was really useful and it helped me grow as a teacher. Reflective practice does that. It was also very useful for my students to participate in this project, which lead to this presentation later on. I would really like to do action research one more time. I have a vague idea that I would like it to be about how my students learn vocabulary, but I am still not very clear about what I want to do.

I always attend four or five EVO sessions and people often ask me how I manage. Now, here's my secret: I focus on a single thing that I would like to do (for example a question or a problem I would like answers to) and do it from different perspectives in different courses. Or I focus on a single group of students and their needs. It works, believe me. This year my question is: How do my students learn vocabulary? To make things easier, I will focuse on my B2 students. I have two B2 groups - one is doing a general English upper-intermediate course and the other one is preparing for the Cambridge First exams.

In Teachers as Designers Week 1, we did something called The Dream Bazaar. Here's mine:

Now, this was what I came up in Week 1. In the meantime, I have had other ideas. Why limit the project to just one type of vocabulary-learning activities? Why not give the students a taste of various activities to choose from? And why not ask them which ones they like best? And why not put all of these activities into an ebook chapter, which is my Week 4 #ebookevo homework?

Stay tuned and let's see how this idea evolves.

My Blog Is Eight Years Old

Photo Credit: Leo Reynolds via Compfight cc


My blog was born on January 22nd, eight years ago. There have been ups and downs and I don't update it as often as I used to, but it has been an incredible tool for personal and professional growth. It has provided reflective practice and served as a learning eportfolio. It has helped me connect to other bloggers from my niche and grow, both as a teacher and as a writer.

Happy birthday, blog. 

Looking Back, Looking Forward

First of all, Happy New Year. I hope it is a great one for all of us.

2015 was a really good year for me, professionally. I know I didn't update this blog much, but I was super busy elswere.

The highlight of my year was the British Council Trainer Development Course, which took place last spring and which I completed successfully. So, I am now a teacher trainer and I have got a shiny new certificate to prove this.

It was a great course, though very hard physically. We all learnt a lot and we formed lasting friendships. The best thing of all was that we had a fantastic teacher. She supported us every step of the way.

I will never think of this course without thinking about my teacher, Danijela Serafijanovic. And I will never think about this course without a sadness in my heart. For, we lost her. The illness was sudden and it took her away quickly.

I don't know how to talk about this, or deal with my feelings. And, when I get stuck on something, I tend to write poetry. So, here's a poem I wrote for Danijela.

The Certificate

You are standing on the corner,
in your best clothes,
holding a piece of paper.
It is pink and crisp.
You are careful not to bend it.
You turn around,
but you are all alone.
Suddenly you have forgotten
how to cross the street.
It is your first day at school,
but no one came to pick you up.
You don’t know the way home
and there is no adult to take your hand.
Then you remember
that you are the adult now.
She left, but not before
she passed it all on
to you.

It is hard to lose a teacher. I hope I can pay her a tribute every time I give a workshop, or present in public. Maybe even through blog posts.

There is one other thing that kept me busy last year (and will keep me busy in the year to come as well), and that's SEETA. SEETA is short for South Eastern Europe Teachers' Association. We are an NGO now. I first got involved with SEETA through courses and workshops they organised, then there was a webinar on blogging, which was followed by a blogging forum I moderated. Last year our Chair Anna Parisi was kind enough to offer me a place in the SEETA Board. I am a Volunteers Manager now, which basically means that I coordinate volunteers and deal with any issues that might arise connected to SEETA volunteers. I am also a member of the advertising team and I post to Facebook on new SEETA activities.

SEETA community is very supportive and I am grateful for the opportunity to give something back to it. If you have never attended a workshop or a webinar on the SEETA Moodle, I suggest you give it a try and I am sure you will come back for more.

And then, there are EVO sessions. Last year I was an EVO moderator for the first time. I moderated EbookEVO and it was a great experience. Guess what - I am doing it again this year and it starts on Monday. Please join. You will learn a lot about creating and curating your own e-textbooks, and this will empower you in the classroom, by giving you more control over the materials you use with your students.

There are a few other EVO sessions that I would like to attend, but more about that in my next blog posts. If you are a reader of this blog, then you know there is always more activity here during EVO then during the rest of the year. This year, I am hoping to change that.

I miss this blog. It is the place where I used to come in order to clear my mind and make sense of things. The writing process was never easy here, but it was so useful. I feel that I have grown as a teacher just by writing occasionally in this blog during the last eight years. Since I started my poetry blog some two years ago, I started coming here less and less.  I have always loved writing and my poetry blog gave me instant gratification - I would spend up to an hour on a poem and that was it. Nothing like the laborious process that went into creating posts on my teaching blog.

I am not big on resolutions, especially the unrealistic ones that most people create at the beginning of each year, only to abandon them a couple of weeks later. I believe in seizing the moment and playing it by ear. And doing it all year round. Or, if you must write down your resolutions, keep the bar low and the goals achievable. Still, there is one resolution I made for 2016 which concerns this blog. I am going to write at least one blog post every month. Yes, I am keeping the bar low. And the goal is achievable. Let's see if I can find the discipline to do it.

I have got other plans for 2016. I would like to present at a conference or two. And a longer teacher training workshop would be a nice thing.

Besides that, we will see. I will just play it by ear, as usual.

EVO Week 5 - Saying Goodbye

Another EVO is over. It was my eight and all I can say is that I still have a lot to learn. I was very lucky this year with the sessions I chose. They were all great. I managed to finish five and I moderated one of them. I learnt new skills - how to make videos, how to help students with pronunciation, how to create lesson plans for a flipped classroom. I took a refresher course in ICT4ELT and I managed to collect all five badges. Above you can see the badge to Week 5. And here's my ICT4ELT certificate:

In Flipped Learning, we said goodbye to the session and migrated to this Ning for more flipping.

The moderators of Teaching Pronunciation Differently shared their YouTube channel with us.

In #ebookevo, we published our final chapters. One of the weekly tasks was to create a cover for our ebook. I used PicMonkey to create mine.

Then I played around with this tool and created a 3D version of my cover.

After trying out multiple tools and platforms for my chapter, two stood out for me. One is FLIPHTML5. I really like the way my ebook looks on their platform:

I know I am being a traditionalist here, but my second favourite is Microsoft Word:

It is downloadable  and editable. It is easy to navigate through the document and it has a clean, simple look. I had originally embedded the videos, which is possible to do in the offline version of Word 2013, but then I replaced them with hyperlinked snapshots, because the videos wouldn't work in Word Online.

If you prefer PDF, you can download it from this link.

I experimented with several other formats and you can see all versions of my ebook in this wiki page. I created the wiki to record my progress through this year's EVO and it contains all my EVO 2015 artifacts.

Once again, moderating #ebookevo was a great experience. I hope to do this again next year. Which is why I am a very proud owner of this certificate of appreciation:

I am grateful to Shelly Terrell and the moderator team. Special thanks go to the EVO Moderator group, especially to Nina Liakos and Elizabeth Anne for supporting us.

And, of course, I am grateful to EVO for being there for us. See you next year, EVO.

EVO Week 3 - Mind Maps and Lesson Plans

Week 3 in EVO is over. It was a very busy week and I ended up with two new lesson plans, a new wiki, three new videos, a mind map and a couple of Hot Potatoes exercises.  I am going to share all of them here and I hope you find them useful.

Week 3 in #ebookevo was a mind-mapping week. I played with NovaMind, which is free. In fact, I liked it so much that I created a mind map for this blog post to let you know what you are going to read about.You can see a larger version here. NovaMind comes in various shapes and sizes (depending on your device and platform) and it even provides cloud storage for your maps.

In #ebookevo we mapped out our chapters, which helped us plan them better. Here's the map of my chapter:

Or see it here.

I am not going to go into various ways you can use mind maps in EFL (this deserves a separate post and I am planning to write it), but one immediate idea I had was to include the map of my ebook at the beginning of the book (thus giving the students the idea about what they were going to find inside) and then again at the end (as a kind of can-do checklist). And there is no reason why we couldn't start and end our classes at school like that, so that the students could keep track of what they are learning. Mind maps are easy to use and they are a powerfu visual tool.

This was a very busy week in #evoflippedlearning. We looked at a lot of great examples of flipped lessons and we created our own lesson plans. Here's mine:

Or you can read about the lesson procedure here. By the way, I made the videos myself.

In ICT4ELT I got my Week 2 badge:

I created a new wiki, where I am planning to showcase everything I create during this EVO.

In Blended Learning we learnt about Moodle lessons and created our own lesson plan. We were supposed to draw our lesson on a piece of paper, then upload the drawing. I am terrible at drawing, so I bent the rules a little and used Hot Potatoes and Quandary. I also made another video (yes, I am addicted now). The final result is this.





I probably missed the point of the exercise, but I created something that I and my students can use more or less immediately. By the way, if the video doesn't work in the online version, you can download the doc, or follow the link under the video.

In Teaching Pronunciation Differently we learnt about articulatory settings in English. We watches two very useful videos showing how the lip and the tongue positions differ in English. I still practice saying Sing a Song of Sixpence every day, focusing on different aspects of what we are learning in the worksop.

As I was writing this post, I got notified by Sanja Božinović that my ICT4ELT badge has arrived.

These badges are so motivating. I have now decided I want the ICT4ELT certificate. I retake this course every year, but this time I have worked on the tasks more seriously that I usually do. I have discovered new tools and rediscovered old ones and found new use for them.

I will sign off now. It is Week 4 already and I have moderator duties in #ebookevo. You'll hear from me really soon.

Keep Calm and Publish

This is my "moderator post" for Week 4 in #etextbookevo . This is where I give advice and support for the participants, pretending that I am an expert in publishing ebooks and not just someone who published her first chapter last year. I will try to be useful, I know you have a lot of work to do. Week 4 is going to be "that" week, you will be expected to publish your ebook chapter and show it to the world. OK, so here's the first piece of advice:

Photo Credit: quimby via Compfight cc

I mean it - don't panic. You don't have to finish your chapter next week, you don't have to write 100 pages and, moreover, you don't have to make it all up. The internet is like a global supermarket, with CC-licenced images, lectures and worksheets. You can write content that is completely new and original, but you can also curate some of the existing content created by diligent and creative teachers like you. Or you can do a combination of both.

(And remember that, even if something is not CC-licenced, you can always link to it.)

Think of what you do every week as you prepare for classes. You think about your previous class, you look at what's planned for the next lesson, you think about your students and their needs, then you go and search for something on the internet. Or maybe you sit down and write some tailor-made worksheets.

My point is that we all do it all the time. We are all material developers. So you have never published an ebook, so what?

Maybe you are lost when you look at all these publishing options. This Google Doc contains a list of publishing tools with advantages and disadvantages. If you are willing to dig through the posts in Listly, you will find some tools that are not listed in the Doc. What you choose should depend on your students and their needs. It will also depend on the kind of ebook you are writing and the way you are planning to use it. Do you want something very interactive? Which devices and platforms will your students use to access the ebook? Do they need to be online all the time? Which formats are they used to? If they want epub, then you should probably forget about adding videos and quizzes.

If possible, maybe it is a good idea to publish the ebook on multiple platforms. Last year I published my chapter in Glossi, which is beautiful but sadly no longer available, but I also created a Storify story. Finally I backed everything up on a wiki. I am trying to create content that will resemble Lego bricks - I can move elements of my chapter from platform to platform, I can add or remove parts of my chapter or rearrange them in a different order. This year I am experimenting with Widbook, but I have no idea what the final result will be like. I am also planning to create a Word document because I can embed videos into Word 2013. And, of course, there will be a wiki.

Whatever you do, remember to have fun. And remember the first two rules of writing:

Catching Up on Week 2 of EVO

View image | gettyimages.com

It is the end of Week 2 in EVO. I signed up for too many sessions again this year and last week was crazy at work. So I found myself in front of my computer at the end of the week, having no idea where to start. Could I even hope to do all my assignments in two days? And interact with other participants?

A sane answer to these questions would have been "No". The right thing to do on a Saturday morning would have been to go out and enjoy life. Luckily, the weather was awful all weekend, with dark gloomy skies and rain. And, luckily, I am a nerd.

It took me six hours on Saturday and four on Sunday, but I managed. And I loved every moment of it.

So here's what I did. I first attacked the Flipped Learning homework. I experimented with PowerPoint and created this video for my advanced class:

There are blunders and mistakes and things I could have done better, but this is my first instructional video and I am proud of it. I am really enthusiastic about my flipped learning class, I can't wait to learn more and create more videos.

Working with PowerPoint on my Windows tablet was a great experience. I have become a Windows 8 fan by now and I want to explore the use of PowerPoint for flipped learning. I also created a Jing video, but I made so many blunders in that one that I am leaving it out. Still, Jing videos are great when you need to share your screen with others, or teach them how to use a tool. Or take a screenshot, the way I am doing it here:

This is a picture of my Blended Learning homework. You might notice that I have recycled my Idioms with Paint video. Our task was to create two different forum-based activities, to explain what the previous task was and what the objective of the forum was going to be. I have some experience with online forums and I have used Yahoo Groups with my students. I haven't got much experience with Moodle, except as a student. I am quite impressed by what Moodle forums can do. You can find out more about Moodle forums here.

Next, I created an audio recording for ICT4ELT, listing some ways how audio can be used with students. I used a Windows 8 application called Sound Recorder. It is great and the sound is very clear, but there was a slight problem with it - afterwards, the file was nowhere to be found. It wasn't stored anywhere in My Documents, or in Downloads. I searched and searched. Finally, I asked Google and this post helped me find it. After I had finally located my file, I uploaded it to several podcasting platforms (probably in fear of losing it again)  Anyway, here are my thoughts on how you can use audio with your students:

On more ideas how to use audio, I warmly recommend this article by Nik Peachey.

We also played with Skype in ICT4ELT and I suggest you read this article about Skype in the classroom.

Next, Teaching Pronunciation Differently. Did I already tell you how much I love that class? This week we watched a series of interesting videos (for example, this one) and did some practical exercises. I recorded myself again, and this time I was saying Sing a Song of Sixpence in a normal voice, stage whisper and ordinary whisper. I deleted the recording afterwards, it was for my own personal use.

This week in EVO eTextbooks we were thinking about the visual design and layout of our etextbooks. What do we want our books to look like? And which visual elements are important to our students specifically? If I think about my (adult) learners and the visual elements that are important to them, I believe we need to start with the basics, and that's the font. It needs to be easy on the eyes and large. Of course they can always enlarge it on their device, but it will help if the page is not cluttered with text. Instead, there should also be images, bulletpoints, arrows... I speak from personal experience. I can't see a thing without my reading glasses. The only reading app I like is FBReader. You can enlarge the letters as much as you want and, what's equally important, you can increase the space between the lines. That way even I can read without my glasses. Unfortunately FBReader only works on Android devices. 

More on visual design in this very informative post by  Walton Burns. And here's a helpful rubric by M. Jesus Garcia San Martin.

And what will textbooks be like in the future?

Of course we can't be sure, but in the future most textbooks will probably be read on people's devices. They will be interactive, with videos, interactive quizzes and exercises and lots of images. Students will probably be able to "write on the margins" and post comments and feedback for the textbook author. Digital textbooks should be designed in such a way that they can be quickly edited, so that the content can be changed and updated regularly.

I made a Prezi for last year's #etextbook course. I believe it still neatly sums up what I want future textbooks to be like.

In Educators and Copyright we had interesting readings and listenings this week. For example, in this post you can find more search tools which help you locate CC-licenced images. Quite a few of them are new to me. Sadly, I was mostly lurking in Educators and Copyright last week, otherwise I would probably have needed a Time-Turner.

Photo Credit: Natalie Barletta via Compfight cc

One last thing before I sign off. I mentioned the interaction. In every one of the groups where I have participated I have met great teachers who have inspired me with their work and their comments.

And if I can somehow get a hold of that Time-Turner, I will work even harder next week.

My Blog is Seven Years Old

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My blog is seven years old. I  can't believe it's been so long since I started blogging. It seems like yesterday.

I write a post on this day every year and I lead my readers through all the posts that I wrote the year before. However, I was a lazy blogger last year (as I have already explained here) and there wouldn't be much to share. So, instead, I have decided to celebrate my blog's seventh birthday by sharing seven random blog posts. I am not looking for the best posts, or even my personal favourites. I am not sure what criteria I am using here, but I hope you like the result.

My number one, Publishing My First Ebook Chapter, was written last year and it will lead you through the 2014 Ebook EVO session (or, at least, my experience of it). Since I am moderating #ebookevo this year, I thought it would be useful both for me and for my readers to go through the process of creating an ebook this early in the 2015 session.

How I Became a Teacher is a personal story about how the profession chose me. If you don't understand what I am talking about, you should read the post.

7 Reasons Why Educators Should Blog was originally written as an assignment for a writing MOOC I attended on Coursera. You will notice that a lot of effort went into this post. I also had more personal reasons for writing it - I was trying to convince a group of reluctant bloggers to just do it. If you are not a blogger yet, but want to start blogging, or if like me you have recently gone through a stage when you felt like giving up, read this post.

Activities for the First Class contains some nice warmers and you might find it useful.

Free Tools Challenge - Animoto contains practical ideas how you can use my favourite digital storytelling tool. I am rather proud of this post.

Trouble with the Mobile Phone is a lesson plan with a role play worksheet that I created. Hope you find it useful.

I would like to finish with Murphy's Law for EFL Teachers because we can all use a good laugh.

That's all, folks. Thank you for reading my blog. I hope I'll see you more often in 2015. In fact, I'll be reckless and make this a promise.

And stay tuned for more EVO updates.

EVO Week One - Let the Fun Begin

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It is Week 1 of EVO, so it's time to get this blog active again. As always, I have signed up for multiple sessions. And I am moderating one of them - Crafting the ePerfect Textbook, or #ebookevo. The session has 18 moderators, so it is a collaborative endeavour. We are a true MOOC, with a lot of participants, so we are very busy responding to the threads in our Google+ group. I will be moderating Week 4, but until then I am trying to be as active in the group as I can. Congratulations to the Week 1 moderators, Shelly Terrell, Özge Karaoğlu, Janet Bianchini, Debbie Tebovich, Michelle Worgan, André J. Spang, Jennifer Verschoor, for doing a great job during this busy week. You can read Janet's Week 1 post here. It contains lots of tips and tricks to help you write your own ebook.

I first attended #ebookevo as a participant last year and I wrote about it here. So, I was honoured when Shelly Terrell invited me to help moderate the session. This year I am planning to add one more chapter to the collaborative ebook I wrote last year with two colleagues from my school, Snezana Filipovic and Milica Svrzic. It is aimed at intermediate adult students.

Another session I am very excited about is EVO 2015 Flipped Learning, or #evoflippedlearning. In week 1 we were trying to decide whether flipped learning was applicable to our teaching situation. I find the topic both relevant and interesting. I teach busy adults who spend only two 90-minute periods a week in class. Flipping could free some classroom time for activating new vocabulary and grammar. I first need to learn how to create instructional videos. My YouTube channel has been mostly inactive, maybe that is going to change now. 

Week 1 in #evoflippedlearning contained some great resources. Here is a series of short videos by John Bergmann and Aaron Sams, who are considered to be pioneers of flipped learning. The main question they try to answer is What is the best use of my face-to-face time with students? Here are two articles by John Graney and Laine Marshall, our moderators. Laine Marshall provides further links to Katie Gambar's videos and this treasure trove. I can't wait to find out more.

I have to admit that I find the difference between flipped and blended learning a little hazy. The terms overlap and in an effective use of online tools there might be both methods present. Blended learning is another topic I find very relevant, so I am attending Using Moodle as a Bridge to Blended Learning. It is on the Moodle4Teachers website and you can read a short description of the course here. This video differentiates the blurry line between blended learning and technology integration. This video gives further examples of blended learning in the classroom.

I am also attending Educators and Copyright: Do the Right Thing. In Week 1, among other things, I read this blog post about using images legally. I find it very relevant to bloggers, especially since it also contains links to places where you can find CC-licenced photos you can legally use. More on places to find CC-licenced photos here.

I wouldn't feel I was in EVO if I didn't sign up for ICT4ELT. I sign up every year, and this time I earned myself a badge for Week 1.

Finally (don't count my sessions, please) there is Teaching Pronunciation Differently. This session has transported me back to my student days when phonetics was one of my favourite subjects. That was a long time ago and I have forgotten a lot, so I am struggling a little at this stage. Luckily, the moderators are very helpful and I am looking forward to the following weeks because I feel that here I will learn something new. Hopefully this course will help me help my students with pronunciation.

I hope you have enjoyed my report from various EVO sessions and that you will find the readings and the videos I have shared useful. See you again really soon.

Let's Face It, This Blog Has Been on Hiatus

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I am a lazy blogger. There are times when I post regularly (usually when I attend courses and workshops) and there are times when I don't post anything for a month or two. I stopped apologising for my silences long ago. Blogging takes time and I don't always have time. Still, this year I feel I owe you all an explanation, if not an apology.

I started the year well. I wrote a couple of posts which I believe were quite good. Then, since March, nothing. Silence.

Has this blog been on hiatus? If so, why?

I never planned to take a break from blogging, but, as you'll see, things happened. One of the "things" that happened was my other blog. I believe people with multiple blogs often have this problem, but in my case it was drastic.

Summer Blues is my poetry blog. I started it in August 2011, when I finally plucked up the courage to start sharing my hobby with the world. Not much was happening there until April 2013, when I participated in my first NaPoWriMo poetic challenge. NaPoWriMo is held every April and you post a poem a day. Despite its name, it is international. I started the challenge tentatively, but like a good nerd, I posted a poem (sometimes even two) every day. I met great people who encouraged me to persevere.

I have to say that in 2013 the challenge didn't really do any harm to my teaching blog, except that  it kept me from posting here for a month. We could argue that I took the challenge more seriously in 2014 (I once again managed to post every day), but this time other things happened as well.

OK, the culprit is my kidney. For the past four months I have been trying to get rid of kidney stones. This hasn't happened to me for the first time, but this time it has been much, much worse than usual. As anyone who has had them will tell you, kidney stones are nasty. Believe me, the last thing on your mind when you have kidney colics is blogging.

If you have just been to my other blog and if you are observant, you will notice that I managed to post there every day during November, the month I was supposedly incapacitated by kidney stones. In fact, I succeeded in completing another poetry challenge.

When you are in pain, poetry helps. You can vent and complain. I don't normally complain in my TEFL blog, and I rarely vent. Besides, to write about TEFL, I need the classroom. I need to be teaching in order to get new blogging ideas. This autumn I was on sick leave for six weeks.

However, I am back now and I am eager to start blogging. Natasa's Blog will be seven years old in January and in November it was 25 years since I had started teaching. These are important milestones and I have so much I want to share with you in 2015.

Navigating the Chaos

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I am incorrigible. The five weeks of EVO finished a long time ago and here I am writing about Week 3. If you go through my last year's posts (for example, here), you will notice that this is not unusual. For me, real learning starts after the sessions are over. I go through the tasks I skipped, finish the readings and try to stay in touch with the community. And, from time to time, I even post something to my blog.

This year I chose to organise my weekly reflections around #rhizo14 challenges. #Rhiso14 is not even an EVO session, but I did sign up initially because it was my #MultiMOOC "homework" to sign up for a really massive online course and then observe what was happening. I only ever heard about #rhizo14 through #MultiMOOC.

#Rhizo14 was organised around weekly challenges. The challenge in Week 3 was to embrace uncertainty.


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In Dave's own words:

We've spent two weeks talking about power - first from the student's perspective and then from the facilitators perspective. Come down the rabbit hole with me my friends. At the heart of the rhizome is a very messy network, one where not all the dots connect to all the lines. No centre. Multiple paths. Where we have beliefs and facts that contradict each other. Where our decisions are founded on an ever shifting knowledge base. Our challenge this week... how do we make our learning experience reflect (and celebrate) this uncertainty?

Dave goes on to ask:

How do we make embrace uncertainty in learning? How do we keep people encouraged about learning if there is no finite achievable goal? How do we teach when there are no answers, but only more questions?

During this same week in #Multimooc, Vance Stevens talked about chaos in learning and its resolution through networking. Here's the link to the audio. And here are Vance's slides:

Chaos in learning: Engaging learners in resolving chaos through networking from Vance Stevens

As you will see, the slides contain additional resources on chaos in learning. In the words of George Siemens: "...but if an instructor makes sense and gives you all the readings and sets the full path in place for you then you are eviscerating the learner's experience."

Yes, but how do you navigate chaos? Maureen Crawford suggests that we Press Pause, Let Go, Let Flow. In her own words:

       "When I try to navigate and respond to the Internet by only using the meta-lanuages of          speech, writing, math and scientific method, I find that often my expectations do not            align with what I am experiencing. If I take a fairly linear approach, thinking that I                  can comprehensively absorb or connect dots with what I already know I quickly find              that there are too many choices, possible directions, and things to be taken into                      consideration. Being methodical and trying to deal thoroughly with one aspect before            moving onto the next does not work particularly well – it is a reflection of my trying to          use old methods with new technology. There is a mismatch – neither one works well            and I become overwhelmed. The Internet is liquid not solid. To navigate I need to                 swim, to take flow into consideration – or as Marshal McLuhan would say, 
        “to use my wit“. Internet Lingo demands navigation by improvisation. When I begin to         feel that too much is happening I need to let go. Giving myself permission play, to let             go,  or to press pause is appropriate and results in the creation of a personal, healthy             Internet ecology!!"

In his webinar, Vance talks about serendipitous learning. If you need to know something, it will find its way to you. If you miss it the first time, it will come back. Trying to absorb it all at once is impossible. It is also unnecessary. Letting go is the first step.

The second step is networking. During Week 3 there was one more webinar in MultiMOOC. Ali Bostanciogly talked about Technology Professional Development: Networking and Online Communities. Here's the link to the MP3. Ali talked about the difference between networks and communities and how they can help us in our professional development.

This was the week when History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education started on Coursera. I have really enjoyed this course and I am going to share a couple of things that fit nicely with the topic of this post. First of all, let me remind you of this video:



Did you see it? I did. But then, I wasn't very good at counting those balls. Maybe because the activity was boring (and I am terrible at boring repetitive tasks). Maybe I am good at multitasking. Or maybe I have an attention deficiency, which is why you wouldn't want me to count your money for you or be a basketball referee when your favourite team is playing.

In the first chapter of her book Now You See it (titled "I'll Count, You Take Care of the Gorilla"), professor Davidson talks about why collaboration has become a necessity in the modern world full of distracting stimuli. She uses the term "collaboration by difference" - we need people who can count and we need people who can spot the gorilla. We also need teachers who can bring together different personalities and teach them how to cooperate. Or maybe the kids will find ways to learn how to cooperate on their own. Isn't that what rhizomatic learning is all about?




Tags: #rhizo14, #MultiMOOC, #evomlt, #evosessions, #futereEd