PLN Challenge #2 - How a PLN Works

Image on Flickr by Jef Safi

In the PLN Challenge #2 we were asked two questions:

1. What do you hope to learn more about with respect to your PLN in the coming weeks?

I have to be honest with you. I have joined the challenge because I want to meet new people and add them to my PLN. I am looking forward to new projects, new ways to collaborate. And I am hoping to join a couple of new online spaces.

As for my existing PLN, I would like to learn how to communicate more effectively within the time I am already spending online, since I know it is unrealistic for me to plan on spending more time online than I already do. I have great people in my PLN and they are very supportive, but sometimes I am not there when I should be. Or at least I feel so. The internet is a messy thing and, no matter how much you spend online reading what other people have posted, you will still miss a lot. Right now I am missing a bunch of great posts and tweets posted by members of my PLN. I suppose that can't be helped. Still, it is a pity.

Photo on Flickr by Samyra Serin

2. What have you learned with creating your PLN that you wish that someone had told you before and what tips do you have to share?

I know this is going to sound contradictory to what I have just said, but I wish someone had told me to relax and take it easy, to do only as much as I can. As I have said, the internet is messy, the information overload threatens to crush you and the key is not to do more, but to focus and prioritize. I wish someone had told me to choose my battles carefully and not to click the"join" button every time I see it. It is very important to treat online learning as a hobby (which it is) and never to treat it as an obligation. Not only will it kill the fun, but you are in danger of burning out and that might put you off online learning for a long time.

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PLN Challenge #1 - How My PLN Came to Be

Photo on Flickr by Paul Falardeu

Back in 2008 I believed that everyone who had a website was a demi-god. I read a lot of blogs, but it never crossed my mind that I, a mere mortal, should leave a comment. I was a member of a couple of forums, but I lurked. I didn't know I was lurking, I thought keeping silent was the right thing to do since I didn't 'know' anyone and no one had invited me there anyway.

Then in one of the forums where I lurked I saw an ad for Electronic Village Online. There were about a dozen workshops, but the one that caught my eye was called Becoming a Webhead. It read:

"Webheads in Action is a five-year-old community of practice of language teachers worldwide, coordinated by Vance Stevens. We explore Web communication tools and share the best ways of using them in our teaching practices, engage with students in virtual classes, collaborate on projects, and participate in conferences as audience and presenters. This collaboration takes place online, as we are all geographically apart. Would you like to become one of us?"

That last sentence sounded promising. Me becoming a part of an online community! I wanted that. I also wanted my own website, a place where I could share resources and links with my students. Maybe these Webheads could teach me how to create one.

In the introduction to the course they used a lot of words that were unknown to me: synchronous, asynchronous, wiki, podcast... As I was filling in the form to join the workshop, they asked me about the Web 2.0 tools that I had used. Now, what was Web 2.0? It was obviously something I was supposed to know about, so how could I ask? I would just show how ignorant I was. Googling "Web 2.0" never crossed my mind. My mind didn't work like that back then. So, I thought I would just join the group and keep quiet.

If you have ever had any contact with the Webheads, then you'll know that keeping quiet is not an option. I was greeted warmly and pulled into the conversation immediately. The forum was bustling with activity. There were quite a few people who were as ignorant as I was. I decided to learn or perish. I ended up sitting in front of my computer for six hours and loving every moment of it. By the end of the workshop I had my own wiki, my own blog (this one) and I had even created a podcast. After the workshop was finished, I joined the Webheads in Action forum. I belonged.

For at least a year all members of my PLN (Personal Learning Network) came from the Webhead forum. Things changed very gradually. The Webheads had me join Twitter and I met more people there. In January 2009 I read about Sue Waters' 31 Day Blogging Challenge on Twitter. I joined and I met some great new people. In April the same year I joined Problogger's 31DBBB challenge. By that time I knew for sure that my main online activity was going to be blogging so I joined every blogging challenge I could find. I still do that. Challenges give me something to write about and I always meet new people during the challenge. During the 31DBBB I met Karenne Sylvester who soon started BELTFree, a community of TEFL bloggers. Together with the Webheads, BELTFree bloggers became a very important part of my PLN. Although the BELTFree Ning is no longer bustling with activity, the ties have remained. We tweet together and read each other's blogs.

Photo on Flickr by Domiriel

How big is my PLN? I honestly have no idea. There are times when I feel I am all alone online. Then there are times I feel almost overwhelmed. But one thing I do know - they are out there all the time. They can help me find that killer warmer I need, they can teach me how to use that new application everyone is talking about, they can show me a thousand new ways to tell a story or teach some grammar. And if I have a problem or a question to ask, there will always be someone out there to help me.

Technorati Tags: #ebshare, PLN, Webheads, BELTFree

Free Tools Challenge #15 - Livebinders

Photo on Flickr by Ingo Bernhardt

Today in the Free Tools Challenge we are exploring Livebinders, a tool I never heard about until two days ago. It is one of the tools that, once you explore them, you can't stop wondering how you ever lived without them. It takes minutes to learn how to use Livebinders, they are practical and adaptable and it takes just one link to share your binders with the world.

OK, I need to calm down. First of all, I suggest you read this excellent tutorial on Livebinders in the Teacher Challenge blog. It will answer all your questions on how to get started with Livebinders. Then, make sure you come back here because we are going to talk about Livebinders in a TEFL classroom.

Let's say you want to share a bunch of links with your students. For the sake of the argument, let's suppose that you are trying to share with them all the links for online dictionaries that come to your mind. The final result might end up looking like this:

Photo on Flickr by Jerome Collins

And what if I told you that the final result could look like this:

Online Dictionaries

If you click on the icon or on the link underneath a window will open. It will look like this:



And I can keep adding the dictionaries to the binder as I come across them. In fact, I don't even have to visit the site to add the link. All I need to do is install the 'Livebinder It' bookmarklet to my browser and I can add any page I want to my Livebinders.

This is great because students often complain that they can't find the links they need. With Livebinders I can share online resources with them more easily. For my advanced students I created this binder with some short stories for them to read over the summer:

Advanced Reading

This way, instead of hunting for the links all over the pages of our wiki, they can focus on their reading.

What students often complain about in a blended learning course is that they don't know where exactly the course is. The teacher could create a binder with all the links used in the course (the forum, the wikis, the blogs, Twitter accounts...) and tell the students to bookmark the link and use it as their startup page in the course. The students could then add their own resources to this binder. The best thing about Livebinders is that everyone can learn how to use them. They even offer you to type your search term in their Google window and they populate the binder with the relevant pages from Google for you. This is what they came up with for Mother Theresa:

Mother Theresa

Students could create their own binders on different topics (the person I admire, the music I listen to, my country...). Or they could Google their name and share what they find in a binder.

Finally, you can use Livebinders to keep all your personal links in one place so that you can easily share them with others. The following binder contains links to my Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts, this blog, my eportfolio and my wikis. And a bunch of other places where you can find me, including my school website. It is my business card:

Natasa Bozic Grojic

Technorati Tags: #ebshare, TEFL, Livebinders

Free Tools Challenge #14 - PhotoFiltre

In the Free Tools Challenge #14 we explored PhotoFiltre.

I almost skipped this challenge. With Picasa, Picnic and BigHugeLabs, did I really need another image editor? And one that needed to be downoladed at that?

I did download it out of curiosity (download link here). I stared at it, but it didn't seem appealing at first. Then I started playing with it.

You can never have too many image editors at your disposal.

Having an image editor in your computer (rather than online) makes it easier to manipulate a large number of images without having to upload/download them all the time. PhotoFiltre can do a lot of things other image editors can do (crop, resize, cut, copy, paste), but it also offers some really cool effects of its own. They are called the 'filters'.



The 'masks' are an interesting replacement for traditional picture frames:



You always need images in a TEFL classroom. Using a tool like PhotoFiltre lets you create exactly the kind of image you need. Cutting, copying and pasting parts of images is particularly useful:



PhotoFiltre can be used to illustrate idioms and vocabulary in general. PhotoFiltre images can be an interesting conversation prompt. What is the chair doing in the middle of the bridge?




You need an interesting image for a ghost story? No problem:



Or maybe you want your students to peep through a keyhole and tell you what they see:



I hope you have enojoyed this very brief overwiev of PhotoFiltre. If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer them (or at least look for the answer together with you). I have just started exploring this tool myself.

Technorati Tags: #ebshare, TEFL, PhotoFiltre

Free Tools Challenge #12 - Animoto

Free Tools Challenge #12 was something I was looking forward to. I love Animoto. I used it many times before this challenge to create beautiful clips and organise holiday photos.

My plan was to do the same thing this time. I had just come from my Spring Holiday and we had celebrated our son's birthday there. So, what could be more logical? In fact, I was so looking forward to this challenge while I was on holiday that I kept directing my movie in my head and taking additional photos every day. I took the advice from one of the Animoto tutorials and photographed everything from our arrival onwards. Here is my holiday clip.

I was happy with my clip, but I wanted more this time. I have always sensed that Animoto could do much, much more than just create moving photo albums. So, I first came up with the idea of using it as a kind of a picture dictionary. I used Animoto's own photos and worked with what I could find on the platform. Here is the result:





This is just an idea. You can create hundreds of these clips, depending on the vocabulary you need to teach or recycle. It is relatively easy to find the right image for anything among the Creative Commons images.

I still wasn't satisfied. I wanted to try telling a real digital story in Animoto, so I recycled an old one. It is The Boy Who Listened and it was first created in Mixbook. You can read the original story here and the related blog post is here.

Luckily, I had all the photos in a separate folder and I uploaded them to Animoto easily. I had to shorten the text a little, but it was worth it. When you are creating in Animoto, you never quite know what the final product is going to look like, but this exceeded my expectations. See for yourselves:





This can be used in the classroom in so many ways. The first thing that comes to my mind is recording role plays. Or students can write their own short stories or dialogues, record them and finally upload the photos to Animoto.

I was ready to wrap this post up when I suddenly had an idea. Yes, another one.

What if I recorded my own voice in the MP3 format, uploaded it to Animoto and told my story that way?

Luckily, I could yet again recycle an old project for this. It is a poem called The Dragon which I had recorded in Myna by Aviary for one of my online courses. You can find the relevant post here. I just needed the right images... Something to suggest the loneliness of the dragon, some caves perhaps. It was easier than I had thought to find the images. I used a search engine called Compfight which in my case is set to Creative Commons images. Here's the result.

(Photos used in The Dragon: 1. DSC_0237, 2. Lonely tree on Planina lake, 3. Lonely in golden place!, 4. Maldives, a place you want to be, 5. DGJ_1985 - Paint my world (view Large), 6. Natural Bridge, 7. Vodable - cave - 26-08-2007 - 11h49, 8. THE SECRET OF NATURAL ARCH, 9. HDRcavernOrton, 10. NORWAY Flåm: Waterfall "Kjofossen" 18.953.17, 11. One Thousand and One Nights, 12. Phong Nha Cave, Vietnam, 13. Deep Inside the Iris Cave, 14. Ice cave in Glacier Gray, 15. Deja Vu, 16. Lavatube, Mojave National Preserve, 17. Ruby Falls, 18. The End of the Tunnel, 19. Reed flute cave, 20. Vodable - cave - 27-08-2007 - 11h05, 21. Devetashka cave, 22. Pirate's Gold, 23. Red Dragon Horizon, 24. The Dragon Cloud)

To sum up - you can do anything with Animoto. It is adaptable and it will never let you down. Whether you want to tell a story, use Animoto as a learning and teaching tool or simply record memorable events, Animoto is the right choice.

Free Tools Challenge #10 - Wordle

I created this image by running one of my longer blog posts through Wordle. Can you guess what the post is about? Check whether you were right or wrong here.

When I found out that Free Tools Challenge #10 was Wordle, I panicked a little. I feel that everything has already been said about this great tool.

Well, sometimes a bit of repetition doesn't hurt.



This wordle was created by using their Advanced feature. It helps you determine how big you want your letters to be.

What is this Wordle saying:

1. In the pre-reading and pre-listening stage, you can use Wordle to help the students predict what the text is about. You can also use it in the post-reading/post-listening stage for retelling and summary writing. Look at this Wordle on Romeo and Juliet.

2. When you want the students to write a story, you can give some words in advance by putting them into a Wordle.

3. You can help them improve their writing by having them run their essays through Wordle. That way, they can see if they keep repeating the same word over and over (in my case it was 'really') or whether they are mixing formal and informal language.

4. It goes without saying: Wordle is an excellent tool for introducing new vocabulary or for vocabulary revision. In fact, you can use it any time you want to replace an ordinary looking vocabulary box with something more beautiful. I love this Wordle that I have found in their gallery.

5. The largest word in my Wordle is brainstorming. I believe it requires no further explanation. Look at this Wordle, for example. Or at this one.

Of course, there are many, many other ways you can use Wordle. You can simply use it as decoration or to introduce yourself, the way I did here:



One thing you can't do is use Wordle as a storytelling tool. Right?

Wrong.

By the way, all the Wordles I have linked to here have been posted to the gallery during the past hour. Amazing, isn't it?

Technorati Tags: #ebshare, TEFL Wordle

Free Tools Challenge #9 - ToonDoo

By lunas994 | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

In Free Tools Challenge # 9 we are again creating comics. This time we are using ToonDoo.

ToonDoo is a fast, easy and fun way to create comics.

I already shared some ideas about how to use comics in a TEFL classroom here. So, this time I will just concentrate on exploring ToonDoo.

The first thing you will probably want to do is create a fun avatar for yourself using Traitr. Later you can use your character in comics the way I did here:

By lunas994 | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

After that, I advise you to just explore the characters they already have in their gallery and I am sure ideas will come.

By lunas994 | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

One thing I like about ToonDoo is the wide range of characters they offer. This gives you freedom to experiment with different characters and different stories. That way your comics will never be boring:

By lunas994 | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon