20th IATEFL Slovenia Conference 2013

It's been a while since I came back from Slovenia, but if you have visited this blog before, you will know that sometimes I write about events long after they have happened. In this particular case I have a great story to tell and I feel that, like all stories, it deserves to be told from the beginning.

The story begins on the day I received the letter from ELTA Serbia telling me that I was elected to be one of their two official representatives at the annual IATEFL conference in Slovenia. That also meant that I was going to present at a conference for the first time. You might be surprised by this, knowing that I blog about TEFL, but before Slovenia I always managed to come up with different excuses for not presenting. Now was the right time for me to face my fears.

Two months later I was on my way. I arrived in Ljubljana a day before the conference, so I had a chance to go sightseeing. Ljubljana is beautiful. In the following Animoto, I tried to capture the spirit of the city:

The next day I met a group of Serbian teachers who were also going to the conference and we boarded the van that was going to take us to Topolšica. As I was getting onto the van, I saw Shelly Terell's smiling face and she gave me a hug.

I am so glad that I have managed to meet Shelly face to face. She is every bit as wonderful as I thought she would be. A great thing about being a blogger is that you end up having a large PLN and that, from time to time, you actually get to meet the people in it.

Another person I met face to face was Saša Sirk. Saša has been in my PLN from the very beginning. I met her in my first BaW, where she was one of the moderators.

And don't you dare tell me that my online friends are not my real friends, because they are.

The only session we had on Thursday was Shelly's Motivating our Learners to Write with Webtools. She shared a bunch of free online resources with us, together with great ready-made lesson plans. Her presentation is here.

Friday started with Having Fun with English, a plenary by Vanessa Reis Esteves. She greeted us at the door, thus modelling what she was going to teach us later (get students into the English mode by greeting them at the door, build relationships on the way out, set the tone for the next lesson, always provide some positive feedback). She talked about the similarities between children and teenagers (impatient, distracted, demanding), as well as the differences (children are eager and energetic, teenagers are demotivated and apathetic). Finally, she shared some fun activities that can be used with both age groups.

Bojana Nikic Vujic had a workshop on Critical Thinking in EFL Curriculum. Step by step, she led us through the creation of a lesson plan which included critical thinking skills according to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. The process included the creation of a first draft of the lesson plan and its revision after the introduction of the Taxonomy. We learnt how to include critical thinking activities into the textbooks we were using.

My presentation was next and, yes, I survived. There were some technical issues, which reminds me: If you are new to presenting, take your own laptop with you whenever possible. And don't use fancy fonts you downloaded from the internet, as they might turn into something else on somebody else's computer. And don't apologise for the technical difficulties you are experiencing. And don't walk in front of the slides while you are presenting.







Having said that, I think (hope) that everything went well. Quite a lot of people turned up, which was a pleasant surprise. It was almost the same as teaching a class, in fact. Now, here are my slides:



 


And, if you would like to hear me giving this presentation again, I will be doing it at the Virtual Round Table in May.

Ok, let's move on.

Willy Cardoso's workshop Open Space: Becoming the Best Teacher You Can Be was for me one of the highlights of the conference. You can read more about Open Space Principles here. Willy gave us little post-it notes and we wrote onto them a topic connected to teacher development that we wanted to discuss. Then we voted and three topics were selected. I am happy to say that mine was one of the three ("I want to keep improving as a teacher"). Three groups were formed based on the topics, but we were free to roam about the room and change groups. Finally, a summary was created for each group, as you can see in Willy's post (I linked to it above). It is easy to see how Open Space Principles can be used in the classroom and adapted to various levels and age groups.

Shelly's plenary Wings and Webs was about the social networks that educators create in order to share resources and collaborate. Shelly looked at reasons why teachers connect and she also shared places where someone who doesn't have a PLN could go to in order to start connecting. Her talk was something that resonated with me deeply. I have been a part of the large international family of educators since 2008 and I have a hard time remembering what my life was like before that.

Jean McCollister and her border collie Bamm Bamm taught us about Animal-assisted Language Teaching. Dogs are used in therapy, as well as in teaching. In a language classroom, a dog is a strong motivator and the presence of a dog also has cognitive benefits. It provides mental stimulation and improves concentration and attention. This is true, since I have to admit that I remember everything from this workshop vividly. My attention was on the dog all the time and I remember everything he did.

Here's more about what Jean and Bamm Bamm do. It's in Slovene, but I am sure you will be able to understand the gist.

Our first plenary on Saturday was Peter Dyer's Getting Them to Speak. It was very interactive and lively, full of practical and fun activities. For one hour, we improvised, we passed around imaginary gifts, we invented stories and we lived in the fantasy world. These activities are easy to prepare and materials light (in fact, there was no PowerPoint).

The next workshop I attended was Danny Singh's The Power of Laughter Exercises in Learning. To find out more about the application of laughter yoga in language teaching, visit Danny's website. All  I can say is that I have enjoyed this workshop tremendously and that I felt more alert after it. I can see how these exercises can lower inhibitions and boost learning.

Willy Cardoso's plenary A Philosophy of Teacher Development  was another treat. He defined teacher development as trying to decrease the gap between what you believe you should do and what you can do in your teaching situation. Teachers should ask themselves to what extent they can influence, shape and create their own knowledge. Classroom observation helps here (recording yourself, asking a colleague to sit in your class, co-teaching with a colleague, or even giving your learners an observation task). Rather than wait for someone to give them the knowledge, the teachers should legitimise what they already know and share it bottom-up. They should create portfolios, start blogging or give a workshop at a conference.

Marija Lukač spoke about Your Next Step on the Professional Development Ladder. Presenting to fellow colleagues is a way for teachers to grow and develop. Nobody is going to promote you into a conference presenter, you need to make that step yourself.

The last presentation I visited on Saturday was Shelly's Teaching with YouTube. Once again, she shared an abundance of links, resources, lesson plans, ideas...

So far I haven't talked much about evening entertainment, which was great. And the beer was more than great. I grabbed this image off Shelly's Facebook timeline, hope she won't mind:

Yes, it's a beer barrel. In fact, there were three, each one with a different kind of beer.

And let's not forget that Topolšica is a spa. That meant that, when we got tired after sitting in workshops all day, we could always grab an hour to swim in the pool or relax in the sauna park. And we even had a discount on massages.

And kudos to the organising committee. They really went out of their way to make us all comfortable and everything was perfectly organised. Thank you, guys.

And, of course, big thanks to ELTA Serbia for sending me there in the first place.

Conferences are not only about presentations and workshops. They are about networking and meeting new people. And going to an international conference means meeting a lot of great new people. For me this was even more valuable than the presentations themselves. In fact I am looking forward to seeing some of those people again in Belgrade on 11th ELTA Conference in May.

Technorati Tags: TEFL, IATEFL. ELTA, conference

What Makes Us Human - #EDCMOOC Final Feedback

I was doing fine, writing about my MOOCs and EVO workshops, then I suddenly stopped. In the meantime I got very busy. I attended a conference and I am planning to blog about it soon (though my idea of "soon" is quite flexible, especially when it comes to this blog).

Last time I was here, I promised to write about what makes us human, which was the topic of Weeks 3 and 4 of EDCMOOC (E-learning and Digital Cultures on Coursera). In the meantime, the course has finished, but I would still like to do as I promised. There are several reasons for this:

1. A promise is a promise
2. This is an E-portfolio and I have created some EDCMOOC artifacts that I would like to share here
3. It was a great course and it deserves positive feedback
4. It is time we stopped seeing online courses as something linear, something that has a beginning and an end. As Vance Stevens has said in a comment on this blog "these courses never, or should never, end ".

Back to #EDCMOOC. Weeks 3 and 4 were about what makes us human. This text by Neil Badmington is the editor's introduction to a collection of essays on posthumanism. What it did for me is made me want to read the whole book. If we are not defined by humanism, what are we defined by then? Could it be transhumanism? This text by Nick Bostrom really got me thinking and it was the main inspiration for my final project.



My favourite video in Week 3 was this one. And this clip we watched in Week 4 almost made me cry and again influenced my final project.



In Week 3 we were asked to create an image that would somehow show our understanding of the course. There was a competition and the winners were decided automatically using Flickr "interestingness" ranking through Flickriver. Flickriver calculates an image's "interestingness" based on the number of comments and "favourites" it receives. I shared four images (those are the images I have been using in this post), but the one that got most votes is this one:



By the way, that's my son in our holiday house in the country. And what made me put "Both Worlds" onto the picture is my reaction to this text.

You can look at images created by other participants in the course here.

What final feedback can I offer? The course was yet another example of how the rigid Coursera format could be bent to enable a more connective experience. No "talking heads" here, no lectures in the traditional sense. Watching the videos was like going to the cinema and enjoying good movies (which just happened to be much shorter than ordinary movies). We wrote no essays. Instead, we created artifacts.

Speaking of artifacts, I would like to sign off with my final project. But, before I do, if you want to see more final projects, here's where you can do that. And here's one of the three final projects that I reviewed. This Scoop.it by Geri Ellner left a very strong impression on me, not only because it contains five digital stories, but also because I had never before seen Scoop.it used as a digital storytelling tool.

Finally, my project. Before you watch, ask yourselves what it would be like if you could upload your memory onto a computer? Would that memory be you, or someone else? And if you were to go away one day (as we all must, eventually), what would happen to your memory?

Technorati Tags: #edcmooc, writingmatrix

On Metaphors, the Future and the Way We Are Wired (#EDCMOOC, #ETMOOC)

Photo Credit: craig1black via Compfight cc

I am now two weeks late with my weekly reflections. The week I will be writing about here is Week 4 in EVO sessions and in #ETMOOC and Week 2 in #EDCMOOC. I managed to follow the weekly activities in my workshops and be more or less on time, but the weekly blog posts are something completely different. It takes a lot of work to put together everything that went on in all these learning spaces and turn it into something meaningful.

I am glad that this week there'll be digital stories to help me along.

In Neuroscience we learnt about the way we are wired. And, you know what? We are all wired differently. Let me put it like this:

See this story on Storybird


Dr Medina explains schema in a fun way:

Meanwhile, in #ETMOOC it was the first digital storytelling week and I created several 6-words stories on Twitter.

First there was the horror story series:

His last words: "Let's split up."
Last seen running into the woods.
She ran upstairs. Front door creaked.

Then there was this standalone melodrama:

"See you", he said. He lied.

And here is my first ever animated gif:

Uploaded with ImageShack.us


For the animated gif I used this simple tutorial provided by #ETMOOC.

It was a fascinating week in #EDCMOOC, as we discussed future-focused visions of technology and education, both the utopian and the dystopian ones. We looked at metaphors as lenses through which these visions are seen. Metaphors are deterministic. This is the point where #EDCMOOC has a lot to do with Multiliteracies. Here Vance Stevens writes about why looking at computers as tools determines the way we use them and why the tool metaphor shouldn't be enough. Here's more on computer metaphors from the #EDCMOOC reading list. And here's a blog post I wrote about computer metaphors when I attended Multiliteracies two years ago. In this post I compared the computer to a geenie from a magic lamp, a magic wand and a communication tool. The second and the third are tools, but what about the geenie? Is the geenie a person? I think I will have to go back to this in my next post where I will look at this week's #EDCMOOC topic - redefining the human.

A Manifesto for Networked Objects with its notion of "blogjects" will amuse you. But just at first. Are the "blogging objects" and the "networked objects" really our future? Or, are they already our present? Are they really "more dangerous than the Terminator"? Or will they save the planet for us? Yesterday, I read in my son's weekly science magazine about a project which aims to save the rainforests by equipping the trees with mobiles. Once somebody tries to cut it down, the tree "calls for help". It is this type of thing Bleecker is looking forward to.

Now for something dystopic. The following film (7:50) was the highlight of my week:

Sight from Sight Systems on Vimeo.

I believe this movie can be used in TEFL to discuss, among other things, the gaming addiction. Not to mention the future and relationships.

Another point where #EDCMOOC crosses paths with Multiliteracies is the idea of edupunk. Here's what I found in the Multiliteracies wiki archives about edupunk:

EduPunk and Learning Management Systems - Conflict or Chance? from Martin Ebner

Am I an edupunk? Two years ago I wasn't sure, now I am. I am sure that I am one, that is. Why else do you think I am addicted to MOOCs? And what do you think I am doing here blogging about my online learning experiences?

If you think you might be one too, you should listen to this (one hour long, but worth it):

And if you are the sort of person who likes to take notes, Audrey Watters has already done it for you here.

Well, that's all folks. Next week, we will be looking at what makes us human.

I would like to finish with a great image I found in the #EDCMOOC Flickr pool which, I believe, says it all.


cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo by Angela Towndrow: http://flickr.com/photos/90243669@N05/8461301620/

Tags: #evomlit, #mmooc13, , #2013evo, #brainelt, #edcmooc, #etmooc

Technorati Tags: #evomlit, #mmooc13, , #2013evo, #brainelt, #edcmooc, #etmooc

  

Tales of the Unexpected: On Networks, Utopias and Memory (#EDCMOOC, #ETMOOC(

Last week was a very interesting week in my workshops and MOOCs. Very interesting and full of unexpected twists and turns.

I have personally provided a new twist for you, dear reader, by joining #ETMOOC.

You might be wondering exactly how many MOOCs I am attending now. Sorry, but I won't tell you. Or, rather, can't. I am not sure. A few. More than two, less than twenty. So, there's still room for more MOOCs.

Let me just say that I now feel like a full-time student.

If you are an ETMOOCer and are here for the first time, here's something about me:




Meanwhile, elsewhere (and in no particular order):

Last week in Neuroscience we studied memory. I found this clip useful:




The way Dr Antonio Damasio describes memory reminds me of an orchestra playing in a concert. First there is a single clarinet. Then, the string instruments join in. After them, more and more instruments join until finally the whole orchestra is participating. It follows that, as teachers, we need to add more and more "instruments" when we are reviewing, so that the students can hear the same "melody" several times in different ways.

In Multiliteracies we did networking, which made me reread this two-year old post of mine on the same topic. Nothing has changed much, except that now I am moving in even wider circles that before. Two years ago my network consisted mostly of EFL teachers, but now there are other educators, poets, poetry lovers, various other people who like to sign up for MOOCs... The ties are looser as I get to know more and more people, but I still believe that real friendships can form between people who have only met online. Don't you?

Meanwhile in Mentoring we read this very intriguing text about what really happens when our learners leave our protected classroom environments and enter the real world of L1 speakers. What roles do they play? And do those roles give them enough opportunity to practice speaking? And if they don't, then how are they ever going to sound anything like a L1 speaker. It is a Catch 22 situation.

Meanwhile in EDC Mooc on Coursera... Honestly, I am beginning to lose myself in these MOOC names. EDC stands for E-learning and digital cultures. Anyway, in EDC MOOC we looked to the past digital cultures. Rather, we looked at ways in which this past is viewed - as a utopia, or as a dystopia. Our homework, among other thing includes creating images that somehow describe the topic.

I am a utopian, but I still created this image as my homework:





 I love EDC. Our instructors are very creative and they have collected for us a most amazing curriculum consisting of YouTube clips, among other things. Here's one clip that could be called utopian, I suppose:




Notice that the red bags are only the medium. What matters are the real people that the red bags have connected.

As this was Week 1 in EDC, the professors provided this amazing Google doc. And in this post Jeremy Knocks, who is one of our professors, asks a very important question - should MOOCs focus on the process or on the content?

This wouldn't be a tale of the unexpected if it didn't come with a twist. You see, one of my MOOCs died a sudden and unexpected death. You can read more about this here.

I am in no position to judge. Let me just say that I did enjoy the course while it lasted. I loved the readings and I had no problem signing up for groups (in fact, I succeeded in doing so twice). I wouldn't even mention this if it hadn't given rise to a most amazing new MOOC - consisting of the "refugees" from the course. There are two Facebook groups (one for EFL teachers only) and the beginning of a course on Canvas. It is early days and I have no idea how this course will turn out. However, there are people in the group who know a lot about instructional design, so we'll see.

If you are still here, congratulations. This was a monster of a post. Next time, however, I promise something completely different. Next time there'll be digital stories...

Technorati Tags: #evomlit, #mmooc13, #2013evo, #brainelt, #mentorevo, #foemooc, #edcmooc, #etmooc

Week 2 - Declare, Where?

Photo Credit: madelinetosh via Compfight cc

I made a lot of rash promises in my last post. I said I was going to follow my 5 EVO sessions, plus the SEETA course, plus the OLDS MOOC. I said that, in this blog, I was going to give weekly digests of my learning progress. People even took me seriously. In the meantime I signed up for two more MOOCs on Coursera, which promise to be very interactive (EDC MOOC and Fundamentals of Online Education). At work, the week was hectic. And I have a presentation for a conference to write.

Still, I am here as promised. A little late, but I have definitely survived Week 2 in all my online environments. My level of participation was not the same everywhere at all times and I suppose I can say that in some of my groups I was sampling and browsing rather than studying seriously. And whether I do all my weekly tasks or not will depend on the amount of workload. OLDS MOOC, for example, is a fascinating course, but the workload is a bit too much for me at the moment. So, for this course I have a new plan - I will do what I can and curate the rest somewhere for further reference. I still might decide to share snippets from this course in my blog, but this definitely won't be enough to give you an idea about the scope of the MOOC. The same probably goes for my new Coursera MOOCs.

So, let's start with Neuroscience. This week we looked at the link between the emotional brain and motivation. I find the following video fascinating:



What it is saying, in a nutshell, is that the way we raise our children or teach our young students can influence how smart they are in ways much more direct than we thought it possible. Is it surprising, then, that adult students need so long to start believing that they can learn? People who come to my classroom have usually spent 12 (yes, twelve) years of their life sitting in English language classrooms, failing to learn the language. It takes quite a while to convince them that they are not going to fail again.

Several years ago I created this PowerPoint on learning and motivation:

Motivation from Natasa Grojic

Sorry for all the bullets and death-by-PowerPoint stuff. This was before my online days. One thing that I am especially interested in (and I believe this shows in the PowerPoint) is the supportive power of groups on an individual's learning.

It is good, then, that this week in Mentoring we read this text on scaffolding. I find the questions provided in the text very helpful, something that every teacher can use in his/her class.

And in OLDS MOOC we focused a lot on personas and scenarios. Thinking about who your learners are going to be even before you meet them is a useful starting point. Here's a PowerPoint explaining scenarios and here's the template we used. An important part of scenarios are personas. And the template for a persona card is here. One last snippet from last week in OLDS MOOC would be these cards. And here's a short video on how to use them.

Let's finish with Multiliteracies. This course is the glue that binds everything together, it is the reason why I am able to cope with multiple sessions. Multiliteracies has given me something essential - the method. You remember how at school your teachers told you that the most important thing to learn is how to learn? By learning about MOOCs through an environment similar to a MOOC, I have learnt that all this is not about curriculum and homework, but about me. And it is OK to forget where you are supposed to be and what you are supposed to do. It is OK to choose not to do something if you don't find it relevant at the moment. It is also OK to modify assignments and do them your way.

Last week in Multiliteracies was the week when we were supposed to declare, i.e. to state our own learning goals.

My goals this year are as follows:

1. to reflect on the course topics
2. to reflect on my past and present experience in various MOOCs
3. to reflect on my 2011 Multiliteracies posts

Reflect, where?

Well, here, of course. Where else?

I would like to finish this with a short Animoto video I created for my MachinEVO class:

Technorati Tags: #evomlit, #mmooc13, #BaW13, #2013evo, ##machinEVO, #brainelt, #oldsmooc, #edcmooc

My Blog is Five Years Old

It is my blog's fifth birthday today. What I usually do on this day is create a retrospective of sorts. I look back at the previous year and the blog posts that I believe are worth sharing again.

2012 was a strange year for me. At the beginning of the year I was awarded a scholarship for a course called Webskills. You can read about this here. I had to start another blog for the course and, consequently, I spent less time in this one. I still managed to follow two EVO sessions and even post occasionally. Here's a post about how to use five-card stories as writing prompts. Here's one about using video resources for listening, and another post about online tools that can be used for speaking. For my Podcasting course I created another blog and this post introduces both the new blog and the listening/speaking activities within it. In this post I am trying to summarize my Webskills experience.

Moving beyond the EVO sessions and Webskills, I made a collection of April Fools online clips and turned them into a lesson here. Here I talked about a platform called Nicenet.

After that, strange things started happening. First, in June, I joined DS106 on a whim. DS106 was a perfect summer course for a teacher who is on a long holiday. I used this blog to post, but posts got stranger and stranger. Still, I believe those posts contain potentially good lesson ideas. Sometimes I even wrote about the ways to use a particular digital storytelling exercise in an EFL classroom. For example, here I turned a short clip featuring Kurt Vonnegut into a speaking exercise. This image illustrates an idiom, but it can be a good speaking and writing prompt. I created a lot of crazy images during the course and most of them are CC licenced, so if you find them useful, go ahead. There are some nice ones here and here. The Creative Commons poster from this post can be used to explain the CC concept to students. My Autobiography Cover could be developed into a nice speaking activity. Similar to this are Alternative Book Covers and the post already contains instructions for EFL teachers. In Wrapping Up Loose Ends there are three digital stories, but for use in the classroom I particularly recommend Mood Inversion. The Sound Effect Story  is accompanied by instructions for EFL teachers. Taking Back Spam was one of my favourite DS106 activities and it too has an application in an EFL classroom.

Once the holiday was over, I was preparing for the next school year. Activities for the First Class contains some nice warmers.

In 2012 I attended a Coursera course on modern poetry. It was a life-changing experience and you can read about it here.

If I try to summarise 2012, I would say that I had to step out of my comfort zone a lot. I attended a couple of courses that were not created for EFL teachers exclusively, I blogged about matters that were not TEFL-related, I created new blogs. It was a useful and refreshing experience.

I will finish with one of my DS106 movies. It is appropriate for this occasion because it is about number 5.

Thank you for being a part of my PLN in 2012.

Time to Fess Up

Photo Credit: timailius via Compfight cc

It is that time of the year again and we are nearing the end of the first week of EVO sessions. Every year I sign up for too many and then I have to do a lot of juggling. You might be wondering how many I have signed up for.

OK, there's Neuroscience in Education , an exciting new course with Carla Arena and her team. It promises to be very interactive and fun and, on top of everything, we will learn a lot about the brain and learning. Then there's Developing Mentoring Skills. There's MachinEVO, a very challenging course on how to create educational videos in Second Life. My Second Life skills are a bit rusty (though they never were great), but the course looks very interesting. Oh, my poor neglected avatar!



There are two courses which I have done before - Multiliteracies and BaW. When it comes to BaW, I have signed up to catch up with old friends and meet new people (after all, this is their 10th anniversary). I will probably not be able to do much more in this session. I am keen on Multiliteracies. In fact I need Multiliteracies in order to organise my learning.

I will try to explain. I am not sure my juggling metaphor from the beginning is correct. In connected learning, the five balls would not be seen as five separate online courses. Rather, forming connections among them would be what would keep all of them in the air. I am sure there will be a lot in common among the five sessions. I especially expect parallels between Multiliteracies and Neuroscience in Education. As Carla Arena explains in this post, it is important to make connections both within our brain and with other participants.

I will be using this blog as my eportfolio for these courses. Rather than look at each session separately, I will try to condense my 5-workshop experience within a single weekly post.

Ahem. I haven't told you everything. I am also doing OLDS MOOC, which is a MOOC on learning design. I'd signed up a long time ago and I didn't intend to participate when it started, but it looked so interesting. And it is. The workload is scary, but I don't have to do everything. Do I? I know next to nothing about learning design. Surely after the course is over I will know more than I do now? Also, I have an idea about a learning design project for English teachers and it is going to happen right here, in this blog. Stay tuned.

P.S. I am also doing a workshop on how to teach writing on SEETA.

Technorati Tags: #evomlit, #mmooc13, #BaW13, #2013evo, ##machinEVO, #brainelt