My Blog Is Eight Years Old

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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

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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.