Where in the world are you?

The beginning of Week 2 brought a new task, which, I'm happy to say, I managed to complete, although it didn't look promising at the beginning.

We were supposed to put a pin on the world map that Deborah has created for us, so that we not only see where in the world we live, but take a bird's view of our homes.

I thought I was on familiar ground with Google sites and wikis, but I struggled with the map for quite some time, mostly because I couldn't find the EDIT button. Sometimes a simple thing can be the biggest obstacle. Anyway, I managed to find it and I zoomed the map to where I live, found my apartment building and drag-and-dropped the blue arrow. In a pop up window I wrote a short description of the location of my home.




This is what the world map looks like now, but I hope my fellow bloggers soon add their blue pins.




Being a visual type of person, I find Deborah's idea of creating a world map really valuable, as in this way my virtual fellow bloggers are becoming real. Add to this their photos and what we get is an online course with a touch of face to face communication.

Catching up

Friday was a holiday here in Croatia, so I grabbed the chance to go to the Adriatic with my family. It was a computer-free weekend as I don't have access to the Internet in this small village.

I was absent for only THREE days, and I'm now in awe of my assidious course mates who posted 82 messages and a plethora of blog posts, comments and useful links.

I definitely have some catching up to do! And I'm looking forward to it immensely.

Week 1: Blogging with students: My experience

Today I did my reading on Blogging for ELT . The article strenghtened my belief in the importance of blogging with students as a new learning tool.

I also read two excellent posts by fellow bloggers Azhar and Cami, where they give examples of how to engage students in blogging projects.

Now I would like to share my personal experience with you. I have been blogging with my students for a year now. However, we started off with Ning, which is rather a social network, not a blogging platform, although blogging and commenting are possible. The reason I chose Ning was that it presented the opportunity to create a virtual classroom and a safe environment. Now I must say that my students were 16 years old at that time and all of them had been well-experienced in social networking websites in general and Facebook in particular.

However, most of them were first-time bloggers and this is where our Ning network proved of great value in helping them overcome their fears of having their thoughts read by a wide audience of known and unknown readers. After some time we opened up the door to a class of sophomores from Colorado and both blogging and commenting flourished.

Later on I created a Learner Blog on Edublogs. Each of my students was given their own blog and I was proud when I saw how positively they responded to the new environment. However, at the end of school year they told me they were in favour of the Ning site, as it gave them a strong sense of belonging and togetherness.

Week 1: The beginning of a new learning journey

I have just embarked upon a new learning adventure and I'm very pleased to be one of the 30 life-long learners from all over the world who decided to spend their summer holidays on learning how to enhance their teaching practices with new technologies.

The course "Building teaching Skills Through The Interactive Web" is taking place on Nicenet, a virtual classroom. Having introduced ourselves to other course members, we have now taken on a new task of creating our new blogs, where we will reflect upon what we learn from each other and how we can use our newly-acquired knowledge in the classroom.

I have been blogging for quite a while and creating a new blog specifically for this course was not a difficult task for me. By following the step by step guide, a new blog can easily be created.

This blog is my window to the world and I'm looking forward to sharing ideas and thoughts with you.