My story: Vicky's blog challenge

Vicky Loras has recently started a new blog challenge What's your story? Vicky invited teachers from around the world to share their stories about the changes they've made that helped them become a better educator or a better person. Vicky herself has made some big changes in her life and so have so many other educators, people who I know from Twitter and Facebook and who took up the challenge and wrote amazing posts about their amazing lives.

Do I lead such an amazing life? Do I have such a story? I've never lived anywhere else but in Croatia. I've never done anything else but teach. I'm not thinking about a change in the future (no matter how much I would love to live in a foreign country - any foreign country, for that matter - and learn a new language by speaking it - but I simply don't have the courage to make such a move). But despite living and teaching in one country for a long, long time I have changed as an educator and a person because of - you guessed correctly - Twitter and my PLN!

Before Twitter I rarely got the opportunity to share my experiences/knowledge/vision with other teachers and more importantly, the very thought of me giving a presentation to an audience sent shivers down my spine. I used to be an extremely shy presenter. I've been a teacher for many many years, but standing in front of an audience always made me feel ill at ease. Today things have changed,  my confidence has increased tremendously and I readily accept every invitation, in spite of the butterflies that appear at the first mention of a possible presentation or talk.Yes, I'm still nervous at the beginning of a talk, but this is positive nervousness, more like adrenalin, something that makes me want to keep on talking to my audience forever and ever.

At the beginning of November I'm going to do something that I would never do if it weren't for Twitter and my precious PLN - I'm going to speak in front of an audience of English teachers at TESOL Paris! I know I'll die ten times during the first ten minutes of the talk, but I want to go through it and I'm so terribly excited about it that I can hardly sleep. What's more, I'm thinking about singing karaoke in Paris! Something stupid - you might be thinking. (No, it's just that I love Robbie Williams:-) This would have been absolutely impossible two years ago, but today I feel quite comfortable with it. Yes, I have changed, definitely.

Despite having butterflies during my presentation in Redmond, I thoroughly enjoyed it