Spice up your classroom with games

Cape Town is a beautiful city - I visited it in 2010 when I took part in the Microsoft Global Forum. I visited it again yesterday - but only virtually - I gave a presentation about games in education to South African teachers. Fiona Beal, a global hero in education and my dear friend who I first met in Cape Town, then later in Seattle, invited me to share my knowledge about this topic - most of which I learned at last year's workshop  in Swindon, orgnaized by Intel and led by the one and only Ollie Bray.
 
Here's the recording of the webinar, as well as the links to the websites and tools I mentioned in the webinar and to the Schoolnet SA blog. And my slides are right here:

Spice up your classroom with games from Arjana Blazic

MS PIL Alumni Reunion

In July 2011,  I was proud and honored to be one of the top 50 educators selected by the Microsoft Partners in Learning Network to take part in the first PIL Institute that was held at the Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, WA.

This event has greatly impacted both my professional and personal life - it influenced the way I teach, the way I learn and the way I connect with educators worldwide.

I'm still in close contact with most of the educators from Seattle -  on the PIL Network and on our Facebook page, fondly nicknamed the Dirty Fifty.  Some of us have also had the pleasure of f2f meetings in different countries worldwide and we all know, more or less, for most members of our group what they are up to, what they have done since Seattle, where they have traveled and how they have implemented the knowledge they gained at the Insititute.

A year and a half later, Bart and I are organizing a virtual PIL Insitutute Alumni Reunion - or an informal follow-up meeting as an opportunity for the PIL Insitutute Alumni to share their experiences and their expertise.

We're pleased to have received all the support from the PIL Network for the organization of this event, which will be held on the Microsoft Lync videoconferencing platform. What's more, Ms Razan Roberts and Ms Taryn Benarroch of Microsoft will join us and deliver a presentation on the Expert Educator Program that Microsoft is about to launch real soon. This will be a huge privilege for all the attendees to hear about this program even before it is launched. We'll learn how educators can apply for it and what it will bring them for their professional development.

The meeting will be held at 7:00 pm CET on Thursday April 4, 2013. Check your time zone here. To join us for the event, follow this link to the Lync Room. The room will be open half an hour before the event.

Find out more about the PIL Alumni here.
Here's my video about the PIL Institute:

Free tools for educators on Thinglink

Recently I discovered Thinglink - a fantastic tool for creating interactive images.
Today I created this one - about Microsoft free tools for educators. It's easily embeddable on Blogger (not on Wordpress, though) and all the interactive features function properly. The image can also be found on my Thinglink page.


My first Thinglink was about Zadar, a beautiful city in Croatia, famous for the most romantic sunset in the world. My interactive image made it to the Thinglink's staff favourites:

My first Teach Meet Session

In Redmond I had a wonderful opportunity to present at my First Teach Meet ever. If you don't know what a Teach Meet is you can take a look at this video.

All our Teach Meet sessions were recorded on video, but while we're waiting for the videos to be uploaded, and following Fiona's suggestion, I made a screencast of my presentation on Live Meeting webinars for students.

Teach Meet session
- Watch more Tech Videos at Vodpod.

It's all about us

It's been a week since we returned from Seattle, but the blogoshpere is teeming with posts about our visit, our experiences, our learning activities and excursions, about the wonderful time we spent together. In order not to miss any of the precious posts by my fellow PIL bloggers, I've decided to make a list of all the posts about the Institute that have been published up to now and I'll update the list on a regular basis. Please keep me posted about the new arrivals.

Here they are (in the order they appeared)

Bart: Ped Xing
Dan: Microsoft Magical Mystery Tour Part 15 - Amazing just the way you are (feel free to read parts 1-17 as well:-)))
Bram: Maken we chef koks van onze leerlingen of keukenhulpjes? ;  Follow the guide through the Microsoft Partners in Learning Institute and The balance between Microsoft, partners and learning
Arjana:  Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond,  Inspired, motivated and enthusiastic (+ 4 posts on my Croatian blog)
Jugoslava: First Partners in Learning Institute
Kylie: The End is here... (+ more posts about the Institute from her archives)
Robyn: Dancing to a Great Song Part 1
Fiona: Will you be the next to attend the Microsoft Partners in Learning Institute week? and Why not hold a TeachMeet in your area?
Gergely: Ma van a tegnap holnapja, Immerzív tanulás, Innovatív tanárok fóruma USA, Tananyagok és tanulás and  Jó nekünk?
Laurence: From … Partners in Learning Institute / retour sur une semaine à Redmond
Kiley: Recap: Microsoft Partners in Learning Institute

Don't forget to take a look at these amazing videos:

Bart: Redmond, Seattle
Bram: MS PIL Institute in Seattle, Washington
Arjana: MS PIL Institute 2011
Dan: Partners in Learning Institute 2011 Redmond
Laurence: Seattle

Top 50 in Redmond

I feel tremendously proud and deeply honoured to be among the top 5o innovative educators from around the world who have been selected to attend the Microsoft Partners in Learning Institue 2011 in Seattle next week.

During this activity-packed week we'll be learning how to improve our own teaching practices, how to effectively teach with technology, how to prepare our students for life in the 21st century and how to train other teachers to implement innovative teaching and learning practices.

I'm immensely looking forward to it - to seeing the teachers who I have already met in Berlin and Cape Town, to meeting f2f those teachers who I have known only vritually but for such a long time, to meeting others from around the globe who I haven't had the opportunity to talk to yet, to learning from them all and together with all of them, to lifelong learning, which I'm so pasionate about, to flying across the Atlantic with a dozen of innovative educators, to travelling..... yes, it's all that and more!