Welcome, Europe!

Yes, today is the long-awaited day for Croatia - today we're voting in a referendum on whether to join the European Union and I do hope the Croatian citizens say yes.

But no, this post is not about the referendum. This post is my way to extend a warm welcome to the participants of the Comenius project Imaging Europe. My school is one of the 8  participants of this project financed by the European Comission and I'm the coordinator of the Croatian team. 50 people are coming to Zagreb today and they are going to be our guests over the next five days.

31 students from Belgium, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Greece and Spain will be hosted by the students from my school while 19 teachers will be staying at a hotel. Over the next week we plan to show our guests all the sights of Zagreb and the surroundings, visit several muesum, go to a musical, learn how to make movies and actually make them, eat delicious Croatian food, speak English and most importantly, get to know each other, learn from each other, learn to respect each other no matter how different we are, recognize prejudices and sterotypes and hopefully eliminate them. This is my vision of the Europe I want to live in.

Virtual TeachMeets and StudentsMeets - yes, we can!

On March 3, the TeachMeet Int'l Team (Sonja, Bart and I)  will be hosting another virtual TeachMeet. I think it's not an overstatement to say that  the first one, held in December 2011, was a great success. There are two reasons for its success. Firstly, the teachers were given the floor! They had a chance to talk about practical matters and ideas that worked in their classroooms and they embraced this opportunity with burning and contagious enthusiasm. Secondly, all the participants, be it presenters or the audience, were given  a wonderful opportunity to connect with educators from all over the world without leaving their home.

I  believe that the same can be done for students as well, so we'll be hosting our first StudentsMeet on Feburary 7. We are eager to bring together all the students (and their teachers) who want to share their ideas and their creativity with the rest of the world, no matter where they live, what language they speak or what school they attend.  What matters is willingness to share and to learn from peers.

I think it's time to give the floor to students! Let's switch the roles. Let's give the students the opportunity to teach the teachers. I'm ready, are you?

Highlights of 2011

What an incredible year 2011 has been for me and my professional development! While I was nothing more than an ordinary yet enthusiastic lurker in 2010,  I  dared and I did in 2011!

Despite being a shy presenter I plucked up the courage to present at two ELT conferences and a Teach Meet and I gave a talk on new technologies in education to teachers in two schools in Zagreb.

I'm extremely proud of the series of webinars for students that Sonja and I launched in the spring. There were 13 webinars that I co-hosted and/or presented at and they proved to be extremely successful, useful and popular among the student population. Besides student webinars, I delievered two webinars for teachers, entitled School Without Walls and Safer Internet Day - How They Do It. I was a co-presenter at the webinar about the Microsoft Partners in Learning Institue 2011.

The highlights of the year have been by far the two TeachMeets  that I co-organized and co-hosted with Sonja and Bart. The first one was aimed at Croatian teachers, the second one was international with 22 presenters from 15 countries.(See the video clip below)

So that makes 23 presentations in one year! Not bad for a shy presenter, huh?


In 2011 I finally had a chance to meet many great educators in person - Vicky, Eva, Chiew, Chuck, Vladimira, Ann, Ania, Anna, Ceci, Sue, Brad, Fiona, Dan, Kelli, James..... I've been lucky enough to have met some of my Twitter and Facebook friends twice - Fiona, Shelly, Marijana, Cheryl, Beyza, Isil, Valentina, Sue, Denize, Luke, Rakesh, Ania, Ken, Julie....  and even three times - Jugoslava,  Dede, Tatiana, Jan and Bart.

The world has become a small place, literally! It doesn't matter where they are - we're in touch - be it virtually or f2f! Nothing is impossible any more. At least not when it comes to travelling. Of which I've had my share in 2011 - I've travelled to Egypt, Turkey, Ireland, Northern Ireland, the US, Greece and France. Not bad for someone who is just a teacher, huh?

Good vibrations

If anything deserves to be described as a truly out of this world experience, then the two yesterday's webinars should be it! The iTDi webinar and the TeachMeet Int'l definitely set new standards for professional development and I'd like to express my heartfelt thanks to all the speakers and participants who shared their experiences, ideas and best practices and sent out a great deal of good vibrations into the cyberspace.

 

I'm especially grateful to Bart and Sonja, my co-hosts for the TeachMeet Int'l  for their wholehearted support before, during and after the event. The Twitter back channeling was absolutely amazing and I extend my huge thanks to Jeannette @7MrsJames for compiling  the tweetdoc  and for being there with us although it was middle of the night in Australia. Jeannette has written a wonderful post about this special day, and so did Vicky, who was one of the TeachMeet Int'l esteemed presenters.

Just a perfect day for webinars

I first presented at a webinar a year ago - and got hooked immediately! When it comes to webinars, it doesn't matter if  I'm a moderator, a presenter or only a listener, I simply love them. They're really contagious - you do it once - you want to do it all the time! And on Saturday Dec. 17 there is going to be a real treat for all the webinar fans out there. Two fanatastic events will take place in the virtual world: 

At 10:00 am CET,  iTDi will be hosting a special webinar What's a Teacher? moderated by Shelly Terrell with live online presentations by Scott Thornbury, Luke Meddings, Marcos Benevides, Steven Herder, Chuck Sandy, and John Fanselow. 300 teachers from 57 countries have registered for the event. Are you one of them too?





Immediately after the ITDi webinar, at 2:0 pm CET, Sonja, Bart and I will be moderating our first virtual Teach Meet Int'l. In this webinar, 25 speakers from 15 countries will be sharing their ideas and projects in  3-minute presentations. Check out who our fabulous presenters are and what they're going to talk about. You don't have to register to hear our speakers, just follow this link to the Live meeting room which will be open at 1:30 CET. Click here to see your time and date.

What is GFTW, anyway?

I feel elated and excited because my  wiki Greetings From The World has been nominated for the Edublog Awards 2011! This is the third time in a row that it has been nominated and if you take a look at the sidebar you'll see that GFTW is the proud winner of the 2009 and 2010 Eddies.

It started with a tweet about Glogster by Shelly Terrell . I liked this tool so much that  I immediately created my own glogster called My Magic Wand a.k.a Web 2.0. On the very next day I introduced it to my students who loved it even more than I did and a new project was launched. Three months later it was nominated for the Edublog Awards! I felt as if I had been nominated for an Oscar Award and I will never forget that December night when the winners were announced. At that time there were 10 participating schools in the project. A year later we were joined by another 8 schools and this year we have grown again - for the time being there are 29 schools from 6 continents with more than 500 students who have contributed to the project with their glogsters. There are more than 300 amazing glogsters that our members have created. Over the past year we have worked with Beetroote, whose travels and glogs have inspired all of us to create glogs that can be used as wonderful learning resources.

If you want please vote for Greetings from the world on the Edublog Awards website. This year the voting process is slightly different: you can vote for us every single day! But please make sure to view all the other wonderful wikis, blogs and blog posts and let amazing educators and students from all over the world inspire and enthuse you.

My fav piece of tech

After having taken the poll about using technology in the classroom on the Facebook page of the International Teacher Development Institute, I'd like to recommend my favorite web 2.0 tool that my students and I used - and liked - the most over the past year.

Wikispaces is definitely Number 1 on my list. I started using wikis three years ago, then moved from there to blogs (I tried all of them: wordpress, edublogs and blogger) and the Google sites as well. But this year I returned to the wiki - I think wikis convey the true essence of Web 2.0 - collaboration! It's amazing how easily we can work with students and teachers from all parts of the world. Even teachers who aren't tech-savvy can easily use it and keep it running smoothly. Here's my Greeting from the world wiki, which has connected more than 500 students and educators from across six continents.

In October 2011, I set up a virtual classrooms for my second-year students where we do the tasks that accompany the course book. It's called  My English Class 2B and we've done quite a lot over the past two months. I have recently introduced the wiki to my first-year students as well:  My English Class 1E  and right now they're learning how to use it.