Enjoy and be happy!

For a wonderful 2015, full of happy sincere authentic collaborative learning and teaching!

Thank you to all who, whatever the way, have been supporting me throughout 2014, which undoubtedly will always be a year to remember!

EVO 2015, coming soon!

The Electronic Village Online, a project of TESOL's CALL Interest Section, has been offering free online professional development sessions to language teachers worldwide for over ten years now.

January 2015 is bringing a new EVO Call, Electronic Village Online 2015.

This year, there is an offer of 13 incredible five-week sessions on a wide range of topics, including teaching pronunciation, international writing, using Moodle, creating electronic textbooks, flipped learning, making Machinima in Second Life, using Minecraft to teach English, and a lot more.

For the first time in my professional career I will be co-moderating three EVO sessions from January 12 to February 15, hand in hand with a fabulous team of educational leaders, all of them an inspiration for any ESL teacher, and thanks to Shelly Terrell and Dr. Nellie Deutsch, both of whom contacted me and opened a wide new gate towards online development before me.

My sincere gratitude to Shelly and Dr. Deutsch, to our EVO Mentors, our TESOL sponsors and to Nina Liakos, EVO Lead Coordinator.

I am nervously looking forward to starting it all but extremely full of joy to be part of it all too. Do not miss the chance to join these sessions:

Creating eTextbooks

International Writing Exchange

Moodle For Teachers

For a complete list of sessions and abstracts, visit the Call for Participation.

Registration for the sessions will take place from January 5 - January 11, 2015.
The sessions begin on January 12 and continue until February 15. To register for a session, follow the instructions on the corresponding session's page.

EVO sessions are free and open to everybody who wants to join; you don't need to be a TESOL member.

Put January 5 - 11 on your agenda and register for EVO 2015. Follow #evosessions and stay tuned for an awesome online experience! Do not miss it!

Recording of Flip, Blend and Wrap it all up! is ready now

Last 1 December, my peer Billy J. Ramos, @somar0209, and myself copresented together the third live session of the series entitled The EduPower of Blended Learning at WizIQ.

In this last session, we gave tips about surviving through face-to-face lessons, combined with a virtual classroom at Edu 2.0, and through collaborative project blogging challenges.

For those of you who could not attend live, here you are the recording ready now:



We are looking forward to gaining your feedback and reading your comments!

The World is my audience

As you all know by now, the Twima Project has been going on  for a few months, along the last term.
In previous entries here, we have been following it step by step, from scratch to its web launch, until now, when it comes to its end with a wonderful collaborative iBook compiled with the contribution of more than 170 writers from all around the world, being smoothly coordinated by @theipodtecher, who was the one coming up with this wonderful globally connected idea.

Our contribution to #twima from Spain comes hand in hand with the online teacher training course 'Digital Storytelling For Teachers', run by INTEF, and hosted by an awesome team of instructors, who encouraged and fostered their trainees to play a part in a collaborative chain story, which has now gone global. I sincerely thank them for that!

A chain story is an easy way to have students learn vocabulary and work with their friends to create a collaborative story. In a chain story, the teacher begins the story, student A continues the story, student B continues where A stopped, and so on.  The students have to listen to each other and understand each other so that the story makes sense and flows.

For this activity, trainnees contributed to a collaborative web chain story, using an online tool, Padlet. This tool allows you to click on the web wall and add text, images, videos, and more. Trainees did not have to register, but they were kindly asked to include their name. Of course, they can contribute on any mobile device with internet access or on the web.

We had over a hundreed online course participants, divided into five groups, to whom we provided the same beginning of a chain poem, and whose chained outcome can be read at the different group poems below:

Group A - http://padlet.com/majegsm/chainpoem_A 

Group B - http://padlet.com/majegsm/chainpoem_B  

Group C - http://padlet.com/majegsm/chainpoem_C 

Group D - http://padlet.com/majegsm/chainpoem_D 

Group E - http://padlet.com/majegsm/chainpoem_E 

To contribute to the poem, our trainees had to read the entire story up to the last post, contribute with a chunk that made sense and continued the flow of the poem as well as being related to the previous post, and adding multimedia elements to accompany their part of the poem, but involving an added snag: their contribution should be at least 100 words long.

The collaborative poems that they have come up with are now part of the #twima iBook The World Is My Audience, live at iTunes, free to download on all iOS devices and Macs.