Moodle For Teachers EVO 2015

Register now for Moodle 4 Teachers English Village Online Session 2015!

EVO15 is kicking off on January 11 and registration for M4T session is now open. For 5 weeks, until February 15, you will be able to participate in live online classes and view the recordings from the Moodle session area.

The aim of the M4T session is to provide participants, who have never used Moodle or who would like to enrich their previous Moodle experiences, with the knowledge and skills to navigate a Moodle course, access resources, activities, and blocks from a student perspective and practise the same Moodle features in practice areas as teachers and managers of a Moodle course. The participants will develop a lesson in teams in a Moodle course of their own.

The session is massive, open, completely free, and facilitated by a team of 6 moderators from different parts of the world, all willing to help and accompany you in this collaborative connected challenge.

Meet the team below. From left to right: Nellie Deutsch, Ludmila Smirnova, Tom Hodgers, Nives Torresi, Susan Dixon, and myself.

The main learning environment is at Moodle 4 Teachers EVO15, the course area that includes all the materials and the schedule of activities. In addition, every Saturday the session holds
live online classes (webinars) at 4 GMT/UTC  (11 AM EST).

To join this session, follow these steps:
1. Create an account on: http://moodle4teachers.org
2. Go to your email, confirm the account and log in.
3. Enroll in http://moodle4teachers.org/course/view.php?id=16
4. Introduce yourself: http://moodle4teachers.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=520

The action starts on January 10, 2015!

International Writing Exchange EVO 2015

Register now for this Electronic Village Online 2015 Session.

The International Writing Exchange EVO Session is taking place from January 12 to February 15 and registration is open now, until 11 January.

IWE is a collaborative writing project for EFL teachers and their students. The goal of IWE is for students to learn about other cultures and improve their writing. Teachers from around the globe plan the online course and invite their students. One of the aims of this EVO session is to create personal learning networks among teachers for the creation of different IWEs to serve a variety of ages and levels of groups through the teachers’ participation.

The session is aimed at EFL teachers who teach or would like to teach English for academic or special purposes around the world and are interested in learning how to form writing communities. Teachers, who take the session, do not need to currently be giving a class.

The session is massive, open and completely free, moderated by a team of 5 ESL teachers from different parts of the world; from left to right, meet them below: Nellie Deutsch, Rosmery Ribera, Ludmila Smirnova, myself and Ellen Graber.

     

IWE EVO15 takes place at two learning environments: the Moodle course area where the International Writing Exchange will take place. And the WizIQ course area for the content and live online events for public viewing after EVO15

To join this session: 

1. Go to the Moodle course area. 

2. Create a new account.

3. Confirm the account in your email.

4. Enrol!

The action starts on January 12, 2015!

Registration for EVO2015 begins today!

To register, go to EVO Sessions.

Registration for this year's Electronic Village Online (free online professional development sessions for EFL and ESL teachers) begins January 5, 2015. The sessions themselves run from January 12 until February 15, 2015.

Get more information about all thirteen sessions at http://evosessions.pbworks.com.


If you are having trouble deciding on which session to register for, please join us at http://learningtimesevents.org/webheads/ (scroll down for instructions and technical requirements) for the EVO2015 kickoff webcast on January 11, 2015 at 14:00/2:00 p.m. GMT (your local time at bit.ly/1CaH6fq)!

Session moderators will be on hand to introduce their sessions and take questions.

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.