Feedback on EVO Crafting the ePerfect Textbook 2014

Sunday February16th marked the final day of the exciting five-week EVO Crafting the ePerfect Textbook session.  It has been a truly exhilarating and educational experience, connecting with over 500 teachers from around the globe.  I was helping the amazing organizer Shelly Terrell to moderate the Crafting the ePerfect eTextbook, together with 14 other moderators as seen in the screenshot below.

This session was a great CPD opportunity for me and I learned so much about how to write and publish a chapter of a textbook.  I was able to meet and interact with so many enthusiastic participants, some I knew already, but a lot of new people, I met for the first time.  The interactions took place mostly on the Google+ EVO Crafting the ePerfect Textbook community.  Google+ was a new experience for me and I have to say I enjoyed learning more about how this site functions. It was the perfect place to host the session and everything was expertly organized by Shelly Terrell into the different weeks of the session.

There is a Listly Ebook EVO bookshelf of all the ebooks / pdfs / publications from the community here 

During the pre-registration week and then the five weeks of the session, I enjoyed meeting and greeting all the participants and seeing how their projects developed from mindmapping of the initial ideas to the final creation of their ebook chapter.  I was able to comment on and encourage the participants within the Google+ community and a lot of interesting resources and links were shared by everyone, moderators and participants alike. It was wonderful to see how everything evolved and how much enthusisam was poured into the session.

Apart from popping in daily to see what was happening in the community, I also added a few images and links to tools, that I thought might be useful.  Below a list of some of the tools I used during the five weeks in no particular order.

Write Comics

Big Huge Labs Magazine cover effect

Haiku Deck 3, 2, 1 Introduction

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad

Dvolver  

Tagxedo - A list of web 2.0 tools used by participants for their 3,2,1 introductions

Text2mindmap of Week 3 impressions

Fodey newspaper article feedback

A Bookr of my impressions of the session.

I would like to say a huge thanks to everyone for making these five weeks such a wonderful and stimulating experience!   A special thanks to Shelly Terrell the super organizer, Rubena  St Louis our session mentor, all my lovely co-moderators and all the fabulous participants. Congratulations to everyone who completed their ebook chapter!!

Also, included is a huge thanks to the very hardworking EVO Moderators' team led by Nina Liakos.  The four-week Moderator Training session before the actual EVO sessions began, was very interesting and extremely practical.  All in all, the past 10 weeks have flown past!

One of the participants and my dear fellow-blogger Natasa,  has posted feedback of how her ebook chapter evolved during the five weeks.  Many congratulations for her excellent ebook chapter called Travel.

CO14 - An Exciting Weekend of CPD!

This weekend Friday 7th February to Sunday 9th February promises to be an exciting couple of days for educators around the world.

It is the Connecting Online's 2014 E-conference, which is free to attend. It is all hosted on the WizIq platform.  Speakers include Professor Curt Bonk, Shelly Terrell, Dr Nellie Deutsch, Dr Ludmilla Smirnova, Stephen Downes and many more! I too will be presenting my tutorial on 'Visually Inspire your Students!' on Sunday at 5pm EST, or 11pm Rome time. This presentation is the same one I did for the Reform Symposium in 2013.  It will be a great pleasure for me to share my ideas to a wider audience.

The themes for the CO14 econference are as follows (reposted from the wiziq newsletter site with kind permission to reproduce and share)

'Educators at all levels will find this conference very useful, as many eminent intellectuals from across the globe will be holding webinars on a variety of topics that include:

		Connecting Online to Improve Instruction and Learning: Online Learning and Instructional Experiences
		Experiences with technology in face-to-face and online classes. What worked and what didn't work for you?
		How do you use technology to promote your online workshops, consultation, and communities?
		Research conducted on e-learning
		Books written on e-learning
		21st Century learning and teaching
		Challenges of the 21st Century learning/teaching environment
		Leading a business with e-learning technology

I look forward to seeing you over the weekend.  I can guarantee you it will be very educational, enlightening and above all, lots of fun!