Five weeks have flown past and today is the last day of the Electronic Village Online sessions. I have been co-moderating the eTextbooks session and enjoying the experience enormously. Under Shelly Terrell's expert leadership and guidance, and also our mentor Dr Nellie Deutsch, the expert team of moderators have helped many participants to realise their dream of creating an etextbook for their classes.
Below an Animoto feedback I have created summing up a few points.
A very happy new year to everyone! I hope 2016 is going to be a great year for us all full of happy occasions and inspirational events:-)
CPD Opportunity for 2016!
This week from 3rd - 11th January the TESOL Electronic Village Online yearly sessions can be viewed and you can now register to attend one or more exciting CPD opportunities. The sessions are FREE, and they last for 5 weeks and kick off from January 11th and finish on February 14th. They are open to anyone around the globe who wishes to learn about something educational. There is a wide range of fascinating topics on offer, 14 in fact, so there should be something to suit everyone!
I am delighted to be moderating once again for the third year in a row on EVO Ebook for Teachers' session, together with Shelly Terrell's fabulous team of co-moderators.
Why don't you join the eBook moderators on Friday for a pre-session EbookEVO chat on Twitter? Details in the image below, courtesy of our lead moderator and organizer, Shelly Terrell.
Looking forward to seeing you in the EVO sessions. I can assure you they will be fun, educational and memorable!!
The Electronic Village Online Hashtag is: #evosessions
I did a presentation called The EVOlution of Jan! for IATEFL YLT in January 2015. The slides via PresentMe demonstrate the EVO sessions I have attended since I first joined as an eager participant in 2009. I hope you will be inspired to register for a session in 2016!
I am currently doing the EVO Moderator training for 4 weeks and am enjoying the experience very much! Even though 2016 will be my third year of moderating on the eTextbooks for Teachers session, all moderators are required to follow the training again, which is a very good thing. We find out about the sessions that are being proposed for 2016. The outcome will be published in early December. We all help each other with feedback comments and get to know our fellow moderators, mentors and Organization Team a bit more.
Part of the training involves reading lots of interesting elearning and emoderating articles and then discussing them in a special and private EVO Moderators' Google+ community. I get notifcations on a daily basis of everyone that posts, so I can keep updated really easily. Inbetween picking our olives last week, attending the training has been very nice and relaxing. Each Sunday there is a Google Hangout on Air / Blackboard Collaborate live meeting with the Lead Moderators and the weekly tasks are discussed.
The 2016 sessions will run from 10th January - 14th February 2016. Teachers from around the globe are invited to participate for free. All the dedicated moderators run the sessions on a voluntary basis, and this is what makes EVO so special and different from most online courses!!
The proposals are all very exciting, and once they are up in the main wiki, I will post the link up in this blog post.
I am honoured and delighted to be invited by Dr Nellie Deutsch to present at the Bi-monthly webinar WiZiq sessions held by IATEFL YLT Sig. I have created a brand new session for this meeting and will also present it at Connecting Online 2015 econference in February.
This talk is about how my life has been transformed by the TESOL Electronic Village Online yearly sessions that I have been attending regularly, since 2009. It has been a transformational journey of liberating learning opportunities, exciting experiments with new tools, and inspirational encounters with the wonderful groups of moderators, and participants from each of the sessions.
This special presentation is my personal and heartfelt ............
......... to everyone who has been involved with the sessions I have attended as a participant, and most recently for the past two years, as a member of the moderating team for the EVO Crafting the Perfect eTextbook session.
I aim to outline what I have personally learned from participating in these sessions and hopefully this will encourage more people to join and attend in future years. The Electronic Village Online sessions are usually held for five weeks in January - February each year. They are open to teachers from around the world and a huge variety of topics are discussed and explored.
I have recorded my thoughts and experiences on all the EVO sessions I have ever attended in this blog, and it constitutes a learner's diary, an evolving journey of exploration and enlightenment! You can click on the EVO tags below the post, and you will be taken to my blog posts, and feedback on each of the sessions.
Webinar Update:
Thanks very much to all the attendees of my webinar (16). I really enjoyed the session, and here is a screenshot from the webinar at the end.
A very special thanks goes to Dr Nellie Deutsch for being such a fabulous moderator, adding all the URLs and links as they came up, and for dealing with all the chatbox comments in such an expert manner.
All my links have now been posted on a special wiki page I have created, called CO15 Links and Resources: HERE.
Link to RECORDING: YLT Webinar: The EVOlution of Jan!The recording lasts just over one hour, so I do hope you will view it!
I tried to join in with the chat as much as possible, as this is a part of doing webinars which is so much fun - interacting with a live audience. Sorry if I missed a few comments here and there!
I am delighted to be one of the moderators of the 'Crafting eTextbooks' Electronic Village Online 2015 sessions. I have the great pleasure of helping to moderate Week One together with my fellow team members Shelly Terrell, (Creator), Ozge Karaoglu, Debbie Tebovich, Michelle Worgan, Jason Levine and Jennifer Vershsoor! It is already promising to be an awesome experience, and if you would like to join us for this session, or of course any other of the Electronic Village Online 2015 sessions, you still can! It begins in earnest today on Monday January 12th!
My personal journey with publishing ebooklets
I have been creating personal ebooklets for a few years now and would like to showcase some of my favourite ones.
My Top 3 digital formats to publish my presentations, lessons and documents are:
Slideshare
Issuu
Youblisher
Usually
I do my preliminary drafts in a Word document, and then I publish to a PDF format,
before uploading to the sites above. I also use Powerpoint to create slides which can be easily converted to Slideshare.
As these presentations are 'in the cloud' they
are easily accessible whenever I need them from any computer and this
makes it very easy to locate them.
SLIDESHARE
Below my very first simple digital e-story called A Fable of Sorts, uploaded to Slideshare:
I created a promotional flyer for my Idiomatic Love Story by adding some information to Glogster, an interactive poster making tool.
You can click on the 2 heart-shaped audio tabs to hear a little bit about this dramatic love story between Frederick and Isabella! You can view the Glog in bigger format by clicking on it below.
My 2014 EVO session 3-2-1 poster introduction using Glogster can be viewed HERE:
YOUBLISHER
I like Youblisher for its very quick and easy publishing options and I have created digital ebooklets to use with my students, and presentation materials for econferences as seen in the 4 examples below. Please click on each image icon to be taken directly to the clickable ebooklet:
Language in Motion: Teaching with the Flow: Presentation
Teaching Idioms with Web 2.0 Tools: Prersentation
The Man with the Golden Voice: Lesson plan
The Cat that got the Cream: Lesson plan
A Romantic Love Story
On the occasion of my parents' anniversary in 2010, I published a small ebooklet to celebrate it. I wrote about their very special love story and sent a link to the family as a souvenir. They were able to click the pages to read the story. I also printed it out to give to my parents as a personal memento. I hope to create another ebooklet to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary later this year, and again I will use a digital format and update it to reflect the events of the past 60 years.
1955: The Look of Love
ISSUU
I have used this publishing tool Issuu with student projects for a while now, and it is simple to use, by uploading your pdf file and then a clickable ebooklet is created within a very short time. Your publications can be kept in stacks for ease of reference. This is one of my ebooklets below, based on a webinar presentation:
Janet'sTOP 5 TIPS for publishing your stories, texts and documents in an ebooklet format!
Remember the following:
I hope you find these resources helpful for crafting your future ebooklet.
The excitement is beginning to mount in the pre-registration week for EVO Crafting the ePerfect Textbook session. Many teachers from around the world are registering, ahead of the start on Monday January 12th. I have just met one participant who lives in Abruzzo, not far from where I live! It is wonderful to meet new people and also familiar faces. This is what EVO sessions are all about: the power of collaborating with like-minded educators, the excitement of sharing new ideas, and the joy of exploring new avenues for continuous professional development. It is an incredible mixture of emotions and experiences!
Registration and lots more information for the Crafting the ePerfect Textbook can be found at the following link: http://ebookevo.pbworks.com
I have created a new 3-2-1 introduction for this session using one of my favourite tools, Animoto. It is only 30 seconds long, but hopefully it gives a few facts about my life.
News Update: January 12th 2015
Inspired by my fellow moderators and participants on the 2015 EVO Ebook session, I have just created a new introduction using ThingLink, as seen below. It looks like a relatively easy tool to use!
Just click on the heart symbols to be taken to a link....
I would like to share the message I received today, and to spread the word, as requested by Nina Liakos, from the EVO team. I can honestly recommend that you join at least one of the 13 free sessions!
I have attended an EVO session every year since 2009, and each session was an awesome learning experience which helped to shape the teacher I am today! Once again, for the second year, I am proud to be one of the moderators on the Crafting the ePerfect eTextbook, led by our inspiring main moderator and creator of the session, Shelly Terrell.
Hope to see you there :-)
Registration for EVO2015 begins today!
To register, go to http:evosessions.pbworks.com.
Reminder to subscribers of the EVO Newsletter:
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.
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.
Please share this announcement with your colleagues and personal learning
networks, and thank you for helping us spread the word!
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.
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.
You can now register for free to participate in this year's Electronic Village Online sessions! The registration period is from January 6th - 12th. Week one kicks off on Monday January 13th. Each session lasts 5 weeks until February 16th. This will be a really exciting opportunity for Continuous Professional Development, and there are 19 different sessions to choose from. Click on the link here to read all about each session, so you can choose which one to join.
We are led and mentored in this session by our incredible team leader and organizer, Shelly Terrell.
Below I have copy pasted the outline of the Crafting the ePerfect Textbook session from the EVO session information page:
'Published textbooks are just the
beginning of a teacher’s instructional tools. Often, teachers need
additional support for their learners, but don’t have the time to
collect, gather, organize, and produce supplemental materials in a
cohesive beautiful document. In 5 weeks, teachers will aim to outline,
design, and complete 1 chapter of an e-textbook that meets their
learners’ needs and can be used yearly with a few edits and updates.
Participants will be guided by 15 moderators from 12 different countries
who are experienced and well-known in publishing and materials design.
The moderators are teachers, award-winning coursebook authors, teacher
trainers, app producers, edubloggers, keynote speakers, and authors of
published books as well as e-books. Additionally, participants will
participate in online collaborative peer feedback and learn how to use
free digital tools to edit and improve writing so that they can use
these tools effectively with their learners.'
A fodey announcement I created which gives a few details of this pre-registration week, which has seen a huge amount of participants enrol for this session. I have enjoyed meeting and welcoming participants from around the globe.
I am looking forward to seeing you in the session!!
I came across this saying the other day, and it struck me as being so positive and uplifting, that I knew I had to write it down, so here it is!!
"Always reach for the stars, because even if you don't get there, you will be out of this world."
I am following the EVO Digital Storytelling for Kids session and so far, I am having such a wonderful time. I just love being a "student" again. Everyone is sharing so many ideas and being supportive of each other's efforts. It is a world I love being drawn into, and it helps me appreciate what it is like to be participating in an online course from the student's eyes and perspective. As an online moderator myself, it is important to be able to feel this perspective, so that in the future, I can incorporate the magical ingredients it takes to make a course a successful and enjoyable one.
Collaborative group work certainly is one of the key ingredients. Having a sense of "belonging" to a community is also fundamental and at the heart of what makes a session run smoothly. Together with excellent, committed moderators who always know the right moment for when to comment and give encouragement, it all contributes to a unique moment in one's personal and professional development.
The truth is that I had planned not to do an EVO session this year, due to a lack of time to devote and immerse myself fully, but as I mentioned in the previous post, I was encouraged to join in, and the rest so they say, is history....I am so glad I am participating!!
Dvolver
Below is a Dvolver film I have created for one of the Week 3 tasks. It sums up the journey I am following with so much enthusiasm.
The Lillies
Here is a simple story I created with Creaza, called The Lillies. Can you guess what happens before the final slide? You need to use your imagination! Please do join in with your ideas in the Comments' box at the very bottom of the post.
Motorbike Stuff
Here's a cartoon I couldn't resist creating, using one of my own favourite images of Abruzzo for the background:
Crazy Rider created with Creaza
The cartoon shows ME doing a wheelie in Abruzzo!!
Can you guess whether the following statements are true about me or not?
Janet
has actually been on the back of a motorbike doing a wheelie.
has ridden thousands of miles on the back of a motorbike.
lists her favourite motorbike of all time as the Honda Goldwing 1500
likes flicking through motorbike magazines such as Motociclismo
has actually seen Valentino Rossi win a Moto GP
has ridden in formation with a Police Outrider for the former Queen Mother
has a signed Valentino Rossi original poster called "First Blood"
knows what an Akrapovic exhaust sounds like
enjoys travelling around Abruzzo by motorbike
has taken training and passed her CBT (Compulsory Basic training) in the UK for riding a 125cc motorbike
Animoto Motorbike Scenes Animoto is an excellent tool for creating short, snappy slideshows with music. The free version allows you 30 seconds, which is a bit limiting, but is good enough to create some lovely presentations.
Below is an Animoto video called Abruzzo by Motorbike. It shows images I took (mostly from the back of the motorbike!) on a trip around the beautiful region of Abruzzo.
Answers to the True / False questions are at the bottom!
Using Comics & Cartoons to learn a language
I think learning a language by creating simple comics is an excellent idea. Can you work out what the characters are saying in Itlaian?
An Italian Dialogue created with Creaza
Mille Grazie
I would like to say a very big thank you to all the lovely moderators on the EVO Digitalstorytelling for Young Learners session and also to all my fellow EVO participants for helping to make it such an interesting and valuable learning experience for me so far. Roll on week 4!!
Post Scriptum
All the statements about Janet and motorbikes are TRUE!!!
Can you believe it? Sometimes I can't believe it myself, but I'm very glad I tried these things...
When I am old and wearing purple, I will look back on these heady and incredible moments, and they will help me to face the last inevitable journey....
I am enjoying the wonderful EVO DigitalStorytelling4kids session, and this is one of the tasks for Week 3. We have to create a video / slideshow using a tool such as Photopeach. This tool is very easy to use and you simply upload your photos, choose some music, add some captions and press Publish. There is also a Quiz feature, which is great for reviewing vocabulary topics with students.
I have chosen to create a slideshow to showcase some of the comics and cartoons I created for the EVO Digital Storytelling Week 2 tasks, and I have also included some of my favourite comics & cartoons from the past.
I owe special thanks to Shelly for inviting me to join this inspirational session. I'm hooked!
What an amazing five weeks I spent on the fantastic Electronic Village Online Podcasting 2012 course! I feel as if I worked very hard during the session and I learned so much about Podcasting. I enjoyed all the activities, which were fun and challenging at the same time. Everything was set out very clearly. The moderators Evelyn Web, Miguel Mendoza and Teadira Perez were outstanding, and looked after the participants very skillfully. Readings such as The 4 Types of Podcasts were chosen carefully, and tutorials provided step by step guidance.
This story is an almost faithful rendition of what happened during the fourth week of my course. I had fun creating it!! I will embed the Storybird as soon as the embed code becomes available. Please click on the link to view My EVO Podcasting Adventures!
A podcast was recorded specially for Fluffy's Blog. You can hear my young niece reading the nursery rhyme of Three Little Kittens. She had great fun reading this rhyme aloud and was very interested in how the podcast was created, using Audacity and then transfered to Podbean.
I was thrilled to be using my newly acquired podcasting skills in an activity aimed at primary school children.
Below you can view the Slideshare presentation, which I created for the final Week 5 Podcasting Fair webinar. I'm so glad I was able to attend this live webinar, as it was a fantastic finale to the whole session. Thanks to everyone for making it so enjoyable. I feel full of enthusiasm for creating podcasts now!
One of the tasks I enjoyed the most was to interview a fellow podcaster, and I asked Natasa. She then interviewed me. We had great fun finding out more about each other.
We communicated via Skype and used the MP3 Skype Recorder to record the interviews.
So I'd finally like to welcome you to my new podcasting blog, which is still in its infancy. It is simply called Janet's Podcasting Blog.
Miguel Mendoza has written a fab feedback blog post with his Reflections / Overview from the course, which you can read here. It is full of useful insights, and serves as a fantastic summary of what was covered during the action-packed five weeks.
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