CO15 MOOC - February 6-8, An Excellent CPD Opportunity for Educators!

I am thrilled and proud to be one of the 35 presenters at the upcoming 6th annual 3-day MOOC, Connecting Online 2015, hosted and organized by the incredible Dr Nellie Deutsch. My presentation is called The EVOlution of Jan!

You can register for this webinar, held on Friday February 6th at 3pm GMT (4pm CET), by clicking the link below:

https://www.wiziq.com/online-class/2475174-co15-the-evolution-of-jan-and-electronic-village-online

I have been presenting at this exciting free annual event since 2011 and this is my fourth time in its 6 year history.  The platform is WizIQ and the event this year is held from 6th-8th February.  The webinars focus on instruction and learning.  The theme for this year is 'connecting online for collaborative work'. The presenters have prepared some great sessions for you to attend, and share their experiences.

I do hope you will be inspired to join in the fun with the presenters below!

Lots of useful information about CO15 has been shared in the Smore flyer, created by Dr Nellie Deutsch.  She has invited her PLN and presenters to share this information so that the MOOC will be attended by as many teachers from around the world as possible!

Smore promotional CO15 flyer with youtube video link reproduced below with kind permission from Dr Nellie Deutsch, and the direct link is also here: https://www.smore.com/zts4g

You can click on each of the presentations in the Smore poster below, and you can register to attend any of the webinars.





My CO15 presentation is viewable below as a clickable and downloadable ebooklet via Youblisher. Resources can be found on my wiki page here.The recording can be found here.
Thanks to everyone who attended my session, and for those who have viewed the recording.  A very special thanks goes to my moderator for the session, the tireless and inspirational Dr Nellie Deutsch!!!





SMORE
If you are interested in finding out more about Smore, one of  the co-moderators on the EVO Crafting the ePerfect eTextbook, Maria Jesus Garcia San Martin   has written an informative blog post with video tutorial to show you how it can be used. It is called First Steps on Smore.



 

The EVOlution of Jan!

The EVOlution of Jan! from Janet Bianchini

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!

EVO Crafting the ePerfect Session - Week One Introduction - Tips and Digital Literacy

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:

A Fable Of Sorts from Janet Bianchini

I later created a more complex digital story highlighting the use of idioms with web 2.0 tools, as seen below:

 

An Idiomatic Love Story from Janet Bianchini

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's TOP 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.

Janet's Reform Symposium 4 Feedback

I am still on a high after one of the most enlightening weekends of Professional and Personal Development I have ever experienced. The 4th Reform Symposium Econference was a very exciting event!! A full list of all the session descriptions can be found here.  All the sessions were recorded and you can scroll down the list and choose which one you would like to view at your leisure. Here is the recordings link.

To imagine that the Reform Symposium Conference was all for free is an incredible thought.  I appreciate all the tireless support and great dedication by all the superb organizers included in the note below.  Each and every single one of them played a massive role in ensuring that everything went according to plan, each with their own specific duties to accomplish. They all did brilliantly!!

What can I say except that I was blown away by the whole event.  I actually felt as if I was physically present at the conference.  Everything was carried out in real time via the sessions, and the special Future of Education Ning chatbox area for presenters, which was buzzing with messages. For a period of time, I felt totally connected in a truly global way and it was exhilarating. It was just as good if not better than attending a conference in person.  I was in the comfort of my own home and it was very relaxing, attending whilst drinking endless cups of coffee.

A United Show
The presenters, moderators, organizers were all sharing, enjoying, helping, supporting each other as a united group and for me personally, this was a huge motivational boost.  I had been temporarily feeling very down and low immediately prior to the event starting on Friday.   However, attending inspirational sessions, presenting at my own session on Sunday, and moderating on the lovely Jennifer Vershoor's session,  was just the tonic I needed.

Some Highlights
With over 100 presentations over the 3 day event and with so many members of my PLN doing sessions, I knew it was going to be very difficult to choose which ones to attend in person, inbetween other duties.  All the sessions I attended were wonderful and I learned a lot from the presenters' input. I will outline 5 of the sessions below. Apologies for not mentioning everyone's presentation, but rest assured, the level and quality of every session I attended was superb and thanks so much to you all!  I have earmarked so many recorded sessions for viewing as soon as I can.......

The Welcome Address and Nicky Hockly's very informative Keynote, The Future Present set the tone for the whole magical event and I was well and truly hooked!! Musical entertainment was provided by the Bookseller.
Recording HERE.

Dr Sugata Mitra's opening plenary, The Future of Learning, provided great food for thought and left me feeling so impressed with what he has achieved in his life, and how he has helped transform the lives of pupils in areas of great poverty, especially with his hole in the wall initiative, which originally started in India.
Recording HERE

Cecilia Lemos :  'I am NOT just a teacher. A new mantra'  This talk was excellent and thought-provoking. It provided great tips on how to value ourselves as teachers.
Recording HERE.

Carla Arena :'Digital Metamorphosis based on Sir Ken Robinson's Three Flourishing Principles'. I enjoyed listening to how Carla successfully applies these three principles into her own teaching.
Recording HERE

Jennifer Vershoor's Jazz Up your classes with technology, which I moderated for.  I always learn so much from Jennifer, and feel very inspired by the creative work she does with her students.
Recording HERE.

Information to access all the other wonderful RSCON4 sessions and links to all recordings can be found on this page:  http://www.futureofeducation.com/page/2013-reform-symposium

Visually Inspire Your Learners!
Finally, I would like to mention my session.  I had a lovely time and I really enjoyed interacting with the audience via the chat box.  Apologies if I didn't catch all the comments while I was speaking.  A huge thank you to everyone who came to the session.  It was so nice to see so many familiar faces and new ones, too. Also a very big thanks to everyone tweeting about it before, during and after my session had finished. I appreciated all the lovely support, very much indeed.

My fabulous moderator Marijana  very kindly introduced me to my audience and the scene was set for an enjoyable time going through the 35 slides.  I have embedded the presentation below and the recording link is HERE.  It lasts for approximately an hour.  I do hope you will find it of some practical use.

RSCON4: Visually Inspire Your Learners! from Janet Bianchini

Marijana took a screenshot of her tweet during the presentation and I have reproduced it here with her kind permission: 

You can view some more details about my presentation on my JanetAbruzzo wiki page, called RSCON4.   If you scroll to the bottom of the page I have added some links to resources connected to the subject.  I hope to add some more...

Background to some of the slides chosen
I spent  about 2- 3 weeks on and off, preparing my RSCON4 presentation. I really enjoy the whole process involved in deciding what to include.
I would like to share some of my personal thoughts on five of the slides that I carefully selected for my rscon4 presentation.

Slide 1: Abruzzo Eagle

Abruzzo Eagle

At this particular moment in time, I wish I could be as free as this Abruzzo eagle, without a care in the world, surrounded by peace and tranquility.  For me it represents total freedom.

Slide 2: Solitary Motorbike in Abruzzo's 'Little Tibet'

I desperately want to get on this motorbike with my hubby and 'ride free' and totally immerse myself in the spectacular grandeur of Abruzzo's wild and mountainous scenery. This area of Abruzzo is totally unspoilt and far removed from the hustle and bustle of an everyday life. I feel blessed to be living in such a beautiful region.

Update Sunday October 20th 2013
My wish was granted and I had a fabulous trip to this area today.  Images below!!

Janet & moto in 'Little Tibet' October 2013

Abruzzo National Park October 2013

Autumn colours

Riding on the back of the motorbike through such beautiful scenery today was so relaxing!!

Slide 3: Snowed Under!

This image represents how I have felt at times during 2013.  Snowed under with paperwork and compiling reports that have absolutely nothing to do with teaching.... However, on a positive note, this image represents hope. The bulbs in the pots totally covered in snow actually survived this heavy snowfall and went on to become beautiful tulips in the spring.  The motto is, 'Never give up hope!'.

Slide 4: Big Brother is Watching You!

1984 written by George Orwell, predicted a 'Big Brother' society, one where nobody was free and everybody was surveilled 24/24.  This graffiti image I came across recently represents for me a chilling reminder that we are living in a closely monitored and controlled society.......

 I would love to know who drew this image on the wall, and what it symbolises for the artist.

Slide 5:The Joy of Teaching

This collaborative word cloud was compiled by a recent f2f class consisting of Swiss teenagers.  They chose the adjectives to sum themselves up and they also chose the shape of the word cloud.

I still feel a sense of 'Joy' after teaching for over 34 years. Teaching has always made me feel alive and provides incredible and unforgettable moments in my life. This last weekend was defnitely one of the highs of my professional life. It certainly offered 'more valuable and professional development than money could ever buy'.

Final Thoughts about RSCON4

Created with Witty Comics

Please watch some of the recordings if you can!  The full list can be found via this link: http://www.futureofeducation.com/page/2013-rscon-recordings

This motivational poster I created with bighugelabs says it all. Thanks once again to all the organizers, presenters, moderators and volunteers for making The Reform Symposium E-conference 2013 such a resounding success.

RSCON4 - An Exciting Weekend of Fantastic CPD!

I am delighted to be presenting at the global and internationally renowned RSCON4 virtual e-conference.  This action-packed event is going to be held online from Friday October 11 - Sunday October 13th.

I have had the pleasure of presenting for The Reform Symposium Conference on two occasions, RSCON2010, and RSCON2011 and this year, it promises to be bigger and even better than previous years. Presenters will be sharing transformative approaches to learning and teaching. Influential international keynote speakers are currently being lined up to deliver presentations that will challenge our way of thinking and inform us about the way forward in education in general.

Professor Sugata Mitra will be delivering the Opening Plenary - The Future of Learning.

Below you can view a screenshot of the main page of The Future of Education ning site where more details are available. If you join the Future of Education group, you will be able to keep up to date with all the announcements and news about the forthcoming presentations.

You can find out about all the RSCON4 updates via Twitter by following @RSCON4 and using the hashtag #RSCON4.

I can guarantee that you will enjoy a wonderful weekend of Continuous Professional Development in the comfort of your own home!  I am looking forward to learning about lots of different topical subjects from passionate educators from around the world.

You can read more blog posts about RSCON4 on this Gdocs created by Chiew Pang here: http://goo.gl/KvplSP

Some Visually Inspiring Activities!
My session is called 'Visually Inspire Your Learners!".  It will be held on Sunday October 13th at 4pm Rome Time.

I will be discussing ideas and highlighting some activities to inspire and motivate learners connected to images, comics and cartoons and photo-editing tools.

Examples of Picture activities I have blogged about in the past can be found under the label Picture Activities.

Teach Meet International presentation on Visual Blogging with Muzy:

Slideshare of the Virtual Round Table Presentation on Project 366: A Picture a Day.

Please note, sadly Posterous does not exist any more as a blogging platform and so the links refering to my Project 366 blog on Posterous no longer function, which is a great pity!!  However, some of the ideas contained in this presentation, and the others mentioned in this post, may be included in my RSCON4 presentation.

I hope to present some of my favourite activities and I plan to create a few new ones, especially for RSCON4.  Watch this space!!

WIKI 
I have created a special RSCON4 wiki page to add ideas, links and resources!  It is a work in progress.....

Please click on the Make Beliefs Comix below to enlarge it.

Interview Update
This evening I had the chance to chat briefly about the event with Bruno Andrade, an inspirational EFL teacher and moderator from Brazil, and you can view it below.
Thanks very much to Bruno for giving me this opportunity :-)

Fluffy - A 21st Century Feline Techie!

Web 2.0 Fun with Fluffy from Janet Bianchini

Fluffy has at last finished his first major Slideshare web presentation, which I am delighted to share with you. It was great fun to help Fluffy with this particular project, based  on a few tools which can visually enhance your lessons and presentations..

Presentation Slides from 5th Virtual Round Table Web Conference

Screenshot of me presenting.
The 5th Virtual Round Table held on 20th April to 22nd April last weekend was a very enjoyable and successful Web Conference event! I managed to attend a few sessions, and each one was wonderful, and I learned a lot about elearning, eteaching and educational technology in general. The atmosphere and buzz surrounding this online event was palpable. There were 695 participants from around the world, 45 guest speakers and 30 hours of recordings!!

I would like to say a huge thanks to the fantastic organizers Heike Philp, Shelly Terrell, Berni Wall and Steven Herder for making the 5th Virtual Round Table Web Conference such a memorable event. Also thanks to all the enthusiastic volunteers who helped to moderate the webinars, especially in my case, Marcia Lima and Chiew Pang.

All the recordings are available in this link here.

Below I have embedded my presentation called Janet's Project 366 - Recording 2012 in Images. The recording of the presentation which was held after midnight on Friday 20th April at approximately 12.30pm, can be accessed from the Programme of Events.

Janet's Project 366 - Recording 2012 in Images

View more PowerPoint from Janet Bianchini

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation, and also for everyone who tweeted about it before, during and after! I greatly appreciate your support!! I look forward to the 6th Virtual Round Table event in 2013.

TeachMeet International & iTDi - Fabulous CPD on 3rd March 2012

On Saturday 3rd March (tomorrow) Teach Meet International will be holding their second free international event with speakers from around the world presenting on a vast array of interesting topics.

TeachMeet Int'l is organised by the lovely Arjana Blazic from Croatia, and Bart Verswijvel from Belgium, and they are also two of the moderators on such events. The platform used is Adobe Connect Pro Meeting. You can read what Arjana has posted about this event here.

Arjana has also written about the hugely successful 1st TeachMeet Int'l held in December 2011, on her blog, in this post called Good Vibrations.

The two-hour event starts at 10am CET. You can find out how to attend on the TeachMeet Int'l wiki. Each presenter has only three minutes to present their slides.

You can find out about what a TeachMeet is exactly, by viewing the link here.
Why are these events called TeachMeet? Find out more here.

There are 32 speakers in the TeachMeet tomorrow, and I am very proud to be one of them!! My 3 minute talk will be on Fun with Comics, one of my favourite topics!! It will basically be a whirlwind recap of my fuller Comics and Cartoons presentation from Reform Symposium. I'll add a live link to my materials on this blog post after Saturday :-)

Doing such a mini presentation will be a first for me, and so I have been practising with one of the online timers here. I have eleven slides, so I'll have to talk a bit quickly to go through everything in time.

Below you can view one of the new cartoons I have created for the webinar. The comic site is called Comic Creator, Boys' Life Magazine.

Hope to see you there!!

UPDATE: 3rd March 2012 - TeachMeet International Online Feedback
I had a fabulous time viewing all the wonderful presentations and I learned about so many new ideas and materials!! You can view the full recording here.

Grab a drink and some snacks, relax and settle down to watch over two hours of great CPD!!

I really enjoyed my three-minute slot!! Image below of me presenting, courtesy of Sonja, one of the excellent moderators.

Arjana has written a blog post entitled "Why I like TeachMeets." It certainly summarises the lively and very exciting atmosphere of the event.

Shelly Terrell has also written her feedback called 20+ Ideas & Resources from TeachMeet Online using an interesting new site called Pearl Trees. It is an indispensable guide to the fabulous event.

The event is also discussed on my Project 366 Posterous blog.

You can listen to a Podomatic podcast where I have recorded my thanks, and opinion of the TeachMeet event:


Fun with Comics! A Mini Presentation.

View more PowerPoint from Janet Bianchini

International Teacher Development Institute (iTDi) Event - March 3rd 2012

Chiew Pang has written an interesting post called Error Correction: a free webinar, aka Lonely Teacher Blues, Part 2

Feedback
Listening to three experts in their field (Scott Thornbury, Steven Herder and Barbara Sakamoto Hoskins) talking about ways of dealing with Error Correction on iTDi, was a great experience. I felt as if I was really attending the event in person, as there was a very lively audience of teachers from around the world. It was "first come, first served" basis for attending, as there was a maximum of 100 attendees, and so I was very lucky to squeeze in!! It was definitely worth staying in to attend this very practical webinar!!

You can view the complete webinar session from the iTDi website.
Meet the amazing iTDi team here.

EVO 2012 Podcasting Course Feedback

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.

I wrote about the first two weeks in EVO Podcasting 2012:Opening The Door To New Horizons.

I have created a short story using Storybird.



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!

http://storybird.com/books/evo-podcasting-adventures-2012/

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!

Podcast Presentation for EVO Podcasting 2012

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.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

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.

Seminar in L'Aquila for Tesol- Italy Teachers: Effective Images for Powerful Activities

In front of my PowerPoint display

It was my great pleasure yesterday to present at the first TESOL seminar of this new school year for Tesol Italy in L'Aquila, Abruzzo. This meeting was organised by Annamaria, the co-ordinator of the Tesol L'Aquila group, and it was lovely to meet her in person. She welcomed me and K (who was my personal chauffeur for the day) very warmly, and then helped me to set up the computer in the designated room, which was in the newly born Resource Centre for Teachers of Foreign Languages, hosted by Scuola Media "Dante Alighieri" of L'Aquila. This fabulous resource centre has been equipped by Tesol Italy with all kinds of materials available for the teachers of L'Aquila.

The session lasted approximately 2 hours, and there were over 20 teachers who were able to attend. My presentation was entitled "Effective Images for Powerful Activities". I showed a combination of slides I have used before, and a few additional new slides. I have embedded a Slideshare below.

L'aquila Seminar: "Effective Images for Powerful Activities

View more presentations from Janet Bianchini.

Feedback and Analysis
It was an absolutely amazing and very moving experience for me to be with teachers, who have been through so much. I was very happy to see all the participants joining in the activities with such a lot of enthusiasm. It was a very interactive presentation, and I liked the fact that I was able to move around everyone and see how they were getting on with the tasks I set. I think we all had some fun and the time literally flew past!

The participants did the following activities amongst others:

• brainstorm adjectives beginning with "C" to describe qualities of an effective teacher
• discuss the qualities of an efffective teacher
• 20 questions "guess the famous couple" (Romeo and Juliet)
• retell the story of Romeo and Juliet in under 50 words in pairs / groups
• retell the story around the class with each participant using only one word (this was fun!)
• guess the story of how a couple met
  
• create a poem/short paragraph from a picture prompt
• read a poem out aloud with correct stress patterns
• complete half a text to recreate a full text
  
• guess a famous person (George Clooney) - relevance to Abruzzo being his latest film "The American"
• briefly touch upon the implications of "teaching unplugged" via a picture prompt

Some Web 2.0 Tools
I introduced and showed examples of the following tools (amongst others), which I had used to create special effects and or edit my own images:

create a newscast picture with tuxpi.com
create a film strip picture frame with tuxpi.com
create a magazine effect and motivational poster with bighugelabs.com (see the one above)
a mind map using www.bubbl.us

The mind map below is one I have just created highlighting the lovely qualities of the teachers I met yesterday. Please press on the image to make it bigger. This has been saved as a .jpeg file.


Below is the same mind map, but it has been saved as a moving file, which is quite fun. This was embedded very easily straight from bubbl.us to my blog. Which one do you prefer?



Teaching Unplugged
I discussed the fact that teaching "unplugged" is a topic which is very topical at the moment. To teach with a coursebook or not / to teach "Dogme" style lessons or not. I introduced this topic briefly by a tuxpi - edited image of myself teaching back in 1981 (!!) in the GDR. Of course, back in those long distant days, I did literally teach "unplugged". Eg I had no internet, no OHP, no modern gadgets. Just the plain old, but incredibly useful, blackboard you can see behind me. The excellent "Streamline Departures" was the coursebook I used with all my Beginner level groups of students for the whole year. That is why after 30 years I still know the book inside out. I have very fond memories of it indeed!

I also showed the following image to generate a short discussion topic on "guess what is Janet saying to her students in 1982?"

As an addendum to our brief discussion yesterday, I would like to add the following excellent blog posts, which are currently featuring the subject of "Teaching Unplugged" principles:

Dogme Blog Challenge by Karenne Sylvester.
Dogme for All? by I'd like to think that I help people to learn English blog.
Unplugged Teaching Journal entry #2: My week with Marilyn by Jason Renshaw.

You might also find the following blog post "Animating your Coursebook", by Marisa Constantinides, very interesting.

On the theme of Romeo and Juliet, have a look at this absolutely amazing "Interactive Romeo and Juliet" resource, mentioned on Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers blog.

I was very touched when at the end of my presentation, Annamaria presented me with a beautiful book on the history of L'Aquila. I will treasure this book forever.

Many, many thanks Teachers of L'Aquila for your wonderful participation in my seminar. It was a huge pleasure to meet you all. Hope to see you at TESOL - Italy Rome National Convention next month!