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 :-)

The Lake School of English: News Update

The Lake School of English has recently been awarded 14 points of strength out of a total of 15, credited by the British Council.  It continues to be a Centre of Excellence in 2013. You can read all about it, and view the full British Council Inspection 2013 report here.

 Image of bus from Bus slogan generator

It is now one of only two UK schools to have received this outstanding result. I would like to wish all its dedicated group of directors and staff my heartfelt congratulations!

I was lucky enough to be in the staffroom when the result came in several weeks ago and I was able to enjoy the joyous atmosphere and impromptu celebratory drinks with a few members of staff.  After I had spent 2 hugely enjoyable weeks running a Creative Teaching for Secondary Schools course, this fantastic news was the final icing on the cake.

This truly outstanding accreditation is fully deserved and I am proud to be associated with the Lake School.  Having first walked in to the establishment in 1982 and hired on the spot to do a 1-1 session the following week, I have always felt a part of its rich and vibrant history.  I know very well how incredibly hard everyone works in all aspects of the running of the school, always paying great attention to every little detail.

I have four personal photo albums spanning from the 1980s to the present day.  These memories will one day be a vibrant reminder of my time spent at the school and will be something to treasure forever.

There have been many celebrations of fantastic achievements by the school in the past, but this one I believe tops them all, as it is the most current, and it means so much to everyone. Well done!!!

Font above created with Font Image generator

 

Photo of Fireworks by @eltpics. Link to original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/6325716290/sizes/m/in/set-72157627956640513/

Connecting Online for Instruction and Learning: International Perspectives

I am absolutely delighted to announce the recent publication of a printed book called Connecting Online for Instruction and Learning: International Perspectives.  I am one of the 14 co-authors who collaborated on this book over a period of time from 2012 - 2013, under the gentle guidance of our inspirational editor Dr Nellie Deutsch. The book contains 312 pages, full of international perspectives based around aspects of elearning and instruction.

A Dream Team
I would like to say a huge thanks to Dr Nellie Deutsch for making this dream project happen, and also heartfelt thanks to all my fellow fabulous co-authors, for being a dream team to collaborate with.

'The authors of the book are: Janet Bianchini, Karen Blumberg, Dr. Christel Broady, Dr. Michele Drechsler, Jennifer D. Klein, Dr. NIki Lambropoulos, Alain Gourdin, Sophi Michael Danis, Antonio Nazzaro, Lenandlar Singh, Kemul Gaffar, Dr. Ludmila Smirnova, Diethild Starkmeth, Steve Tuffill, J. Aleta R. Villanueva, Dr. Revathi Viswanathan, Jason West.'

 I enjoyed every single aspect of this quite ambitious undertaking, and I am so proud to be a part of it all!!

 Screenshot image of book cover taken from Amazon site here. Copyright @ Nellie Deutsch 2013

 'The chapters were written by 14 presenters of Connecting Online (CO12) for instruction and learning live online conference on the first week of February 2012. The free online conferences for educators and by educators started in 2009. The conference takes place on WizIQ Education Online on the first weekend in February of each year'.

Enlightening
The process of working collaboratively with educators from around the world was an enlightening experience.  We each undertook in small groups of 4-5, to proofread and edit each other's book chapters, give comments and advice on how to improve the chapters.  Dr Nellie Deutsch allowed us to collaborate freely within our groups, and gave us gentle reminders for when deadlines were due. She oversaw the whole process from start to finish, and finally published it for us. I and the whole team of co-authors are indebted to her for her invaluable guidance and mentoring of us all.

Below a screenshot glimpse of the first few chapters:

I have just ordered my own copy from Amazon and I am very excited about reading all the book chapters and learning from each of my fantastic co- authors, who are experts in their field.

Now I can't wait for the postman to deliver my copy.  My only worry is that the Italian postal system can be rather unpredicatable at times, so fingers crossed!!

Currently if you click on the image of the book here, you can read a free sample first chapter....

My chapter is entitled: Teaching Idioms Effectively with Web 2.0 Tools. It is based on the background to my original slideshare presentation below:

I had originally created a Glogster, as at first I thought the book would be an ebook. It is in fact a printed publication.


Once again, many thanks to Dr Nellie Deutsch and all my fabulous fellow co-authors for making this dream project come true!!

6th Virtual Round Table E-Conference. Read All About It!

A link to my Slideshare presentation below.  I do hope you enjoy it.  The process of creating each new slide was very therapeutic.

A link to all the resources I shared, located in a special wiki page I created called VRT 2013 Resources.

I forgot to mention the Padlet I created for attendees to share an app or tool.

Please feel free to add your favourite app or web 2.0 teaching tool to the Padlet below or on the actual site.

With many thanks to Miguel, Elinda and Cristina for posting during the event:-)

Created with Padlet

Once again, a very special thanks to Heike and her amazing co-organizers for a truly stunning 6th Virtual Round Table econference. 

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation, who tweeted about it and shared the updates in various social networking sites. It was such a thrill to see so many familiar faces in the audience, including some former students of mine Cristina & Hind, members of my PLN, and also people I didn't know, but was very happy to 'meet' online.  This truly inspired me.

A screenshot of me during the webinar. The direct link to my webinar is here.

Most of all thanks to all my fellow presenters, who demonstrated such a wealth of inspiring information and resources.

A big thanks to my wonderful moderator Aydan :-))  I really enjoyed her inspiring webinar, called 'How to Motivate Online Learners', and you should view the recording.

I am sorry I was not fully able to interact with everything going on in the chatbox, as the time was limited, and I had to get through a lot, and I think I missed some questions.  What I plan to do is to review the chat and I will answer specific questions in my next post. I will be reviewing some of the webinars I attended, so please watch this space!

You can view the recording of my webinar and of all the presenters in the progrmme notes.

Below I have added the special motivation poster which I created to inspire me, and also to keep me on the right track.  The bountiful and non-stop flowering of these lovely snapdragons have adorned many vases in the house, and brightened up my life. This lovely view has also helped me. In addition, the mega daily task of looking after all the furkids has taken my mind off things.

A Weekend of CPD!!

Put the following dates in your diary right now, and you can look forward to a weekend full of fantastic talks, workshops and plenaries!

The Virtual Round Table will host its 6th free e-conference on the weekend of 17th - 19th May.
You can read the schedule and programme at this link here. 

I am delighted to be presenting at the conference again, and I will be talking about Apps and Tools to Spice Up Your Teaching.  

My talk is on Sunday 19th May. 

I am really looking forward to attending the conference, as it promises to be action-packed.

The following information was written by the event organizers, and reproduced in full as follows:

Event Description:
Twitter hashtag: #vrtwebcon
Come join us for the 6th Virtual Round Table Web Conference, 17-19 May 2013 for language educators held entirely online in a web conferencing solution called Adobe Connect, with the main sessions being live-streamed on facebook.
Some 60 guest-speakers look forward to presenting in 48 hours over a period of 3 days the latest in this field on teaching and learning a language with

• educational tools
• video
• learner resources
• mobile learning
• young learners
• virtual worlds
• online testing
• songs

and much more.

Keynote speakers are Nicky Hockly and Gavin Dudeney, Thomas Strasser, Sirin Soyoz, Angelika Guettl-Strahlhofer, Evelyn Izquierdo, Miguel Mendoza, Joe Dale, Steven Herder, Paul Driver and Shelly Terrell.
Highlights of the conference are...

• a Southamerican Symposium organised by Jennifer Verschoor
• a panel discussion on CEFR 'Is your B1 my B1?'
• a presentation by EAQUALS (pending)
• two presentation by NGOs: the Disabled Friendly Access Campaign and the NO Human Trafficking project
• the Asian symposium (pending)
• the LT SIG event with Paul Driver
• an unconference/ barcamp hosted by Vance Stevens
• a musical performance (pending)

The program overview has been published:
http://www.virtual-round-table.com/page/6-vrtwebcon-conference-program

The web conference is free of charge and we thank our sponsors for making this possible.
If you wish to participate, please sign up on our main website www.virtual-round-table.com.

The room links to the sessions are posted on the program and all you need to be is early, because the rooms have a capacity of 100 seats each. We will also live-stream all of the main plenaries and keynotes on facebook, so you do not need to miss out.

https://www.facebook.com/vrtwebcon