Social

It is quite interesting to ask oneself for sometimes: how, when and why should one improve his own performance? How, then to become a good teacher? I am doing the right thing? How can we create a diamond out of a stone? How can we share and make the other share?

Actually, I do not know the answer for the above tormenting questions. At least, I will do the following;

• I will ask the students evaluate my teaching practices by giving them the chance to comment, think over, suggest ways for change
• Involve parents to contribute to the achievement of their own offspring
• Delegate some of my power to students to teach their peers either inside or outside the classroom
• Create extra-curriculum activities to give free vent for other learning strategies.
• Visiting other colleagues to make use of their best practices in my classroom
• Keep up to date with novelties the field
• Invite principals and supervisors to your classroom
• Attending pedagogical gatherings
• Participating actively in workshops and seminars
• Conducting action researches
• …

The more you practice, the more knowledgeable and expert you become.

It is so difficult to start any assignment, especially at the beginning of a course. It gives me a severe headache when starting to jot down my reflections after reading any particular article. I got up this morning feeling that I have not slept for ages and I strongly need a certain medecine to calm down my nervousness and cater for my lonliness. I am writing to say that I have at least started to experience something new in my learning process.

Hello to everybody, to all the familiar and new faces!

My apologies for being so late to be ‘social’ but here I am. I’ve been here for 9 weeks and some days according to Drupal, so now I’ll have to become more active as I’m tagged ;-)

The programme you have here is amazingingly complete and if I’m not active enough, I’ll happily spend 2008 going through it!

I teach f2f and online in the higher educational and corporate sector and am a HW (Happy Webhead) and have lots to learn as always but as I’m a LLL (Life-long Learner), my only problem is finding the time :-)

Moira 

I am interested in collaborating with others on how to improve student writing via Moodle/web 2.0 tools and specifically the wiki.

Hello, everyone. I’m Dennis Oliver. I live in Arizona, a state in the
southwestern part of the U.S. Until recently, I worked as an ESL and
Developmental English teacher at Estrella Mountain Communty College,
a two-year institution located close to my home in far-west Phoenix.

I’ve been involved in online ELT since the mid-1990s, mostly in creating
WWW-based learning materials. Believe it or not, some of my early works
are still online in three places at Dave’s ESL Cafe and at one of the
Listening links at Ron-Chang Li’s ESL site. I think I still have things online
at one of Charles Kelly’s many sites, too.

For a long time, my online materials were non-dynamic teaching modules,
but around 2001 or 2002, I began to see the need for more interactive,
participatory elements. I didn’t really know how to do that, however, until
I became familiar with the outstanding contributions of two remarkable
people: first Barbara ("Bee") Dieu and later Carla Arena. Both Bee and
Carla have helped me acquire many insights that (I hope) will result in
creating materials which are collaborative, interactive, and result in both
"co-teaching" and "co-learning." I hope to learn more as a result of this seminar.

I’ll freely admit from the outset that I’ll probably do more lurking than
contributing to SMiELT—simply because I have too many things competing
for my time and energy. Even so, I will try to be as active as I can—really!

If you’d like to see what I look like and learn a little more about me,
click HERE.

Best wishes—

Dennis in Phoenix

Hi, well-known and prospective friends,

I’m Rita Zeinstejer, from Argentina, happy yo be here with Bee and her team, and ready to share learning and learn sharing…

I’ve opened my second blog at Wordpress…, this one specially meant for the occasion ;-) …, and am loking forward to seeing names and greetings here!

As a Webhead, I can tell all Webheads-to-be that being a member of this fantastic community is one of the most enjoyable experiences EFL teachers can go through, both professionally and personally speaking. The more you have…, the more you know…, the more you learn…, the more you want!!!

Thank you, Bee and all colleagues, I know this is going to be a Pandora box!!!

Rita

The dekita.org initiative is also linked through to the FLNW2 ( TALO ) initiative.

Perhaps you could pick up some feeds from some of the participants and drop them into your aggregator here. It seems awfully quiet in here.

Where’s Bee ?

:) 

  I have been in a very short tour today to the second capital of USA, just today.

It was reaslly exciting to make such a tour.

I have visited Central part, unated nation building, empire building, china town, meusem …

Probably, iwill visited next month. I just had a six hour tour there.

I was supposed to go back to Philadeliphia

 Zouita

Good to see you here.