Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category

A week in the life of a webmaster

Friday, November 18th, 2011

Prague and sick bags

Last week wasn’t a typical week in the life of this webmaster because I went to Prague for 4 days with my family. If you have never been there, go – It’s one of the world’s most beautiful cities imho.

Taking a short break (with or without la famille) always presents challenges for me. The ones that came up this time round were:

  • Having to make a lesson for both my BreakingNewsEnglish and NewsEnglishLessons sites the evening before we flew AND deal with Etihad Airways’ online check-in site that didn’t work and their “Guest Affairs” hotline which was stone cold for 2 hours. Having to do this and wake up at 5.00am the next morning for a flight wasn’t the best preparation for a holiday, BUT…. it meant I didn’t have to make any lessons for two whole days.
  • Wondering what kind of Internet connection there’d be in my room. I’ve never had any problems here, although I did begrudge having to pay for wifi in my room in Cyprus this summer and in a London Heathrow hotel last summer. They charge around $10 a day, which is an extortionate and wholly unjustifiable $3,650 a year – a major rip-off. I guess I’m spoilt as wifi is generally a given in UAE hotels. Anyway, my wifi in Prague was fantastic. We stayed at the wonderful Arcadia Residence in the Old Town Square – highly recommended. The apartment owner had written down the wifi password and left it on the dining room table for us.
  • How to survive without Twitter for large parts of the holiday. I don’t have an Internet-enabled mobile phone (keep that one quiet) and so have to rely on waiting my turn for the kids to finish playing on the computer after a day’s sightseeing.
  • Fitting in making and uploading two lessons while in Prague. I always hate this part of a “holiday”. Luckily this time round, my body clock was on Abu Dhabi time every morning in Prague, which meant I woke up at around 4.00am. This gave me enough time to get most of a lesson done before everyone else woke up three hours later. The tough thing about doing this is that it’s dark in the room and I can’t turn the light on (to avoid waking the family) so I have to lean the laptop screen forward to be able to see the keyboard – slows you down a bit. Of course, the fun bit is finding your glasses in a room you’re not used to and cannot see your way around. I managed to do the bulk of two lessons before breakfast on two different days and upload them after coming back from the 8-hour hike around the city.

Prague Castle from Charles Bridge

So Prague was outrageously pretty and sophisticated. The plane for the six-hour return flight had no TV screen so I couldn’t watch any movies – boo!!! Which meant I had lots of time to make some notes on a new project. Thank goodness for sick bags as I didn’t put a notebook in my computer case. Couldn’t use the computer because it only has 30 minutes of battery in it. Managed to fit quite a lot of thinking onto the waxy bag.

And so back home. Spent half a day catching up on mail, tweets, Facebook comments, etc. and then it was time for another Breaking News lesson (they come around quickly every three days). Also tried to move forward with the new website I’m hoping to upload at the end of this month. This site hijacked an earlier site I was working on, which I’m very excited about. That one should be online in early 2012.

Added the notes I made on the plane to the lengthy to-do list on my desk that grows faster than I can tick things off on it.

And then it was time for another weekend.

If anyone out there wants to share a week in their life, I’d be happy to put it here as a guest post.

Love the fact the museum is above McDonald's.

 

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Dialogues and Dialogs

Monday, May 16th, 2011

This post is in response to a question I received about how to use dialogues in the classroom. (Excuse the muzak :-)
Here are a few thoughts:

What dialogue?

1. Recording a conversation between two students seems to offer the best material to analyze and learn from. All the better if it’s task based. That’s more authentic and it belongs to the student.

The students could either…

transcribe the dialogue and work on that. Audacity is a great tool for them to start and stop and perhaps delete things they don’t like (hesitations, overly long pauses, mess-ups…). They could listen to the recordings of other students and offer peer correction and advice.

or

listen again and analyze their speech.

2. A task or conversation between two proficient speakers – particularly useful if the task is the same as the one students have done (as a means of comparison) or are about to do (as a model).

Using Audacity here is great for focusing on pronunciation – students can “look” at the speech and replay it continually to pick up the shortcuts in the stream of speech (the weak forms, elision, juncture, etc). The stop and play buttons mean students (and teachers) need almost no training with Audacity.

Students could also focus on elements of speech such as hesitations, umms and agghs, fillers, etc. A lot of these are rarely part of course book dialogues.

3. A dialogue written by the teacher specifically to suit the teaching point. Less authentic than the above two but can hone in on exactly the areas you want students to notice or work on. Teacher can include all the fillers, hesitations, rephrasing etc.

4. A dialogue from the course book or teaching materials
Perhaps not overly authentic, but it contains most of the elements you’d want students to be exposed to. Read by professionals, therefore probably better quality than recording your own dialogues.
5. A dialogue written by students.
A good collaborative writing exercise that gets them thinking more about discourse. Students record them and share them with other class members for feedback and correction.

What to do with the dialogue?

(a) Role Plays and extended dialogues
Students take the roles of different people, role play the dialogue and then keep the conversation going beyond what is written in their books or on their materials. They could role play people they know, people with added emotions (angry, sad, ecstatic…) or famous people. Using people in the news can be interesting.

(b) Pronunciation
Dialogues are generally short exchanges and are therefore ideal to analyze for pronunciation. They should contain enough for teachers and students to look at phonemic and word level pronunciation as well as features of discourse intonation. Again, Audacity is great here for providing a visual reference to support what they hear – students can continually replay parts of the recording and see the speech pattern in Audacity.

(c) Language Analysis
Use the dialogue for grammar practice and looking at lexis. It could be used as a cloze, word jumble, paragraph jumble, change the tense, etc.

(d) Register and appropriacy
Students look at how different words and lexical combinations change the degree of register and appropriacy.

(e) Focus on fillers
Fillers make up a small but significant proportion of our speech. They give the speaker time to think and reformulate what they say. For a    a umms, arghhs, Imeans… Students may think these fillers and hesitational devices are an important part of the of what the speaker is saying. It’s useful for students to have an awareness of what the fillers are and what their purpose is.

(f) Add to it
Use the dialogue as a language activity. Students take it in turns to add a single word or sentence of the dialogue. In a larger dialogue, students could take away words while leaving the conversation as “correct” as possible.

(g) Vocabulary practice
Choose a selection of recently taught vocabulary. Students must continue or add to the dialogue by inserting the vocabulary. Can make for an unusual divergence in the dialogue J

(h) Stick it in a Web 2.0 gizmo
There are plenty of online tools that students can use to see the dialogue “in action”.

Four fun ones are:
(i)  http://www.dvolver.com/moviemaker/index.html

Here’s a dvolver movie I made. Click on the pic to play:

(ii)  http://www.xtranormal.com/

This is one that occasionally does the rounds on Twitter:

(iii)  http://www.zimmertwins.com/node/1160454
You have to register and log in to see this movie (click above). The first I made with ZimmerTwins – It’s so intuitive it took me less than 10 minutes.

(iv)  http://www.voki.com
Record half the dialogue and let the students respond to the spaces the Voki avatar leaves. Here’s one I made:

 

Please add more ideas in the comments.

Thank you :-)

PS – More sites on dialogues: http://www.freeeslmaterials.com/dialogues_dialogs.html

 

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Here we go again – gis a job

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Going back to Japan

My last post ended by telling you I would explain how great a career move working in Abu Dhabi has been for me. I will keep that on hold for a while.

Meantime…. I resigned two weeks ago. I feel I have learnt all I can here – an amazing amount about blended learning, Web 2.0 in the classroom, materials and curriculum design…  I have been extremely fortunate to work alongside and learn from so many amazingly knowledgeable, professional and dedicated teachers.  I have offered to make my college a website with gazillions of lessons for Arab and Muslim learners worldwide, but I’m not sure yet whether they’ll take me up on that. I hope they do. If, perchance, you are a Middle Eastern or Islamic-world college or university chief who wants to be known for being the #1 site for providing English materials to Muslim students worldwide, drop me a line.

And if that doesn’t work…? Not 100% sure yet. This time round I won’t be selling the kids’ toys in a garage sale. We don’t have a garage here. We’re going to be packing up our things, selling the piano and giving away the teach-yourself-Arabic books to head back to Japan. If, perchance, you are the chief of a Japanese university who would consider reading my resume, drop me a line.

It’s another risk, although not a forced one like the one I took to leave Japan for the UAE (see my first posts for more). I’m giving up a great tax-free salary, free schooling for my children, free healthcare for our family, free housing, free flight tickets back to Japan every Summer, petrol prices of around $0.40 a litre… and more.

I’m going back to income tax, consumption tax, property tax, school fees, health insurance… and more.

I’m also going back to green trees, pink trees in the Spring, seasons, snow, rain, trains, sushi, tempura, ichigo daifuku (fresh strawberry wrapped in sweet pounded rice, and too yum to believe), sumo (my second favourite sport), and watching my children play in the countryside and grow up with nature. It’s a lovely feeling knowing I’m going “home”.

Between now and then I’ll blog about the ups and downs. One soon-to-come up is the launch of my new site – hopefully later this month. I should be able to put up another two sites before I head back to Japan in June. I’ll also be asking for advice and help with various things.

Until then, back to the “Teachers Wanted” section of my Japanese newspaper.

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To the Desert – Onwards and Upwards

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Life in Ras Al Khaimah, UAE

Camels crossing

This post picks up from where I left off in posts two, three and four. They were the story of how I lost my life savings on a bright idea called BreakingNewsEnglish.com, the horror of a dream vanishing, and saying sayonara to my home in Japan and salam-alaykum to the UAE.

So, here goes part four of the BreakingNewsEnglish-and-beyond story.

My wife, children (aged 4 and 2) and I arrived in Dubai Airport at midnight in January 2006. All we owned in the world was what was on the baggage trolley – four suitcases and carry-on luggage. We looked for the man with the piece of paper with my name on it amid the hundreds of other people from every corner of the globe looking for men with the piece of paper with their name on it. We found him. He took us to a minibus and left Dubai and drove into the eerily dark desert.

Our destination was Ras Al Khaimah – a small city on the Arabian Sea 90 minutes north of Dubai. The man was the driver of my new workplace. He drove us to a nice hotel. The college put us up there for five days while we oriented to our new city and bought some supplies ready to move into our college-provided villa.

After breakfast the next morning, the lovely college HR officer met us. She gave me money to see us through our first week, and a furniture allowance to set up our home. We were amazed at how much was in the envelope. She then took us to open up a bank account and get connected with mobile phones and the Internet. We felt we were now safe.

Our huge villa had a swimming pool with an equally huge car-port roof – year-round swimming. Our kitchen was big enough for our three second-hand dining room tables (one for breakfast, one for the kids’ artistic adventures, and one for entertaining).  It felt like we were living in a palace – the large chandeliers hanging from our reception room and living room added to the sense of palacialitiness (don’t go looking that word up).

We lived a stone’s throw from the Arabian Sea, a 10-minute drive to the most special, spectacular desert and 20 minutes from the unforgettable Hajar Mountains. We went camping in the desert, took dhow rides to see pods of dolphins swim alongside us, four-wheel-drove in the mountains and dry river beds, frequently visited Dubai to have our senses assaulted, ate delicious Indian and Pakistani food several times a week, ate delicious Lebanese food several times a week, ate more delicious Indian and Pakistani food, and much more.

Hajar Mountains

I still really missed Japan.

Work was a huge challenge that totally changed me as a teacher. I did so much. I became team leader of my department; I wrote exams; I was responsible for organizing, administering and invigilating exams for 170 students; I presented at a conference for the first time; I joined committees, I helped organize a conference; I learnt all about course management systems; and best of all, I learnt absolutely loads about educational technology and totally loved it.

My colleagues were inspiring. I had never worked with so many highly qualified, experienced and dedicated teachers. The college director once visited my class and told the students they were lucky to have the best teachers in the world teaching them. I believed him.

But (1) … all this newness and learning and challenge nearly meant the end of my site BreakingNewsEnglish.com. I felt I couldn’t keep it going and decided to break free from it. For three months in 2006, I cast it aside. It had been a worthwhile and interesting adventure.

But (2) … during my summer break I missed it and started making lessons again. I couldn’t just let it go. But I did for a second time half-way through my second semester .  I knew this time it would be for good.

But (3) … then I got a mail from nowhere. A teacher in Slovakia sent me a mail. He told me he would write the lessons for me, which he did for several months in late 2006. His efforts spurred me for a third time to write again for my site and I haven’t stopped since then. He enjoyed helping me so much he set up his own site, NewsFlashEnglish.com.

We spent two years in Ras Al Khaimah before deciding to move on. We weren’t happy with the quality of our children’s education. I asked for and got a transfer to the capital, Abu Dhabi. I told my college director that I’d learnt more in two years at the college than I had in the previous 13 years of my career.

Camel train

I had also paid off the sizeable negative equity on my house in Japan and things looked a lot rosier than they had for years. The move to the UAE was a good one.

We arrived in the big city in January 2008. My time in Abu Dhabi has seen my teaching, learning, interest in online materials, and ambitions take on higher heights, and this will be the subject of my next post.

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Catching Up and Refocusing

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

Back from my summer holiday :-)

Image under Creative Commons license: Details at http://www.ehow.com/how_4489334_focus-mind.html

Well that was a longer-than-planned summer break – from both my blog and my Twitter account. I did look in on Twitter occasionally just to make sure it was still there.

It was good to take some time out from blogging and tweeting and get round to doing a few other projects on my to-do list.

One of those are my new websites, one of which I hope to have finished in the next couple of months – I’ve finished writing 100 articles for it and have done the listening. Now all I have to do is make 2,000 pages of activities and create the website pages. More on all that later. The other two are ideas and ideas that have a few pages to them, and more on those later. I also need to get back on track with www.FreeESLmaterials.com.

Also been trying to get to grips with Facebook for the first time. It’s one of those things that has taken me years longer than everyone else to see the usefulness of. I thought Twitter was enough, but now I see them both as being great ways to stay connected and share. Still tweaking privacy and account settings before I fully dive in.

It was also good to re-focus a little. Stepping back from blogging and Twitter for six weeks has given me a lot of time to think about the past year. I started tweeting in earnest last July, and my blogging began in December of last year. It was a great decision to start both. Blogging and tweeting while running seven websites and making more is quite a lot of work to do in your spare time. They’re all interconnected and what I learn from one I can apply to the others. And I enjoy it.

Anyway, a new semester and school year starts for me tomorrow. I’m confident I’ll learn more in my job to write about in my blog and tweets.

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Sayonara and As-Salam-Alaykum

Monday, December 14th, 2009

The last three months of 2005 were a real rollercoaster ride, complete with all the loops and rolls but without the thrills. The life savings had dwindled to piggy-bank proportions and the revenue from my website had still not broken a dollar a day.

Two miracles happened. At least that’s what they seemed like at the time. Two different educators in Japan gave me leads to possible jobs at universities. I was interviewed and offered both jobs. The downside was that both jobs were hundreds of miles from my home. There was no way I was going to live apart from my family, which meant we would have to sell our house and relocate.

Then another idea came along. If I was to sell house and home and move on, moving overseas became a viable option. I had always been interested in working in the Middle East. Many years earlier I looked at jobs in Saudi Arabia. I didn’t have a Master’s degree then so dropped the idea.

The very first search I did on Google came up with a college in the UAE that was looking for teachers. This was in November; the positions started in January. In my very best typewriting, I completed the application forms. I got and passed a video interview and then waited for the screening process to take its course.

In the middle of December I got the e-mail that said, “You’ve got the job. You start in four weeks.” After months of thinking I’d be bankrupt and jobless, I suddenly had three job offers. As much as we dearly loved Japan, we decided on a new adventure.

We had four weeks to empty our house and tie up the hundreds of loose ends. It’s amazing how much stuff you accumulate when you buy a house.

I lived in a quiet village in a valley. The road in front of my house had recently been widened to take two-way traffic. Sometimes there were two cars visible on it at the same time. This lack of traffic didn’t bode too well for another bright idea I had – a garage sale. It was the only way to get rid of everything we owned. We couldn’t afford to ship it overseas and desperately needed all the funds we could get.

Garage sales are a very unusual event in Japan. My two-metre roadside sign created sufficient bemusement for a fair percentage of the valley traffic to stop, reverse and then find out what this English man was doing. It took me two weeks to sell almost everything in the house.

  • I gave away all my books.
  • I sold my treasured 450 albums for peanuts.
  • My children watched other children take away their toys.
  • We uprooted and sold the plants and trees we had taken such pride in growing in our garden.
  • I gave away my kayak.
  • I parted with my chainsaw.
  • We put our house up for sale at a price far less than what we still owed on it.

The morning we left Japan we got rid of the last items we owned that weren’t in out four suitcases. The futons we slept on the previous night, the heater, and the kettle and cups we would use for a last cup of coffee.

I tried hard, but couldn’t stop the tears flowing as I left my beloved house and valley. I desperately wanted to stay.

Moving on three years and eleven months.

Coming to the UAE was one of the best decisions of my life. Life is good. I’ve learnt so much here. I work with amazing teachers. My students are awesome. Life savings are now something to raise a small smile.

Both risks were worth it.

Next post: Using sound files in the classroom.

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The Horror. The Horror.

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

In March 2005 I quit my well-paying job in Japan and stepped into the unknown. I’d never really been there before. Trekking in the jungles of Papua New Guinea was the closest, perhaps. I believed I could make a go of an ESL materials website and support my family. I wholeheartedly, and even wholer-naively, believed there to be gold in them there online lessons. All I had to do was make lots of them and tell thousands of people. Easy!

Making and taking the decision to risk the family life savings, the house and the little blue scooter on a bright idea was the craziest and most irresponsible thing I’ve ever done. By far.

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Robert F. Kennedy

He who dares, wins.
SAS Motto

You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is.
Will Rogers

You have to risk going too far to discover just how far you can really go.
T.S. Eliot

I woke up on the first morning of my new life as a budding webtrepreneur feeling exhilarated. I had followed my heart. My head was fuelled by motivational quotes that became mantras for my bold voyage into cyber-success.

The fuel ran out pretty quickly. Life soon spluttered into a hope-guzzling nightmare. Within a few short months I was to clutch ever more desperately at these inspiring words, willing them with all my all to be truer.

Real life crashed on top of me with a harsh and horrible reality. No… harsh and horrible would have been very nice in comparison to the crushing, soul-terrifying realization that I had steered my family into a horror story

Our savings were vanishing fast, even though we were redefining austerity to new thrift-defying levels. My site was earning us 26 cents a day.

The horror. The horror.
Joseph Conrad – ‘The Heart of Darkness’

That’s where I arrived six months after quitting my job. Chilling anxiety hounded my every waking thought. Nightmares of my children’s future destroyed because Daddy couldn’t pay the school fees tormented my sleep. Every day. Every night. No respite. I couldn’t question why life was being so cruel because it had been my decision to risk everything we had.

You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period.
Will Smith in ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’

With enough to survive on for another few months, I wondered how I would pay for my $180,000 housing loan, the kids’ education, food. I became haunted by self-recrimination. Years later, I saw the movie ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’. Will Smith’s character so reminded me of the horrors, my horrors, of 2005.

I desperately went in search of work. A daunting task in a Japanese valley with no language schools or universities. Particularly difficult in a biting recession. My options and my future looked bleak.

Then suddenly, perhaps while on my little blue scooter trundling along through the rice fields (not quite sure), another bright idea popped up. It was another risky one. Again, I prepared myself to break my new plan to my wife. Again, she trusted and supported me.

And this time the two risks together proved to be worth taking and will be elaborated on in the final part of my introductory posts.

Moral of this story – Two big risks are better than one if you have a bee in your bonnet and a bright idea under it.

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Life Savings, Bright Ideas, and Milk

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

And I was so tempted to call this “My Second Ever Blog Post”.

So, where do bright ideas come from and are they always so bright? I had one back in mid-2004 as I was riding my little blue scooter home from the train station after work, through the greener-than-verdant rice paddies to my home in a perfectly idyllic Japanese valley.

Riding little blue scooters though Japanese rice paddies is a perfect setting for the stimulation of bright ideas and I thoroughly recommend it.

Anyway, there I was, as happy as anything, tootling along the narrow path where the wild boar ran free to scare the living daylights out of me and the frogs croaked happily (millions of them), when suddenly it hit me. A bright idea of gargantuan, life-changing dimensions.

Now… before I explain further, I must just add that tootling along said path through before-said rice paddies approaching before-that-said valley always made me feel I was going on holiday. I wasn’t. I was just going home. But every day, the little blue scooter journey filled me with wonderful and happy thoughts… and bright ideas. So that’s where a lot of my bright ideas came from.

But this one wasn’t just bright. It was so dazzling that I nearly ended up in a rice paddy as it obscured the sharp bend in the track ahead of me.

And here it is… was…

The whole grand, couldn’t-ever-fail-not-ever-not-in-a-million-years design appeared before me in a quarter of a split second. Everything was worked out even before I got to that bend, in something like this order:

  1. Become a millionaire.
  2. Start a website based on freshly breaking news stories for learners of English.
  3. Learn how to make a website before I start making one.
  4. Quit my quite well paying job to do it.
  5. Retire.
  6. That bend is getting mighty close – Don’t want to jeopardize the bright idea, do we? Easy does it.
  7. Trade the little blue scooter in for a Lamborghini.
  8. Hmmm… Money to buy stuff like food, pay for kids’ education… live, etc?
  9. Find out what html means.
  10. Aha! – Pour life savings into it. A fine investment it’ll be.
  11. Make a new news lesson every day.
  12. No one else does that.
  13. Keep the house in the idyllic valley, but buy the valley.
  14. Call it TeachEasy … dot com.
  15. What to tell the wife? (quit job… pouring of savings… go on a diet…)
  16. Aha! Yes… Become a millionaire.

And then I turned left, and with my heartwarming smile-inducing valley in full view ahead and the bright idea filling me with as much adrenalin as the beautiful landscape, I journeyed home to enbrighten the wife with my revelation.

She was cooking in the kitchen. It seemed the most logical place to do that.

Wife: “Had a good day, darling?”
Me: “Have I had a good day” HAVE – I – HAD – A – GOOD – DAY????
Wife: “OK, so what’s today’s idea?”
Me: explained story in full.
Wife: “We’ve run out of milk. Can you go and get some from the store?”

I was unperturbed, nay ecstatic. She didn’t flinch at the life savings part. She must have thought it was another one of those ideas I kept on having.

Back on to the little blue scooter and down the small track where the freshwater crabs walk sideways free, filled with thoughts of Lamborghinis and html and must, must, must not forget the milk.

Are bright ideas always so bright? Well this one varied between blacker-than-coal brightness to full-volume incandescence.

The life savings had a whoppingly huge part to play in this variety and will probably be the subject of My Fourth Ever Blog Post, titled, “What became of the little blue scooter?”

That really was her reply.

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My First Ever Blog Post

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

My first ever blog post… in history… ever… hmm… what to write?

Ermm… Hmmm… Lovely weather we’re having.

So after five years of making websites and five months of tweeting on Twitter, I have decided to enter the blogosphere. This first post is perhaps the most difficult.

Do I welcome everyone and outline grand plans, thoughts and ideas that will change the world of English language teaching?

The first part, yes (welcome everyone); the second part, not on your Nellie.

Do I tell the story of how I became an English teacher? It all started way back in 1989 when I was backpacking around South-East Asia and ran out of money. I met…

No, that won’t do. That’s all been done before.

OK… so do I write about my very first observed lesson on my CTEFLA (now CELTA) course in Izmir, Turkey. I could describe in great detail how I lost total control of my lips, voice, thoughts, lesson plan and heartbeat in the first second and wanted the floor to swallow me up so I could go home.

Nope. The shame of it all :-O.

How about a potted history of my teaching career? OK. OK. I know the feeling. We won’t go there.

Well… the story of how I used up my life savings to start an Internet site which I thought would make me millions but only made me 26 cents a day after six months?

Uh-Uh – Way too embarrassing.

Now. What I could do is talk about why I’m starting a blog. Logical enough.

Oh… OK then. I’ll do that. I never really read blogs until I joined Twitter and then came across some incredible, inspiring and thought-provoking sites written by extremely dedicated bloggers. To name but more than a few: Shelly Terrell’s Teacher Reboot Camp, Karenne Sylvester’s KalinagoEnglish, MarxistELF, Alex Case’s TEFLTastic, Burcu Akyol’s blog, Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day, TEFL Matters by Marisa Constantinides, Ozge Karaoglu’s blog, ESOL Courses from Sue Lyons-Jones, Jason Renshaw’s English Raven, Steven Anderson’s Web20Classroom… The list is long.

I now love reading the thoughts and ideas contained in these blogs. I have learnt so much from these superb professionals. They keep me on my toes and my fingertips busy.

Of course, they also make me think a lot more about teaching, what it means to be a teacher, technology and how political an issue making a lesson on red squirrels can be.

They all got me thinking about blogging and contributing. So here I am.

They do say the second blog post is the most difficult…

We’ll see.

I heard it’ll rain tomorrow.

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