You can read more about the changes I’m going through at http://collablogatorium.blogspot.com/2008/12/moving-physically-and-digitally.html
Please, add this feed to your reader for us to keep talking and interacting and I hope to meet you at
Archive for the 'edublogpractice' Category
I’m moving back to Brazil and making some moves digitally. All to make my motto work, simplicity.
You can read more about the changes I’m going through at http://collablogatorium.blogspot.com/2008/12/moving-physically-and-digitally.html
Please, add this feed to your reader for us to keep talking and interacting and I hope to meet you at
You can read more about the changes I’m going through at http://collablogatorium.blogspot.com/2008/12/moving-physically-and-digitally.html
Please, add this feed to your reader for us to keep talking and interacting and I hope to meet you at
Dear Colin, Inês, Sue and Kevin,
Here’s my reply to you all about the Comment Challenge. Thanks for inspiring me to go even further now!
Here’s my reply to you all about the Comment Challenge. Thanks for inspiring me to go even further now!
We all wish we had more time to explore, comment, post. Not perfect worlds, but this month was filled of ideas on how we can keep the flow of conversations into a deeper, more meaningful level in our blogs. My participation was imperfect, but this doesn’t mean I haven’t gone far. The comment challenge girls, Sue Waters, Kim Cofino, Michele Martin, and Silvia Tosano were just everywhere showing by skillful commenting strategies how to keep distributed conversations aggregated in clusters of meaning. Participants had a variety of levels of engagement, but each learned what he/she needed to apprehend at the time of the challenge.
For me, the challenge was just the spark for further explorations. No, it’s not over! Finding ways and time to connect is a multi-faceted process. You go far, there’s even more to discover. Ideally, it’s time now for us to keep using the skills, strategies, ideas we’ve been exploring in the blogosphere. However, I feel we should go on exploring possibilities as a group as we’ve done so far. I don’t know how, but maybe still using the tag and the cocomment sharing system to highlight new blogs, interesting posts, comments worth reading? Well, I’m speaking up my mind…
My top 5 lessons from this wonderful commenting experience?
The challenge has just begun.
For me, the challenge was just the spark for further explorations. No, it’s not over! Finding ways and time to connect is a multi-faceted process. You go far, there’s even more to discover. Ideally, it’s time now for us to keep using the skills, strategies, ideas we’ve been exploring in the blogosphere. However, I feel we should go on exploring possibilities as a group as we’ve done so far. I don’t know how, but maybe still using the tag and the cocomment sharing system to highlight new blogs, interesting posts, comments worth reading? Well, I’m speaking up my mind…
My top 5 lessons from this wonderful commenting experience?
- Connections keep coming in different ways
- A simple idea can take a bunch of very busy educators to go beyond, always beyond
- Keep commenting. New nodes of learning are formed by the connections generated in the comment area.
- There are people interested in what you have to say. Keep blogging.
- I’m thinking of a totally new approach to next year’s blogging4educators Electronic Village workshop due to the input I’ve gotten from the challenge.
The challenge has just begun.
I couldn’t resist this one!
I’ve been an admirer and reader of Chris Sessums for a while. But this post has really touched in what I’ve been trying to share for some time now with educators all over when we have the Electronic Village blogging4educators sessions.
It’s all about a purpose.
So, how’s my blogging related to my business?
As an educator, my blog reflects who I am, my interests, my passions, my drives, so then it’s an open space for sharing and learning. By blogging and reflecting, I can improve who I am, try to think outside the box, get other’s input, establish new connections. It makes me move forward and it directly influences my teaching and my approaches to learning and teaching. Since I started blogging, I have certainly become an educator who truly believes in the power of collective learning and building of knowledge.
Blogging is transformative and makes me change every day, and I hope it reflects on the new learning opportunities I’m providing my learners with.
Thanks, Chris, for starting this!
I’d love to hear from my friends Cris Costa, Mary Hillis, Gladys Baya, Vance Stevens , Ronaldo Jr., Bee Dieu .
So, guys, how does your blogging relate to your business?
As Chris suggested, pass this question on to people around you…An interesting, basic question that should guide us in our blogging world.
Here’s a video Chris shared with some fresh perspective of some educators about why they’re blogging and how:
I’ve been an admirer and reader of Chris Sessums for a while. But this post has really touched in what I’ve been trying to share for some time now with educators all over when we have the Electronic Village blogging4educators sessions.
It’s all about a purpose.
So, how’s my blogging related to my business?
As an educator, my blog reflects who I am, my interests, my passions, my drives, so then it’s an open space for sharing and learning. By blogging and reflecting, I can improve who I am, try to think outside the box, get other’s input, establish new connections. It makes me move forward and it directly influences my teaching and my approaches to learning and teaching. Since I started blogging, I have certainly become an educator who truly believes in the power of collective learning and building of knowledge.
Blogging is transformative and makes me change every day, and I hope it reflects on the new learning opportunities I’m providing my learners with.
Thanks, Chris, for starting this!
I’d love to hear from my friends Cris Costa, Mary Hillis, Gladys Baya, Vance Stevens , Ronaldo Jr., Bee Dieu .
So, guys, how does your blogging relate to your business?
As Chris suggested, pass this question on to people around you…An interesting, basic question that should guide us in our blogging world.
Here’s a video Chris shared with some fresh perspective of some educators about why they’re blogging and how:
In my online listening class I gave the option for students to choose the listening practice of their preference in our delicious bookmarks. Seth’s audio about Trento was one of the options.
One of my students commented on it and asked some extra questions about Trento. Well, I decided to contact Seth to see if he could reply to her. I got his immediate feedback and here’s the wonderful information about Trento he recorded to Luciene.
Here’s Seth’s post and audio reply to Luciene.
Who said that e-learning isn’t personal, meaningful, contextualized, communicative, networked?
Thanks, Seth, for being such a generous Webhead! I’m sure not only Luciene will be thrilled for such a feedback, but also the whole group will profit from it.
Just because I was checking Twitter, I came across this very promising tool, which might be totally appealing to learners to mix, remix and create their media. I was just browsing through twitterverse for the EarthCast updates. I stopped at Barbara Ganley’s Tweet. She’s always an inspiration and I just love to check what she’s up to with her students. She was talking about her student production. I went there and was in awe by the visual quality of his poetry production.
No more words needed. Check for yourself. Of course, I signed up in Vuvox!
Related post: The Power of Microblogging
No more words needed. Check for yourself. Of course, I signed up in Vuvox!
Related post: The Power of Microblogging
I’m always eager to share and learn with the groups I’m part of.
So, here’s the challenge: how about adding our voices (audio or text) to this voicethread on edublogpractices that can engage students in blogging. It can be just ideas that haven’t be tested in your classroom yet, or practices that you found worked in your blogging classes.
I started with a very simple one. Listen to it and add yours!
So, here’s the challenge: how about adding our voices (audio or text) to this voicethread on edublogpractices that can engage students in blogging. It can be just ideas that haven’t be tested in your classroom yet, or practices that you found worked in your blogging classes.
I started with a very simple one. Listen to it and add yours!
Here’s some advice:
Be aware of the world around you
Scan, collect, organize the information you see, perceive and receive
Look for patterns
Understand values
Have a view, but don’t make it an ideology
Keep your eyes open
Do you think this piece of advice could apply to your classroom? Certainly. In fact, they have to do what we’ve been exploring in this edublogtalk. As we’ve been discussing, blogging is an eye opener, an exploration of our peripheral views of what surrounds us. Through blogging, we can tap our external world to our inner voices. And that’s exactly the point of Scott Smith’s presentation in lift08. No, he was not talking specifically to educators, but surely to teacherpreneurs, those who are ready for change, subverting old-fashioned practices and trying to see the future the already involves us. Scott was talking about foresight, perceiving the future. He asks what motivates people, what the trends are, what the driving forces are to give us a picture of what surrounds us. Then, he explores the need for a human-based insight, to get on the street and “see” what is out there. Blending external factors to internal is key to understanding the directions we’re taking. Isn’t that what we should question and look for as educators?
What are our students’ driving forces? What touches them? What motivates them? What switches on their creativity, their passion? What are we doing to encourage that?
There’s still a lot to explore from Scott’s talk, but my message here is to look around and find the future around us and explore it with our learners to the benefit of each individual that we encounter and touch. What a better way than to start by blogging and encouraging students to see, reflect, express themselves, and engage in discussions?
Do you think this piece of advice could apply to your classroom? Certainly. In fact, they have to do what we’ve been exploring in this edublogtalk. As we’ve been discussing, blogging is an eye opener, an exploration of our peripheral views of what surrounds us. Through blogging, we can tap our external world to our inner voices. And that’s exactly the point of Scott Smith’s presentation in lift08. No, he was not talking specifically to educators, but surely to teacherpreneurs, those who are ready for change, subverting old-fashioned practices and trying to see the future the already involves us. Scott was talking about foresight, perceiving the future. He asks what motivates people, what the trends are, what the driving forces are to give us a picture of what surrounds us. Then, he explores the need for a human-based insight, to get on the street and “see” what is out there. Blending external factors to internal is key to understanding the directions we’re taking. Isn’t that what we should question and look for as educators?
What are our students’ driving forces? What touches them? What motivates them? What switches on their creativity, their passion? What are we doing to encourage that?
There’s still a lot to explore from Scott’s talk, but my message here is to look around and find the future around us and explore it with our learners to the benefit of each individual that we encounter and touch. What a better way than to start by blogging and encouraging students to see, reflect, express themselves, and engage in discussions?
2008. Not long ago I started blogging. It was 2005 just as I was taking my TESOL Principles and Practices of Online Teaching Certificate Program. That’s when I decide it was high time I started giving it a try. I first heard of blogging in 1999 in a workshop at my workplace. I was fascinated by the possibilities, but, at that time, blogging was still just a distant concept to grasp with a need for a bit of HTML knowledge that I had no idea where to start learning…Well, I did! I knew I could learn a bit online, but was it fear, time excuse, or just keeping myself in the comfort zone of known things? Why would I need to go even further? I was already doing too much in terms of technology compared to my colleagues. No need for comparisons. Otherwise, I’d still be sticking tons of flashcards on the blackboard and cutting hundreds of magazine photos as class realia. Comparing myself to the others was not what kept me going. So, in 2005 I was ready to give blogging a try, but I wanted to do something special. I started big. If I really had given it some thought, I think I wouldn’t have taken that huge step, but I decided to invite an online friend, Dennis Oliver, for an international exchange. If it were now, I’d start the other way around, from blogging for professional development, connecting to others, listening to other bloggers, to stepping into the classroom sphere. I guess I was just too anxious of a learner and felt blogging was an interesting addition to what I was already doing in the classroom (connecting with students through yahoogroups, for example). When we headed for our international interaction, I had been already blogging not with my students, but for my students. It was still a unidirectional informational space. I was replicating what I did in the classroom, except that I was using another medium. My intention was certainly good, as I knew my students were all into techie things and social network spaces. I realized there were just sporadic comments and I had so much work preparing posts for our class blog (in fact, my blog!). After giving it some thought, and by listening to other online edubloggers’ voices, it dawned on me that I was missing the great chance of having the blog as conversational, reflective, engaging spaces for my students. Why would they reply or say something if I was just posting homework and class grammar content?!
That’s when my International Exchange blog with Dennis was conceived. Dennis and I were just starting, testing, sharing, learning. I didn’t have easy access to computers in the classroom. Many times I had to print Dennis’ students messages and take them to the classroom to work there. At that time, my best option was to have teams of students working together. We had to manage classroom schedules with the great addition of the blogging conversations. We juggled, came up with different solutions to keep the conversation among our students flowing. Some of my students would even “risk” replying from home. They loved the experienced, we exchanged postcards and mementos from our countries. Yes, I started to understand what blogging was about, taking language learning, communication, and connections to another dimension. We kept experimenting with our new classes, Dennis’ colleagues joined us, we moved forward, innovated in tasks, looked for creative ways to engage our students.
http://internationalexchange.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_archive.htmlAt that time, I didn’t know much about syndication, nor did I pay attention to the power of tagging. Still, nothing hindered us from developing communication channels within our classes.
We started to fearlessly explore the possibilities. I remember when I first tested with my students recording audio. After some class discussion, my adult students recorded and asked questions to Dennis. They were thrilled, I was exhilirating! Podcasts also became part of our blogging world. My shy, quiet students blossomed in the blogging classroom. I’ll never forget the kinds of conversations Emerson, a quiet student in class, engaged in our class blog: Emerson’s interactions with Dennis, and long after Emerson still participated in international conversations.
From the international exchanged, I expanded my blogging horizons indefatigably looking for options and possibilities that would fit my teaching principles and beliefs, my learner’s goals and needs, as well as balance with institutional curricular requirements. I went from Brazil and Brazilians connected, CTJ Online, Top 21, SambaEFL, to elearningCTJ. Even with some blogging road, there’s still a long way to go.
Now, I also keep this blog for personal reflections on teaching and learning, and my personal blog to write about my experience in Key West.
My 2.0 blogging concept is maturing. The conversations we’ve been keeping in the blogging4educators session, how we’re connecting, using syndication, exploring the power of tagging to aggregate online artifact as proposed by Vance Stevens and team, the chat with special guests like the Women of the Web2.0, Konrad Glogoswksy and Paul Allison, the open ears to online voices in the blogosphere are really shaping up my new perceptions of blogging as a dialogic tool. Carla Raguseo’s post on our distributed conversations summarizes the essence of our enriching blogging experience for the past weeks. 
Carla Raguseo via kwout
The possibilities are limitless. I simply need to keep exploring how to balance them in a way that I focus on my learners’ drives, my main teaching and learning goals and my institutional settings.
The big question: Which blogging practice would be a good balance for the different forces involved in the blogging classroom? I’m on the road to find the answers, but certainly agree with Konrad that “…good teaching is a subversive activity. We’ve been using external pressures as an excuse to do nothing for too long.” (Towards Reflective Blog Talk 02-04-2008). I’m exploring and sharing. No excuses for not moving towards some paradigm shifts that are essential for educators tuned in to a multiliterate flat world.