EVO 2010- Join the fun!

Hi all!

I am thrilled that Electronic Village Online (EVO) 2010 sessions have started. It might be familiar to those who have participated in them before but if you haven't heard of these sessions, here is a brief description of these sessions :

'For six weeks, participants in EVO can engage with ESOL experts in collaborative, online discussion sessions or in hands-on virtual workshops of professional and scholarly benefit. These sessions will bring together participants for a longer period of time than is permitted by the land-based TESOL convention and will allow a fuller development of ideas and themes of the convention or of professional interest in general.'

The most appealing aspect of these sessions is the chance to meet educators from different parts of the World and share insights. These sessions are also FREE.

It is the fourth time I am attending these sessions and they have definitely contributed a lot to my career and goals. I am taking "Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments" and "Teaching Languages in a Virtual World" this year. Although it is diffcult to take two sessions at the same time when working full time, I just couldn't decide which one to take so I decided to take two of them:) I hope I can survive!

Although the sessions have already started, it is still possible to register. You can see the list of these sessions in the following link:



I will be happy to read your reflections about EVO sessions. I hope you enjoy them.

Best wishes.

Why do educators need to be more literate in using web 2.0 tools? Here is the answer:

a great video explaining the functions of twitter - worth watching:)

Hi all,

As my focus has been on twitter recently, I would like to share a video. Actually, I had posted an informative post on twitter but I think this video is better in terms of explaining the functions of twitter.

Please reply to this post by explaining how you use twitter.

Thanks for reading this post.

Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

my twitter mosaic

Hi all,
The chart below displays my twitter mosaic,people I follow on twitter. I would like to thank each one of them for sharing their wonderful ideas and keeping me up to date.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

twitter - my new focus

Hi all,

In this post, I would like to reflect upon a really popular tool, twitter, that I discovered later than many technology enthusiasts. My first twitter experience was not very well. At first I had thought it was just like simple tool people use to reflect what they are doing. The use of twitter seemed so limited to me that I didn't update my status or 'tweeted' for more than three months. After having seen that it is being mentioned a lot in the world of CALL, I decided to focus on twitter again.

Then what is twitter?

Twitter is a microblogging platform helping its users to update their status, send and read people's messages called tweets. If you have a twitter account, people can subscribe to your profile and be your followers. You can also subscribe to their profiles and catch up with their updates, links and messages. Accessing twitter is quite easy. You can either visit twitter website or use external applications like tweetdeck and tweetie or use you mobile to send and respond to people's tweets.

Is it really so popular?

Yes, definitely! That's why many magazines and newspapers and even celebrities have twitter accounts. The popularity of twitter has even led some people to post ads and access many people. It is also necessary to note that this wonderful tool is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic analysis.

What can be done using twitter?

The use of twitter is NOT limited to updating your status. It can be used for various purposes like:

1. sharing links
2. sharing photos
3. catching up with recent news&trends
   
4. replying to people's tweets
5. sending messages to your friends
   
6. meeting new people
   
7. making your blog more popular
8. finding the information needed using popular tags

Twitter vs Facebook

I think I have admit that I find twitter more user friendly and purposeful when compared to facebook as a language teacher.

How can you sign up for a twitter account?

Please visit http://www.twitter.com to get a twitter account.

What is my twitter id?

If you want to follow me on twitter my id is beyza.

If you want to learn more about twitter, please read the wonderful blog post by Kalinago English:

http://kalinago.blogspot.com/2009/08/english-language-teachers-guide-to.html


Happy tweeting:)

B.

my presentation-Check it out!

After my concurrent session today in a local ELT conference on technology, I would like to share my presentation with my followers. I am going to write another post about my ideas both about my presentation and the conference as the theme of it was related to technology.

Wiki In Action

View more presentations from Beyza.

Plans

Although I have neglected my blog recently, I have some good news to share!

As I have already mentioned in my MA reflections blog, I could finish my article on the relation between my wiki use and motivation levels of my students and my proposal for a local ELT conference is accepted. I am going to do a concurrent session in the conference next Saturday. I have already prepared my draft but I need to go over some details in order to engage the audience.

After I finish it, I am planning to post it to slideshare and share it with technology enthusiasts.

Wish me luck:)