Coaching connected learning across borders

In true Web 2.0 style I discovered that our podcast was a winner through a wall posting on Facebook from the Danish organiser of the European Podcast Awards. This is wonderful and, after four years of doing the podcast, tells me that we must be doing something right. Although I do every other show from…

Edublogs is a leading brand in the edublogging field though I must say that their free version has become so restricted and full of advertising that it is difficult to give teachers a flavour of what it has to offer. However one great thing about Edublogs is that they started the Edublogs Awards seven years…

Gavin Dudeney, one of the two owners of The Consultants-E for whom I do some facilitating work, has just written a harrowing post about what he has been going through in the last year. In brief he has been bullied, blackmailed and defamed with the bully telling him on several occasions that they hope that…

It was great to be invited back to an annual event at the RheinAhr Campus of Fachhochschule Koblenz in Germany, their Managing Cultural Diversity seminar, which is open to all the students of the university who wish to spend a weekend thinking about how to internationalise themselves by taking a semester abroad or by applying…

My neice went through a phase of telling everyone ‘You’re weird!’ when she was about 7 years old and according to this research she may have been right. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic which describes a very small proportion of the world’s population. Why does this matter? Because along with the…

Are there any Web 2.0 tools suitable for helping over 60 different nationalities improve their Danish vocabulary and pronunciation? That was the challenge posed by the members of a project at a local college seeking to prepare foreigners for a standard Danish vocational course to become social care assistants. They invited me to share some…

The Business English special interest group of IATEFL is very active and a few weeks ago put on an online webinar addressing the role of intercultural communication training in business English. I thought that there were many topics of wider interest than the target audience of teachers during the three hour event and so I…

I was honoured to be invited to give a presentation to the Polish Moodle Moot  today but I couldn’t go to Poland so I did it virtually in Elluminate. What I did was to run through five habits in working with ICT in your teaching which I think are important to anyone considering including more…

Catching up on old New Scientists recently I was interested to read yet another article on human happiness. This one by Dan Jones concluded that the evolutionary purpose of happiness is to enable and reward learning. So learning makes us happy and we learn better when we are happy. If true, this has many implications…

Some time ago I reviewed Mark Pegrum’s book ‘From Blogs to Bombs – The Future of Digital technologies in Education’ for the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments. Recently I received hard copies of the journal edition but the review is also available online.