Exploring Learning

White Sand Beach, Coral Island nr  Tioman Island Since last July, I have had the privilege not only to have lived in Singapore but to have visited Thailand twice - Phuket last summer and Hua Hin for Christmas - Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Qatar and the beautiful Tioman Island in Malaysia three times! In fact, my family and I just spent the last three weeks on Tioman after a very stressful few weeks of job hunting (see Testing Times ) and packing up to leave Singapore. Upon our return from Tioman, we spent a lovely busy four days in Singapore visiting and saying goodbyes to all the wonderful friends we had made, before finally flying out to a new adventure in Qatar, where we arrived two days ago. In the middle of all this, I have been offered the opportunity to Project Manage one of Julie Lindsay's Flat Connection projects, Global Youth Debate (formerly Eracism). This exciting project joins schools across the globe and provides essential skills of research, collabora...

For my MEd this week, we are looking at Personal Learning Networks - of which I am a huge advocate. I chose to review http://edupln.ning.com/ as I am already a member and dedicated user of both Edmodo and Twitter – both of which are excellent for creating PLN. Edmodo is great to use in the classroom as an organisational tool and learning portal; I use it for all my classes. I have posted about Twitter previsously and strongly advocate all educators create an account. As suggested in the video Being Connected , (U.S. Department of Education, Sept. 2013); your PLN will grow organically as you become familiar with the way that things work. What I liked about edupln.ning.com, is that when you sign up, you can add in your Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ details etc., which shows me this place is one that recognises the power of connection. Having accounts linked together is really helpful when managing a PLN – because, as suggested in Trust’s article , managing a PLN (particularly a...

As the last week of the year fast approaches, I thought I would take five minutes out of my writing to reflect on the progress and achievements of the year. I have found this year to be challenging on many levels and want to focus squarely on the successes - as there have been many - to allow me to see what truly matters as all too easily, we forget the good stuff when the tough stuff gets us down. In terms of teaching, I have successfully designed and implemented my first project-based learning project, which was recognised as excellent in the field and so I was asked to contribute to future course design of PBL projects. I also collaborated and delivered my first Global Project, also recognised as leading in the field . I have continued to explore and understand how technology can enhance teaching and learning in the English classroom and successfully helped implement the 1:1 scheme using Edmodo as a learning portal. I set up and managed learner and class blogs to enable learner...

Recently, as part of my research, I have been exploring Diigo. I want to address the need to be able to organise and curate online research so it is easy to find and use in future learning. The need to curate in the explosion of online information is essential in our digital world. For example, this morning I logged on to my University site to check my workload for this week as well as our conferences, to see what discussions had taken place overnight - my colleagues are all in the US so communication is 12 hours asynchronous for me. Following links from this and from Twitter, less than an hour later I have shared four new sites, taken part in multiple conversations, and bookmarked almost ten sites or articles I want to read for my research for the paper I am writing about software that advances writing. I currently use Pearltrees to curate educational sites that I want to use for teaching and learning, which is explored in more detail in my post ' Pearls of Wisdom '. I ...