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Happy 1st Birthday #ELTchat!

Teacher training and Development

Happy 1st Birthday #ELTchat!

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Happy Birthday #ELTchat and all #ELTchat followers!

 

Free ClipArt from Microsoft


 
It’s been an amazing year and I am very proud and grateful to have been a part of this!
I look forward to many more birthdays and many more new directions that this great PLN will take me to!
Thank to all who follow and make my Wednesdays so charged with energy, revitalize my training and put me in touch with so many amazing educators!
What we have accomplished in this first year of #ELTchats!
In this first year, we can boast about a few things and work harder to do more!

  • More than 100,000 tweets have appeared with the #ELTchat hastag, many of them posted outside #ELTchat times !
  • The widespread use of the hashtag for all important updates related goes to show that the #ELTchat hashtag has become an important and established tag to spread news to the ELT community on Twitter!
  • We were present and shared information at TESOL France in November 2010.
  • With the help and support of #ELTchat followers, bloggers and non-bloggers, we have turned www.elt.chat.com into a great resource bank of summaries which contain a wealth of ideas and links to keep up with your professional development
  • We created a wiki which contains all the transcripts of the chats. You can find it here and you can browse through all the transcripts
  • We created a number of podcasts which, however, due to the sudden illness and disappearance of @olafelch who was one of the original moderator and who did the sound, we have somewhat neglected! But we are coming on stronger with a great interview on Sunday! Stay tuned!!!

But over and above all, I think the most important thing is the Wednesday has become a day teachers look forward to, anticipating the opportunity to connect, share and learn from and with other teachers from around the world, with great excitement and the end of chats is always a time when all participants leave with a new burst of energy and inspiration to carry them through the difficult task of being a teacher.
IATEFL Glasgow 2011 
Our next project is to make #ELTchat better known to those who are still non-Twitter users, and many great teachers seem to hesitate about joining Twitter.
So all #ELTchat Moderators are going to be organising a Symposium and, hopefully, since at the time of writing these lines proposals have not yet been processed, all moderators, Shaun Wilden, Shelly Terrell, Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto, Berni Hall and myself, will be presenting all about how #ELTchat can help you create a PLN and keep up with your professional development.
We hope to see some of you there!

Party Plans for next Wednesday 

Both #ELTchats next Wednesday will have an open topic which is to bring in and share the best ideas you got from participating or reading the summaries and briefly explain how you used the idea or tool and how it worked. Both chats promise to be great!
At the same time we are going to have a party in Second Life – for those of you who have experience of using Second Life,  have some virtual cake and drinks, music and a little bit of a celebration!

#ELTchat 1st Birthday Party Preparations in Second Life

 
Join us by clicking on this slurl and logging into Second Life and visiting my plot – yes, you read correctly, my plot – in Second Life,  or if you don’t have an account and the software, go to  http:/secondlife.com/, download the application (Second Life Viewer), create your avatar in minutes and join in the fun!
I look forward to seeing you there!!!!
Post Party Update
It was great to see quite a few #ELTchat friends and three more moderators joined me in Second Life for the birthday celebrations.  Shaun Wilden, Barbara Sakamoto, Shelly Terrell, Sue Lyon Jones, Lesley Cioccarelli, Adam Simpson, Alexandra Koukoumialou and Raquel Olivera were there and were also joined by Heike Philp – Gwen Gwasi in Second Life – one of the owners of Edunation where this happened. Heike, with her usual aplomb, very quickly opened her Adobe Connect Pro  classroom and made a recording of the last few minutes of this very happy gathering and the speeches we made, which is a lovely souvenir to have and we thank her very much for it.
Have a look at some of the snapshots which I turned into a short animoto production – the pretty party lights were a headache to delete and I am sorry that Barbara had to spend so much time figuring out how to lose them!!!
http://static.animoto.com/swf/w.swf?w=swf/vp1&e=1318317840&f=WieQTTyHHm9BydqDZDBKEg&d=32&m=b&r=240p&volume=&i=m&options=

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Speeches were made, virtual cake and champagne eaten and drunk, which some may think is a joke, a fake, not real… but to us it felt as if we were close to each other, even if thousands of miles apart, Barbara in Japan, Shaun and Sue in the UK, Heike in Germany,  Lesley in Australia, Shelly in the US and me in Greece….
Second Life does do that.
 
Here is the link to the video kindly recorded by Heike Philps in Edunation, where a lot of foreign language teaching and educational conferences and meetings take place.  Raquel Oliveira, Sue Lyon Jones, Shelly Terrell, Shaun Wilden and myself are sitting on the front ‘porch’ of my very own tree house in Second Life. :-)  (Yes, I am a proud Edunation Resident now…)
http://content.screencast.com/users/MarisaConstantinides/folders/Jing/media/fc4e1f9d-4d0e-44b5-b7d7-21e649e0fac7/jingswfplayer.swf
 

Related Post 

Marisa Constantinides Reflects on the 1st year of #ELTchat Interview on TEFLnet.com by Tara Benwell.
 
 
 
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3 Responses

  1. […] Marisa Constantinides – TEFL Matters – Happy 1st Birthday #ELTchat! Source: marisaconstantinides.edublogs.org […]

  2. […] Happy 1st Birthday #ELTchat! Happy Birthday #ELTchat and all #ELTchat followers! It’s been an amazing year and I am very proud and grateful to have been a part of this! I look forward to many more birthdays and many more new directions that this great PLN will take me to! Source: marisaconstantinides.edublogs.org […]

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