Project 52 - Catch up Weeks 43 & 44

Well, Week 43 went past at a rapid speed and before I knew it, it was over and I realised with some trepidation that it was a bit late to post.  So this week it is 2 for 1 and I have added week 44 into the mix!

At the beginning of the week I got a lovely surprise when I was invited by Lana to become a guest blogger for SEETA, on the subject of 'My Working Week'.  Sadly I am not teaching full time at the moment, so I asked if I could leave blogging until early spring 2015, when I hope to do more teaching at the Lake... Watch this space!!

My mLearning course is already over halfway through and I am learning so much.  I love being a student again, and so I was a bit worried when the Internet was down from last Saturday lunchtime til Monday night.  This meant 2 days of no access, hence another reason for my not posting last Sunday.  I managed to do course work offline, however, ready to post as soon as the Internet came back up.

This is a podcast I produced for one of the tasks on the subject of what makes me happy.  No prizes to guess what really makes me a happy bunny!!  This was one of the tasks I had to do, and I really enjoyed creating an mlearning lesson plan based on the theme of happiness.

For some reason I can't get the Podomatic embed code to work here, so here is the link to the podcast:

http://janetbianchini.podomatic.com/entry/2014-10-28T05_58_24-07_00

I like trying out new ways to reply to posts and here is my favourite quote from a TED talk I based the Happiness lesson plan on:

The lesson plan will soon be added to this site here and everybody is welcome to use it or adapt parts of it :-)

I added this picture of My Precious teddy bear bought in Harrod's on the occasion of a special birthday 7 years ago....

I also tried out Photo Grid again and added the Android app to my smartphone. This is a collage I created quickly and easily as an example of  a possible 'Show and Tell' weekend activity that you could get students to do on their mobiles:

Here's a single photo frame with a special Halloween theme.  There are lots of other themes available to choose from in the PhotoGrid app. I like it because it is so quick and easy to make beautiful collages straight from my phone!

I also experimented with a fun fake newspaper creator and added this as a lesson idea. You can scan the QR code and it takes you to a very short Youtube video clip..... 

 

As well as doing the mlearning course which I am thoroughly enjoying, I am also doing a 4-week moderator training session for EVO, and this means having to read lots of articles, responding to posts and generally getting the hang of Google+ again.  I was not so keen on starting up an account last year, as I can hardly keep up with blogging and Twitter these days, but I can see it is very useful in a closed group community, such as the EVO Moderators group.  There are 75 of us in total and it is great fun interacting and getting to know each other and discussing EVO matters together.

I have been invited to do a webinar talk for the IATEFL YTL sig in January 2015 by Dr Nellie Deutsch, and I was honoured to accept.  Now the only thing is I am not sure what to present!!  Do I do one on Comics and adapt previous presentations and update them for a new one (this is a tempting option), or do I do one from scratch, but that would need lots of weeks of preparation??  I am still not sure, but I hope to decide by the close of day!!

So all in all a busy fortnight of studying, socialising and a bit of gardening.......

Roll on Week 45!!