August 31 st - Day 5 - Is this the end, or just the beginning of a brand new day?

Top row, from the left to the right: Karin, Richard, Ilkay, Marta, Filiz, Noelia
Bottom row, from the left to the right: Alain, Ulrike, Toni, I
(Gerda is unfortunately not in the picture, 'cos she was the one taking the picture)

'This is the end, my friends....', he sang... I'd rather put it the complete other way round: This is really just the beginning of the brand new path we started on Sunday evening, Aug. 26th, and that we can continue and make together for as long as we wish.

In short, the morning was spent with us playing the 'Who is who?' game, using the chat tool. The appeal of both the idea of the activity, the challenge and the potential of the tool in itelf, made us all very much involved in it. One more activity we can all adapt and use with our students in different ways, and which, just like with what happened with us, will certainly help them become involved in their learning process.

The rest of this last session was dedicated to evaluating the work we did all through the week. The result? Well, I think everybody agreed on the fact that this course was definitely a very positive experience in so many aspects:
- its organization (both structure and content) and development;
- the high level of professionalism of the trainers (THANK YOU, dear Ulrike, Gerda and Karin, for the sharing!);
- the significance of the new knowledge and skills we acquired and the ones we (already got and) had the chance to develop;
- the diversity and appeal of the tasks we performed;
- the experiences we had the chance to exchange;
- the reflections on the use of this course and on the ways we can put many of the things we learned into practice in our daily work;
- the whole atmosphere of the course;
- the location of the course and the material/equipment provided;
- the accomodation;
- the friends we made and that I am sure will remain forever;
- ... I could go on and on and on...

For all this and so much more, this was one of the best weeks I have ever had.

Forever yours, dear friends!

Hasta siempre, amigos mios!

August 30th - Day 4

A hard morning's (and part of the afternoon's) work on Hot Potatoes.

Hot Potatoes enables you to create interactive exercises, such as multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web.
(adapted from http://hotpot.uvic.ca/)

This morning we became aware of:

- how to have access to the Hot Potatoes programme;
- how to use it in different ways, namely in producing clozes, matching, and quizzes for our students;
- how to link all the exercises we produced and how to create an index in order to make all of them easily available to the students.

The afternoon was dedicated to reporting some of our teaching-learning experiences to each other.


What a resourceful day we had!!!

August 29th - Day 3

Lexical competence activities

"What does your neighbour usually have for breakfast?"



From a list of items your neighbour and you have for breakfast we were taken to comparing different habits across countries/cultures. The same goes, for example, for a list of clothing which students can complete both in their mother tongue and in English, French, Swedish, ... according to the teacher's instructions.

Divided into groups, we then developed a similar task on the topics TV, newspapers and stereotypes. Making intercultural awareness meaningful was the main purpose of this task, in which creating a social context assumes a basic role.

The Forum value

"An Internet forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user generated content. Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, (electronic) discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards, fora (the Latin plural) or simply forums."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum

Our attention was then driven to how to understand and use the forum potential, as well as to the fact that the forum would be mainly used for course evaluation.

August 28th - Day 2 of the course

The morning was spent sharing a few views on what we learned the day before, and then we went on finding out about how to create a blog and how to use it for pedagogical purposes.

Blog - short for weblog. Let's read a definition for "blog":
"A weblog is a journal (or newsletter)"A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog.
www.conceptwebsites.com/SEO/common-terms.htm
Blogs used for educational purposes are becoming more and more a means for educators and students to interact more effectively than ever before.

In the afternoon we dedicated ourselves to doing some research and then preparing a text on a town we would like to visit. Hard choice! Anyway, I had to make my choice, and so... New Orleans! Here I go! :o)

Let's start with some music just to create the right atmosphere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q1u_69BARo

The town is located along the Mississipi river and it was founded by the French people in 1718 becoming the capital of French Louisiana.

The sugar industry characterized the growth of trade on the Mississipi.

New Orleans is one of the most visited cities in America and it has many attractions, from the Bourbon St. to the French Quarter (known locally as "the Quarter" or Vieux Carré), which dates from the French and Spanish eras and is bounded by the Mississippi River & Rampart Street and Canal Street & Esplanade Ave. There you can find all sorts of bars, hotels and entertainment in general. A whole life experience

Aug. 27th - Day 1 of DidacTIClang

"DidacTIClang aims to promote the use of Internet in language learning and teaching and motivates teachers and trainers to make the best pedagogical use of ICT in their own teaching environments."

Source: http://www.didacticlang.eu/

The morning was all about introducing the course and the moodle platform to us, while the afternoon was spent learning a bit about the PBwiki thing :o).

The PBWiki is a collaborative tool, which can be used by a group of people. They can all contribute to it and edit it together. Besides, eveybody involved in it can easily track any changes that take place in it. Once you learn how to deal with it, it is in fact a very easy, fast way to edit a web site.

Here are the pictures of our course trainers, Ulrike, Gerda and Karin:

Saturday thru Sunday (25th-26th Aug.)

Two whole days just for me to enjoy the town. Lucky girl to have arrived in Salzburg two and a half days earlier :o) right in the middle of the Salzburg Festival.


I guess I must have visited most of what there was to visit in town for these two days:
Mirabell Garden, Mozart's birthplace and the place where he used to live, Rupertinum Museum, the Museum of Modern Art on top of the hill, where I had the chance to see an exhibition on Chinese modern art, Festung Höhensalzburg, Salzburg's downtown, and so much more...


Sunday evening was time for the whole group of the course trainees to gather at a typical restaurant in Puch right next to the Fachhochschule. Such a great time for us all to meet for the first time in a very friendly atmosphere.

Friday, August 24th

From Setúbal - Portugal to Salzburg - Austria

I got to Salzburg after lunch time. The weather was just great.
There was Ulrike waiting for me with a big smile at Salzburg airport. She took me right to the students' residence in Urstein and showed me around.

She soon had to go back to town and pick up Karin, one of the trainers who was coming from Sweden. So, I decided to go for a short walk around the Fachhochschule.



All that green and the hills, that seemed to have been taken from a film shot, were so appealing I just couldn't stay still.
In the meantime, Ulrike got back with Karin and then she took me to town. I went for a walk just to get a general idea of what there was to see and visit the next day.
In the evening, Ulrike, Karin and I went to have dinner at a very nice restaurant, where I tried my very first Wiener Schnitzel. :o)