I have always been a big fan of TED talks since the day I watched the first video and today I am honored and super excited to announce that I have been invited to do a TEDx talk in February at Sabancı University!  Although it is a local TED, it’s still a TED, isn’t it?

I have watched great talks from people sharing their ideas on TED which always  leave me inspired and I have genuinely learnt a lot from them. Here are some of my favourites:

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity: Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity!

This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another: How it feels to have a stroke

 Adora Svitak  says kids big dreams deserve high expectations starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach: What adults can learn from kids

Richard St. John is talking about 8 secrets of success: 8 secrets of success

Thomas Suarez is a 12 year old child and talking about his own iPhone application:A 12-year-old app Developer

Poet Rives is talking about the coincidences surrounding that most surreal of hours, 4 o’clock in the morning: Rives on 4p.m

and you can watch more inspiring ones here..

This February I may be giving the talk of my life and I am really looking forward to it with butterflies in my stomach!!

This is where my online journey begins …

Electronic Village Online Sessions are five-week collaborative and hands on virtual courses & discussions that engage hundreds of educators. They are completely free and a great opportunity for professional development and connect with other teachers all over the world.

This year also I will be co-moderating an online session on EVO with other great educators that we all know and follow. Shelly Terrell,Barbara Sakamoto, Esra Girgin, Jennifer Verschoor, David Dodgson, Michelle Worgan and Sabrina de Vita.

So, if you are interested in digital storytelling and want to learn more about it, come and join our session on “Digital Storytelling for Young Learners” . The registration starts today! Don’t miss the opportunity, share the joy!

Be careful! You are about to read very techie resolutions for teachers!!

The end of 2011 is fast approaching and another year has passed in a split second. Now it’s the time to look forward to the future and a time for a fresh techie start! Here is my list for teachers who are looking for techie resolutions for the new coming year…

Blogosphere phenomenon will go on growing!Because it’s the best way to keep your ideas organized, keep pace with the changing world, leave your footprints to the digital world. It is the best way to say “Hi, I exist”! Get an account from Edublogs, Blogger or WordPress immediately and enjoy blogging throughout the new year!

Twitter has been the best place for professional development in 2011 and it will be the same for next year. Reserve your place and access a steam of great ideas, links, opinions, feedback and resources from global professionals.Start following these educators here.

Conferences and courses have extended virtually beyond the walls.  Do not miss the chance to be in K12onlineconference, SEETA, Electronic Village Online, Reform Symposium or Virtual Round Table virtually this year. You need more, here is a longer list and if you want to be a speaker in one of them, Steal This Presentation or You Suck at Powerpoint!

Using technology in the classroom will still be popular among educators next year. Although many of the tools haven’t been designed education in mind, we teachers find unique ways and create new learning opportunities for our kids. If you are a newbie, here is a list of edtech blogs and web tools that have been chosen by educators.

There is too much information that is floating around on cyber space and it’s important what other people can learn about you and what information they can access once they search for your name on Google,so invest yourself today with Creative Commons and don’t forget “Stealing is easy: Being original is hard!”

Praise yourself and others as well. Leave nice and encouraging comments on other’s blog. Make others smile and motivated. Pat yourself on the back, because you are about to become a very 21st century educator and whatever the other people say, you are not wasting your time and you are doing great! And never give up because I or others will find you and appreciate your ideas.

Cheers to a New Year and another chance for us to get it right.

“We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” – Edith Lovejoy Pierce

p.s I have been nominated, please vote me here!

Here are my favourite web tools from 2011:

Grababeast is a tool to create your own monster using different body parts and colouring them using a palette. You can save it to your computer or share your monster with a link.

You can attach different animal parts to a human body on build your wild safe and share it with others.

SafeShareTv is a tool to remove inappropriate elements around the page and generate a safe link for our students. It also lets you crop youtube videos and get rid of the unwanted parts from a video.

Howjsay is a free online dictionary. The words are pre-recorded and it is not synthetic. You can also hear multiple entries by separating them with semi-colons.

BatLyrics lets you search for song lyrics based on words and phrases with a video. You can watch and listen the video with a teleprompting screen with the lyrics of the song on it.

Penzu is a tool to keep an online diary and share it with others if you like.

Google Search Stories is a tool to create your stories using google search.  You choose a video based on your search terms, add some music to create your video.

YouPublisher is a web tool to turn your PDF documents into flippable and downloaded e-books and get a link to place it on your blog in very easy and quick  steps.

DisposableWebPage  is a site where you can create a disposable page with any content you want and share it with others.

AcapelaTV is a site where you can find ready flash animations to reuse by customizing them. You can use text-to-speech feature to make the characters talk.

AMap is a great and a fun way to display your live debates on a very simple visual format.

Join.me allows you to share your screen with others.

Twurdy lets you find texts that suit your students’ readability level. It looks for the number of words on the page, the average number of syllables in each word and the average sentence length.

Symface is a cute tool to express your emotions changing the face expression of an animated emoticon and writing why you feel like that.

Cueprompter is a tool that makes your scren work like a teleprompter without downloading a software.

Stay tuned for the new coming year …

p.s. I have been nominated, please vote me here!

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