”The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.” (Tim O’Reilly)

”Unity is strength… when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.” (Mattie Stepanek)

I look for projects that I thrive on where I can learn from people that I collaborate. I do enjoy collaboration and every collaboration has helped me to grow and become a better teacher!

I’ve recently become a member of two great social networks. The first one is BeltFree which stands for Bloggers in ELT, Freelancer. This group has been created by Karenne Sylvester (@kalinagoenglish) on Ning. The aim of this community is to share and exchange ideas, collaborate and inspire!! I am happy and honored to be a part of this group because all the members are great teachers, trainers, bloggers and tweeters. They all have a lot to share and can easily inspire, motivate and enrich you with their ideas even we are all from different parts of the world. This is what I call a real ‘collaboration’.

As Karenne mentioned on her post previously, to be a part of this community, you should meet the following criteria :

-You are (or have been) an English Language Teacher
-Your blog is over 3 months old
-Your last post was less than 3weeks ago
-You have written at least 10+ articles
-You post more than once a month
-Your blog(s) belongs to you and not a corporation!

Hope to meet you on BeltFree …

Te second project is the One Comment a Day which has been created by Andrew Marcinek (@andicinek) on Ning. (Read his blog post about this project.) The aim of this project is to leave a positive comment on other bloggers ‘ blogs at least once a day!!  The universe is full of great ideas and certainly this project is one of them!!

Whenever I get a new comment on one of my posts, I think that I’m writing and some other people are really reading it and even bothering to reply for it!  Every comment is a smile on my  face and putting this smile on other people’s faces and doing it every day is awesome. It’s friendly , motivating, inspiring and encouraging!! Please join this project and leave a comment for some one!!

Thanks to all bloggers+tweeters from whom I ‘m learning new things every single day… Today my PLN is more crowded than my face to face friends list and I’m proud of it !!

Twitter really amazes me!! I have learnt a lot from all the tweets of all the people and keep on learning, collaborating and improving myself.

And today, as you can see from the picture on the left side (thanks Burak Akyuz for that pic,he really tried hard to take the picture), @burcuakyol and I met face to face!!

We are both teachers in different schools in Istanbul,Turkey and we first saw each other on Twitter =)  and decided to meet.

It wasn’t difficult to recognize  Burcu. First you can easily pick her from her hair colour, I think she is one of those rare&lucky people who can wear that colour!!  When you start conversation with her, you can recognize her from her clever, engaging, motivating, enthusiastic posts and tweets. She is so lively, cheerful and has a beautiful smile on her face! We had a lovely conversation for about six hours non stop. A lot to talk and share!!

What I think is now that, Twitter is not only a social micro blogging platform but also it’s a social micro blogging platform that is a lot more than that! You can convert it into real life!

Also, I would like congratulate Burcu on her new position as the Coordinators of the Foreign Languages Departments of Istek Schools. (BTW, there are more  than 10 Istek Schools) She really deserves where she is now!

And I hope to meet some other lovely tweetchers that I’m inspired  from every single day. Who is next? I can wait to see =)

As teachers and lifelong learners of the 21st century, we are all aware of the importance of meaningful teacher collaboration. It’s essential for us to work together to improve the curriculum, make connections between the subjects and the world, deepen the understanding of being a teacher, share knowledge and experience and also; learn and grow together.

There are a lot to benefit from the teacher collaboration. It helps to incorporate new teaching strategies, improve and spread  teaching skills, team-work abilities, gain confidence in your knowledge, skills and abilities; respect for others, have the opportunity to share ideas, valuable resources and get feedback, increase enthusiasm and it can even bring career rewards and I think the most importantly, there is a positive relationship between the teacher collaboration and student success.

With all the growing technology, new tools have arrived. It has changed the way we collaborate and made collaboration speed up and simple. Today; most of us agree that  digital collaboration  among  teachers is becoming increasingly important. Blogs, wikis, twitter, ning, Second Life, conferencing & chat tools and all other social networking sites now successfully can bring teachers 2gether to share knowledge and learn from each other. It has become very easy to collaborate  with educators all around the world. Having a blog, writing on forums, taking online courses, becoming a member of a social network such as Twitter, Ning or a wiki have created new platforms to collaborate, generate awareness on different methods of teaching and share knowledge with other teachers from all over the world.

But; do we collaborate the same way with our colleagues as we collaborate with other networked educators from different countries?

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to answer this question with a ‘Yes!!’ Still, there are a lot of teachers around me who don’t believe the importance and the benefits of using technology and Web 2.0 tools and for worse, thinking that technology is just a waste of time and a threat.

To be able to change it, schools and the principles should provide teachers with TIME, training, technical and follow up assistance  and the access to technology;  to use and integrate existing technologies into their teaching and as a part of their collaboration with their colleagues and life-long learning. Teachers should be motivated and encouraged to use IT skills and create their own PLN, e-portfolios and experience becoming a member of a social network and see the benefits of using 21st century skills.

Till I see my colleagues tweeting, blogging, exchanging information and teaching each other online, I don’t think we are really educating better 2gether. I hope these days are very close.  

Here is the second and the last part of my 4 day Pilgrims course.

* Students make a circle with the first letter of their names or their birthdays.

* Students throw a ball to each other saying their names and when everyone says his/her name, they have to throw the ball back to the person who has thrown them saying their names. Challenging!! 

* Teachers make a circle, everyone says how many years they have worked as a teacher adding the number they have heard from the teacher before them. (We ended up 114 years of experience in teaching. It was great fun!)

* In a circle, students throw a ball to each other saying ‘I like….’, when everyone finishes their sentences, students throw the ball back to the people saying what they said they liked (Danny likes travelling etc.)

* In pairs, students write three words about their lives. It can be their age, their brother’s name, what they like to do, the year they were born etc. The other pair tries to guess what the words mean by asking questions.

* In groups, students try to find a word starting with ‘T’ or ’C' for these sentences.

•  Something that has wheels.
•  Someting that is worked by electricity.
•  Something that you can find at the coast.
•  A sport or a hobby.
•  Something to do with weather.
•  Something that is in your living room.
•  Something that is yellow.
•  Something that you wear in cold weather.

* Teacher gives some questions to the students before the reading activity. Students try to answer the questions with made up answers. When they finish, they retell their story looking at their answers. The good thing is that everyone will end up having a different story. Then teacher gives the real story. What’s your story out of these questions?

1. Where is Minton?
2. How many medical students arrived in Minton?
3. What time of the day did they arrive?
4. What did they tell the landlord of the pub?
5. What did the students do the following weeks?
6. How did the local people feel about the activities of the students?
7. How did the local people stop the young students and get them leave the town?

I can send you the real story, just let me know.

* Teacher starts telling her true story using not more than 3 or 4 sentences then she stops and asks the students to go on telling the rest of the story trying to guess what it may have happened and ended. When they finish telling the story, teacher tells the real story of her own.

* After students read the story, teacher writes some words from the story on the board and asks students to put the words in order as they are in the story without looking at their texts.

* Teacher writes a sentence, a rhyme or a song on the board and reads/sings it with students. Every time they read/sing the text on the board, teacher deletes a word or chunks to make it more difficult and fun for the students to read and remember.

* Students tell the number of the letters of each word as they read it. (Jack/four, and/three, Jill/four,went four, up/two, the/three, hill/four ….)

* After students read a story, teacher divides the class into groups of three and each group members choose to be either A, B or C. Teacher dictates questions adding one of the letters from A,B or C. All the A’s in the class has to write the question whenever they hear ‘A’ letter. The same goes for B’s and C’s. When teacher dictates all the questions, each students answers her/his answers and shares it with the rest of her group. (It was difficult to explain, hope you get it)

* # Students work in pairs. Each pair has six different words on their lists. They try to memorize the words, pairs change their lists and try to remember the words on their lists. # Each pair tells 5 words form the other pair’s words list and they try to remember the 6th word on the list. # Each pair tells 4 words form the other pair’s words list and they try to remember the 5th and the 6th word on the list. #Pairs get their own lists and try to write the other pair’s words on their papers.

* This is a post-reading activity. Teacher divides the class into groups, each group is asked to read one paragraph of the text, then teacher asks each group to write one or two sentences after their paragraph that will not change the story.

* Students expand the story with the adverbs and adjectives that the teacher has given to them.

* Students add one extra character or a scene to the story.

* Teacher gives each student an animal word (sheep, dog, bird, cow etc) Students start walking around the classroom making the noises of these animals. Each students try to find the rest of his/her group by listening to the noises. Students can be given different songs, they hum around and find the rest of their group.

*  Teacher gives each student in the class a letter, A,B,C…. (All the letters of the alphabet should be) . Teacher shouts out one word, e.g DOG. The class try to spell that word by standing up and saying their letters at the right time.

* Teacher lays the pictures of the story on the floor and hands out different parts of the text to students. They try to match the pictures with their texts. When everyone finds the right picture, they read their texts and show their pictures.

* Students choose one sentence from the story and write each word of their sentences on small papers and place them on their desks randomly. Students walk around the class and try to put the words into correct order to find the sentence again.

* Teacher gives different parts of the story to some of the students in the class. They all stand up and face the rest of the class. Each student only read their parts of their story while the rest of the class try to put the story into correct order moving students to the right or to the left and asking them to read their parts.

We can easily make our students read the texts more than once by using these activities and make them understand the it thoroughly. I hope you enjoy and find these activities useful.  

I would like to thank to Philip Franklin, the Coordinator of the Foreign Languages Department of Terakki Vakfi Okullari for this opportunity.