Electronic Village Online is here again!! EVO sessions 2016!

End of Year Meeting with my Travelling Aunts

I have named my students this year, the Travelling Aunts, since they have all come to me with the purpose of consolidating their English speaking skills for the sole purpose of travelling.  When I decided to hold a meeting with them only some of then had met before.  I did not know what to expect or how to prepare for this meetup.  I took some notes on an article about travelling and found a cozy place where we could have a cup of tea and a piece of cake.

The afternoon of our meeting was a typical December day in Santa Fe, 32 Degrees Celcius and 70 per cent humidity, so we ended up ordering lemonade with lots of mint and ginger.  The cakes were delicious but what I enjoyed best was the conversation that developed swiftly among people who had met for the first time, who shared a common interest: the awareness of the importance of learning English.  Some of my students had been touring different language schools looking for the right kind of class for them.  Others had been through difficult situations abroad where they needed to use English to solve a problem.  All of them shared their stories as language learners and users with enthusiasm and laughter.  By the end of the meeting they were talking as if they were old friends and they urged me to set up another meeting so that they could continue the conversation.

As for me, I forgot about the notes I had taken and I felt that my job had yelded great results this year in terms of engagement and confidence.  It also made me reflect on the value of  human contact and community building when we are learning languages.
A final thought.  As I was uploading the pictures I noticed the tag on the lemonade: "Hecho con Amor" = "Made with Love".  What an important ingredient in the teaching equation!

My Session Recording of FAAPI Conference, Cordoba, September 2015

Attending a conference is not only an investment of time and money.  For people who live far away from the place where the conference takes place, such as my dear friend and colleage Zoraida Risso Patrón, it also involves a 10 hours´drive from home to cover a distance of  over 1,000 km.
This year´s FAAPI host city was Córdoba and the venue was the Languages School of the 400 year old university of Córdoba.  For me this year, and for the first time in several years, the trip was only a short 5 hour trip from home and I decided to arrive a year before so that I could catch up with the cultural life of a city I had always wanted to visit managing my own itinerary.  I was thrilled to visit the renovated Museum of Fine Arts: Palacio Ferreyra, Paseo del Buen Pastor and the city´s several Jesuit churches.  I even attended a fashion show in a building that used to be a church!
The sessions I attended this year featured the usual tools and techniques for the busy teacher,  but also some  low tech ones such as the Kennis Look´s one on Speaking and Listening from the heart, which is an activity by which students take turns to listen and talk without interrupting each other in circles, council-like, which I found particularly appealing for my conversation classses.
As for my session, it was the first time I presented with a full house, with people sitting on the floor! I really hope the attendees found my session useful. I meant to share what I do to try to cope with the various levels, interests and scenarios I have taught this year and I did so in the hope that maybe there were some things that could save my dear colleages a bit of time in their busy schedules.
I am looking forward to next year Teachers of English of Argentina Conference, which will be held in San Juan city.
Below is the video recording of the session called: Web Content Curation:  An Inspiration Source for Busy Teachers. Hope you like it!

FAAPI 2015, Web Content Curation, an inspiration source for busy teachers from mariacolussa

FAAPI 2015

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FAAPI 2015, Web Content Curation, an inspiration source for busy teachers from mariacolussa

´Congreso Internacional de Educación, Santa Fe, Septiembre 2015

Congress Announcement 

I´m going to start with one the last day´s plenaries, not because of that phrase: "The last shall be first", but because I was startled to know these figures.  In Argentina every given day 12,358,248 students and 758,522 teachers get moving during a normal school day.  Luz Pearson showed us these numbers during her joint presentation with Pablo Bongiovani.  Luz and Pablo shared with us their experience of collaborative work with students who are studying the same thing.  They called it "Aula Red" in Spanish, (something like networked classroom?)  In Spanish we say "Hay Señal" when we want to say that there is wifi connection that enables us to use our devices to communicate.  They showed a slide with the following: "Hay Señal Humana" (There is Human Connection?).  I particularly liked this play on words because I´m constantly experiencing the human touch in my daily contact with teachers from whom I learn every day.  It has been happening on a regular basis since I started interacting online back in 2012.  Today we are not constrained by space and time, they said, on the contrary these boundaries are blurred by the use of technology.  I was happily surprised to see Mariana Fossatti, a dear Uruguayan teacher who led me during those early times of web use in one of their slides.  Small world!

I met another person from Uruguay: Jose Miguel Garcia who was responsible for my tears on this congress (I always cry at congresses at some point) when he showed a video made by students who were invited to re-imagine schools.  I was delighted to hear his story of how collective knowledge is constructed within the Plan Ceibal, a scheme I have heard of first regarding the distance teaching of English, via Grahan Stanley. 

Several speakers stressed the importance of reflective practice, and the need to create opportunities for critical analysis of media in a country where there are more screens per family than books and magazines.  

I was attracted by the slogan of the congress and I hope that what the speakers shared during these days catch up in Argentinian classrooms.  I am already looking forward to next year´s edition.

I come from a land surrounded by rivers, and the waters are coming...

Where I stand as a teacher and where I hope to be

@mariacolussa, Mint. 2015

As a result of joining the many teachers out there who share their journeys on blogs, I have learned that we have more things in common than  I could have ever imagined.  Hana Ticha's reflections after a casual friends meeting reminded me of several conversations that I took part in where a group of teachers gather over a glass or something or a cup of coffee, or a round of mate, the typical Argentinean drink that inspires and accompanies philosophical exchanges among friends.  Just a few weeks ago I heard a teacher say that he wasn´t interested in the "word of online teaching" because he preferred the "human contact" as if they were mutually excluded or as if only one was allowed at the expense of the other.  I did not give any thought to that remark at all at the moment.  I considered that it was not the time and place to talk about that.  Plus I had not seen this person in any of the online events that proved that his remark was absolutely groundless. In fact I consider it a lack of respect towards so many people that have done so much for online teaching and learning, such as Dr. Nellie Deutch, just check out one of her many recorded sessions: Leading from Within. That´s what I should have said.  However I feel that this person was trying to conceal a lack of interest to invest time and energy to learn something new.  
Apparently we are all concerned about being the best teacher out there.  By 'the best' I mean a constelation of qualities that the mythical foreign language teacher is bestowed with.   We should be proficient in the language, the pedagogy, plus we have to somehow integrate technology.  
My road so far has been like a ride in the quiet waters of a stream.  I started teaching without technology, simply because I did not have access to it.  Then I taught like crazy for over 12 years to finally quit out of failing to find relevance in what I was doing.
Today my reality has changed.   I was helped and taught patiently by strangers for free online as to how to harness the potential of the web to scaffold learning.  I was also encouraged to take risks and pay it forward by sharing what I have learned with my fellow teachers.  On the way I had enjoyed myself with master learners/sharers like Vance Stevens, Shelly Terrell, and the amazing Hello Little World Teachers Skypers team. 
I have been enjoying myself learning and teaching with my colleagues and students.  I am now teaching in contexts that my teacher training college did not prepare such as adult education, teaching to a visually impaired student, in-company teaching, and soon online teaching.  I have also been invited to give workshops on the things I have been doing with my colleagues and students.  Accepting every single one of these challenges was a leap of faith.  One that I wouldn´t have dared to face had I not been connected to the wonderful people out there who share what they are passionate about.  
When I think about learning and growing as a teacher I immediatelly think about the EVO Sessions, the Electronic Village Online, which played such an important role in my motivation to explore digital tools with the help of other teachers.  When it comes to blogging I think about Sue Waters and her drive to spread the word about the benefits of bloggins for children and adults alike.  This is the kind of professional development that has worked for me during the last three years.  I admire those educators who gather together to organize conferences, online or face to face and I attend both with an open mind.   Because there are just too many interesting things to learn, I often feel frustrated about not being able to watch recorded sessions or read my favourite blog posts.  
I try to attend and mingle with my master learner teachers as much as I can, because after these meetings I feel energized and full of drive to go about the wonderful job to teach languages.
What do I want to do next?  Well, I hope to continue hanging out with my network of educators.  I like teaching adults, so I will probably go on doing so.  
I will try to concentrate my energies on doing what makes me happy as an educator.  I found setting your teaching manifesto a very healthy exercise.  It was suggested by Shelly in one of the sessions of her 30 Goals Challenge Conference