My Reflection on Week 5 of Crafting the e-Perfect e-Textbook, EVO Sessions 2014

Learning English, a handbook, by Maria del Carmen Colussa

After navigating the waters of the feeling of loss and frustration at not being able to check each and every amazing link and material put together by the Crafting the e-Perfect e-book EVO team, I finally got down to writing and eventually finished the first chapter of my first e-book.  And I managed to sail away without drowning in the attempt.  There was a reason for this, of course.  Our moderators crafted each stage of the process with a purpose in mind: putting us in the e-book frame of mind.  I have to acknowledge that I struggled with certain things such as templates or e-publishing options, which I will dedicate time to explore further in the near future.  However and thanks to having attended last year Podcasting for the ESL/EFL Classroom session I was able to embed audio to my book as well as image files, this comes from my previous knowledge of digital photography.
  Having gone through the process of crafting my first chapter of an e-book I have to say, no matter how much I till love paper books, a whole new world opens for us as teachers.  The potencial for language teaching use of e-books is amazing in the sense that it allows us to personalize our material, hence make it more memorable to our students by talking about what really matters to them.  I strongly support what Sylvia proposed in her presentation: Destination: Imagination.
This first chapter posed me an exercise of not only imagination but also of leaving behind presupositions which have been with me as a teacher from the very beginning of my career; eg. You can´t teach without a textbook, you should follow the textbook, etc.  In other words it was an invitation to think outside the box.
There´s still a lot of learning I have to do, yet I ´m looking forward to the future of what I strongly believe is the greatest time to be a teacher of English.