| 18th December, 2011 HAPPY and HOLY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE Enhancing your own professional development via Global Collaboration.  |
Last night on Twitter I stumbled across the #itdi chat and was unsure what the acronym stood for so I asked... It stands for International teacher development institute. This caught my interest immediately. I believe as educators, we are all responsible for our own learning and continuing to adapt our pedagogy to suit our students and to prepare them for THEIR future world, not ours. I believe schools must encourage a culture of educators supporting their own PD - more of "helping teachers help themselves". As educators we are professionally responsible and morally bound to provide the best learning environment we can for our students.
Following the hashtag on twitter, I discovered it was the backchannel for a LIVE webinar that was currently concluding, however a new one for #teachmeet was about to start. I followed the links and tried to join the live meeting. This didn't work on my Mac, so I tried on my work HP probook and BINGO! I was able to install Microsoft Live meeting and join in!. Click here for more info.
This online LIVE meeting (webinar) was amazing! I had the laptop open viewing the international presenters on screen and listening to their presentations (slides were also progressing in background- Click here for the teachmeet international wikispace ) and the Mac assisted my tweeting of the event on #teachmeet hashtag. Listening to the perspectives, insights and learning experiences from educators all around the world was very special. Here is a list of the presenters. They represented countries ranging from South Africa, Croatia, Greece, Indonesia, Switzerland, Wales, Belgium, Spain, England, Romania and India.
Cherry is an English teacher from India who was very helpful with the twitter backchannel.
Tweet doc of last night so you can have a squiz!
Squiz is Australian slang for take a look/have a glance/be inquisitive.
Recently I was apart of the Connected classrooms #ccglobal Christmas-around-the-world initiative, where we sent QR codes (this is the generator I use) to schools around the world sharing our countries Christmas traditions and experiences. Amazingly, one of the educators I had connected with last week Vicky Loras @vickyloras was also a presenter last night- truly a small world. So easy to connect these days which is the beauty of online learning. Link to our Glogster here and QR code below.
This is a terrific capture of the international teachmeet by Bart (see his contact below)
The event was hosted ever so well by Arjana Blazic from Croatia @abfromz and Bart Verswijvel @bartverswijvel from Belgium. Well done guys!
And another Slideshare overview by @sonjalr
Link to the International teachmeet wikispace with further handy links -> Click here.
Over and out. Keep smiling!
Jeannette James
