A Juggling Act

Well, I went and signed up for the next course in the Advanced Courses series at iTDi.pro ... it's called "Language Learning to Go! Integrating Mobile Learning with Language Learners" and the instructor is Shelley Sanchez Terrell, so I'm very excited!  I can see that it will be chock-full of new ideas for me, so I will need to stay on my toes for the whole four weeks.  Love it!  But I'm going to be jaunting off to Pittsburgh for the COABE PAACE Conference next week, so I will miss one of the lessons.  So, thank goodness all lessons are recorded for flexible access later!  (And, by the way, it's not too late to sign up if you're interested.  Check the link above.)

In April, I'll be taking part in the AERA annual meeting, which is going to be right here in Philadelphia. I'm not a researcher, but I collaborated with a researcher and two fellow teachers on a vocabulary intervention recently and we'll be having a round table discussion about that experience.  I know I learned a lot and I hope the data shows that my learners did too!  I can say that their post-test scores (not related to the intervention, but something we give all learners after 50-60 hours) were far better than any other group I've taught before ... hmmm, coincidence?

credit

In other news, I recently got my higher level learners started on another website.  In the past, I've used edmodo and wikispaces.  Both have their advantages, but I found the former to be a little too inflexible for this level, while wikispaces was a little too flexible.  Boy, am I picky!  Anyway, now we've got a password-only blog going at edublogs and it seems to be juuust right.  I'm spending a bit of time there monitoring, making sure things are neatly categorized and tagged, and reviewing posts as everyone gets up and running.  (Meanwhile, I may learn some other cool ways to interact with my class from the course!)

What all of this boils down to:  I may not be posting here too much for a month or two while I juggle everything else.  I hope to put up a few "hi there" posts, at a minimum!  And I'm really, really interested in pulling all of this new learning together somehow, sometime soon ... so stay tuned?