Sunday 28th October, the fourth week at Webskills starting tomorrow. Today I drove to Turku to see Mom, 91, and other relatives so my day off was spent on something else not Webskills. Luckily it was a warm day (+10-12) unlike the previous weekend when early snow once again took me by surprise as I still haven't changed into the winter tyres.

Courtney gave me the good advice of waiting for awhile before posting a new text in my blog, meaning that it would be wise to  really reflect on things being learnt during a certain study week before writing about them. So this time I waited:D:D but alas! I didn't really have the time to try and test things so there was not much food for reflections either.

Also I am amazed to see how most of my study mates are doing, they are so clever and hard-working. That makes me a bit scared: what if I am trying to cope with a task that is too tough for me. But no no, there are a lot of things that I have learnt already, starting from the very simple realisation in Week 2 that Google is by no means the only way to find information quickly and in great multitudes on the net. I've realised that Google is for those who are unambitious about knowing. Also, starting to play with Delicious has taught me that brilliant links should and can be neatly saved and not just thrown into oblivion. This means even a greener office: to aid my memory, I have often printed my net findings which, with a links storage will be needed!

This week, working on webskills related to teaching and learning about listening and speaking skills, I came to realise that there are heaps and heaps of exciting and practical sites to help teachers boost their teaching on those themes. This is all transferable information that will serve my Webskills project purposes.

I was a little sad though to see that the articles that we were referred to  as our reading in this connection, were somewhat outdated. The progress is so quick in the ICT spheres that yesterday's articles may be yesterday's news as well, not to mention articles from the past decade. Also language education pedagogy is going through a major change where the focus has already been shifted from trying to avoid mistakes and achieve near-native results to appreciating life-long learning and plurilingual skills so reading the recommended articles made me feel somewhat unhappy: why these, why not the cutting edge of say, the last 2-3 years. I have been on Twitter since July and I am following some clever people on ICT edu developments and that's where the cutting edge can be found, if only in bits and pieces, glimpses from here and there, but it is glimpses that are absolutely new and sometimes thrilling. Maybe we could somehow follow Twitter and aggregate our findings jointly?

This coming week I am trying to have a day off from work and really concentrate on Webskills. I am hopeful that I can come back with some useful links for you too. Right now, I would like to refer you to the European Centre for Modern Languages, the ECML at www.ecml.at, where you can find and download a lot of teaching materials which reflect the cutting edge in European language education. Unfortunately, the ICT skills bit is even there not the best possible as it is also somewhat both outdated and limited in scope. But the stuff on language education in general is great.

One more thing: even if I try to be a good student, meaning I try to follow and be on the ball with all Webskills developments, I find it hard as our great lovable group is so big and there are so many threads of discourse to observe (not to mention - comment) so let me ask, why don't we use Yammer for example to be more interactive and have our discussions much easier to follow. Pls see www.yammer.com and compare it to Nicenet. At work I run and am member in half a dozen Yammer groups and it simple makes communication so much easier compared to - well not to mention old-fashioned meetings - but email as well.

Have a lovely week! Great to be a member of Webskills for many weeks still to come.

Just a quick notion: I started going through some of Courney's amazing recommended sites for web search and it opened up a whole new world - or worlds - to me. In Finland, you know, we just google and google... It's a verb in Finnish, too, nowadays, we say, Etkö tiedä, no, googlaa se! (Don't you know, well, why don't you just google it!). [In Finnish we actually often pronounce the word 'kuuklaa'.]

I already added a couple of search engines into my favourites.

The only thing that worries me tonight is, this is all very English-language, Anglo-American oriented information that we get. Of course, why shouldn't it be, this is an English-language teaching-learning course, but I for one, need to keep looking for parallel solutions that would serve Finnish teachers and kids from a more European, Nordic and why not, global perspective.

But I'm thrilled! I wrote a little thing about rubrics as my post into the Week 1 conversation, before I had tried Sweet Search (because I just learnt about SS today...). The difference between Google and SS results was awesome. But of course, Google was able to bring me stuff in Finnish, from Finnish sources whereas SS could not.

I need to reflect on this from the viewpoint of using searching for learning English. Avoiding mother tongue (Finnish, Swedish) web environments may be just the thing to do.

Now I realise I forgot to watch the half past eight news on Finnish TV1 - does not happen easily! Great to be studying with you all!

I have been very  busy this week as today we had a conference with several schools, associations and our partners at the ForMin Finland about global education. We are working on (analysing) the competences making a global citizen, and to be more precise, the competence of global partnership or mutuality/reciprocity in global - or north-south - cooperation. Great topic, isn't it! We have school kids aged 12 to 18 in the team too and the treat us aunties and uncles with great mutuality:D

Well, some of the schools use blogs in their project work, some seem to do that with great sophistication too. There is this quite regular largish comprehensive school (classes 1-9) up in Northern Ostrobothnia who have a partnerschool in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian school is for deaf kids, so the way they communicate with the Finnish kids has to be of a special kind. They blog and use a lot of pictures in the posts. They also believe in communicating by doing something practical, so the Finn kids (the whole school I was told) knit socks for the not so well-to-do Ethiopians. The knitting process is documented in the blogs.

I was looking at Courtney's tips [thanks!!] for us about blogging and decided to share with you the above experience after coming across this quote:

International link-ups. Contact another educational establishment to see if they are interested in a joint blogging project. Students can write about their lives, culture, interests, etc, and be encouraged to read about the other class and respond by writing comments.(http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/blogging-elt)

Today I have been happy and amazed looking at my Webskills colleagues' blogs. Some of you are so experienced already and all of you are so clever! Lucky I come from the country of PISA (now also PIAAC) top rankings so you may know we Finns are quite good at learning though!

Presently I find it not too easy to foresee how I would introduce blogs as something that would enhance learning (English) in ways that would make it superior to good old writing of essays and stuff - except for the fact of course that you can toy with all the tools that working digitally and on the net brings along. I will work on this (heaps of suggestions for answers coming into my mind already).

Greetings from sunny Helsinki or from the suburbs and the cottage I live in, amidst woods and fields.
Looking forward to starting today - once again - as a student, this time to learn about web skills for teaching learning English more efficiently and with more fun. This time the thrill comes also from the fact that I will be studying, not only on-line (that I've done once, ages ago) but in a fully international group too.
I'll meet my group tomorrow for the first time, great!