I am passionate about creative writing for strong, independent folk because I believe that embracing your creativity is the key to expressing yourself in a clear, succinct & powerful way and connecting with the real you. Hence the launch of my short online course Share Your Story with Confidence. Join me if you are: excited about…
Three weeks have passed and we have come to the end of my first short online course in creative writing. It was a pleasure and honour to support 4 willing participants shake off their inhibitions, adopt a positive mindset and get down to some serious writing! About the Course The fundamentals of the course were…
Call For Participants This is a call for participants to my online collaborative exchange project. This ‘Telecollaboration‘ will be carried out as academic research for my Masters in Digital Technologies for Language Teaching at the University of Nottingham. Please read the dissertation abstract here. Or read the full dissertation proposal here. What is Telecollaboration? Telecollaboration…
Thinking about how to inject some creativity into my language classroom, last week I attended a poetry workshop with the Barking Foxes Poetry Stanza in east London. The theme was ballads, which was a new term for me. Ballad Definition A ballad is a poem that is typically arranged in quatrains (four poetic lines) with the…
Last week I attended a CPD session focused on Differentiation. But what is it? And why do I need it in my life? Explanation Attempt 1 differentiation – the action or process of differentiating or distinguishing between two or more things or people. OK, so that’s a dry general description from the dictionary. It’s not that…
Introduction So you’re interested in teaching online and don’t know where to start? Or you teach online but want to know if there is a better way to do things? This Online Teacher Toolkit could be for you. Packed with the necessary implements to set yourself up online (but not the type of implements to…
I am passionate about creative writing for strong, independent folk because I believe that embracing your creativity is the key to expressing yourself in a clear, succinct & powerful way and connecting with the real you. Hence the launch of my short online course Write Your Story with Confidence. Join me if: sometimes your mind…
The Economic Landscape – it’s not as bad as it seems A simple scan of the job pages highlights a period of economic transition. Words like: downturn, Brexit, recession, inexperience, (lack of) training, (lack of) digital skills, (demand for) basic literacy and numeracy, vie for our attention. In my mind, with any transition, with any difficulty, indeed, within…
Reflection on: Building Sense of Community at a Distance by Alfred Rovai (2002) International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 3, No. 1. Issues in Online Learning This paper discusses how best to design and conduct an online course in response to the major issues in distance learning: high dropout rates – apparently 10-20%…
Reflection on: Using SmallWorlds to enhance social presence, group cohesion, and group identity in an online postgraduate course by Angelos Konstantinidis (2017) Overview This paper about virtual worlds reminds us that the current digitised and connected world is forcing educators to re-think the way in which they teach. On second thought, ‘force’ is a strong…