#Walkmyworld project--Part 1

                                           Christy1/  CCO Public Domain Pixabay


Happy new year to all!

Let me start by writing that I do not blog often. I am gradually learning to understand the multiple implications of sharing my thoughts with a real audience, whether it is a group of colleagues or my own students.

I have to acknowledge that blogging paid off because it forced me to take time off my busy schedule to think ideas through and write about them. One of my blog posts became the basis for an abstract I submitted to a conference that was accepted, so the gains were immediate.

As I resume the activity on my blog this 2016, I would like to describe the outstanding project that a group of educators created to use technology in a friendly manner.

How I became interested in #Walkmyworld (this part is in response to Greg's questions

I was reading one of Ian's blog posts when he described #Walkmyworld project. In one of his recent posts, Ian described the project as “an open research, open learning, and open education project designed to get educators and students thinking critically about digital texts while sharing and connecting online”.  

I decided to give it a try as a participant in early 2015 and then I used it with my pre-service teachers in late September and October 2015.

What did I learn from the experiences both as a participant as a teacher?

As a participant, I could tell the learning events were interesting and I loved the interaction some of my tweets received from the participants. It meant that somebody was reading them.

As I teacher I knew that not all the learning events would resonate with my population (pre-service teachers of English as a foreign language) but decided to play with them. What did I learn? My students were eager to connect with other participants but since we did it on a time that the project was not running with the other groups, the interaction was only among them and me. They were only four and two were very reluctant to use Twitter so I had to mentor them and gradually explained to them what they could get away from the project. The learning events that worked well were the first ones and the last ones. The ones in the middle had a focus on poems and that did not work well with them—again I kind of knew that this could be the case. I realized the importance of debriefing with them as we were doing the learning events because they had assumptions about the project that were incorrect and it was also my opportunity to discuss with them about digital citizenship.

This entry is a response to a series of emails that I have been exchanging with the creators of the project and their encouragement to respond via blog.