I am being published! I will have to give you more details as they come. But as luck would have it, about six months ago an educational researcher and professor at Columbia University, Lori Langer de Ramirez, Ed. D., found my students’ wiki and loved it. She asked me to write a narrative about how I used the wiki in my ESL class and why. Well, it is getting published in her book about Web 2.0 in language classrooms. I am so excited. My little teaching narrative will compliment the more theoretical, research-based chapter on wikis in her book.

This achievement inspires me in a few different ways. First, as a fairly new teacher, I feel empowered by the Internet’s ability to level the playing field. What are the chances that the author would have found me and been able to peek into my classroom like that without the Internet? Second, it inspires me to try more new things because people notice! They noticed me! Not like being noticed really matters. (But we all know it does.) Anyway, I will keep you posted about when and where to buy the book.

And P.S. thanks for all the encouragement you guys gave me to teach abroad. I am excited about that too.

Image:  Zoha Navehebrahim

This week’s blog comes a little late because I spent most of last week in Washington, DC. I was training people from the University of DC to use instructional technology. UDC is very lucky that many of their teachers and administrators are extremely passionate about their work. One of the GED teachers, in particular,  touched my heart. (He is so humble, so I am going to leave his name out of this. I don’t want to embarrass him.) But hopefully, you will also be inspired by his dedication and creativity.

Here are three inspiring things that he does:

• He continues to teach classes over break, so that students don’t get out of the groove.
• He works (informally) with companies in town to get his GED students jobs. He even hires some of them to help him with his house projects.
• He does everything he can to get students (and keep them) in class. Including picking them up at the bus stop.

I was so impressed by him. He goes above and beyond to make sure students get what they need (from jobs to rides to school). He was the same way at my training. So I guess, I just want to put this out there. Some of us are great teachers. But others of us are so much more than great teachers! After meeting him, I hold myself to a new standard of teaching and caring for students.

Last week, I wrote my New Years Teaching Resolutions. One of them was to “share my lesson plans with other teachers in a consistent and organized way.”  There are so many ways to share links and drinks, but what about our favorite worksheets? Mine usually stay hidden away somewhere on my computer or worse yet in a file cabinet in my office. I hate the idea that I spend hours creating handouts for my class and they rarely get used again. Sometimes, I give them to other teachers. Most of the time, we share hard copies, which is such a pain if you want to edit something.

So this year, my goal is to share more and share better. I want to share the electronic copies of all of my lessons. I have a few ideas of how to go about it. I could start putting them all on my personal website. I could use another website. Something with a community feature would be great so that I can easily get lessons too.

So far, I have two ideas: connexions, or a wiki. The first is something I stumbled upon today, but it might be worth looking into. Wikis, on the other hand, I am familiar with. I have used a wiki to share lessons before. Last time, I used a wiki to share pronunciation lessons with other interested parties. People shared things, but they rarely posted lessons. So I am going to have to give the first one a try and maybe look for something better. Do you have any ideas?