Tag: collaborate

Welcome to New Bloggers

Denise Krebs16 Comments

Welcome!

Welcome to the blogging world! Some of my blogging teacher friends have been creating resources for new bloggers, so I thought I would contribute my ideas. My simple advice is to get in there and start blogging, find your own way, and enjoy the journey.

Although I’ve been blogging for about 18 months, it’s just been in the last six months that my journey has become more engaging and rewarding.

First, I became involved in Edublogs teacher challenges. It started with the Kick Start Your Blogging last January. Next it was 30 Days to Get Your Students Blogging, next, with my students, the Student Blogging Challenge in late March through May. Then I even became a guest blogger in the Free Tools Challenge. Currently I am lurking about the PLN Challenge. I’m hoping to begin participating, but, yikes!! There are too many opportunities to take advantage of all of them. However, as a result of the blogging challenges I have tried, I’ve discovered a whole world of educators out there connecting and collaborating. I’ve met some incredible friends like Nancy Carroll, Sheri Edwards, Lyn Howlin, Theresa Allen, Joanne Selig, and Kathryn Trask—educators from all over the world.

The second thing that happened on my blogging journey is I realized I was unclear on the purpose of my blog. Was it for personal or professional reflection? Was it to give assignments and write model blog posts for my students? Yes, it was all of those things, and it was a little bit crazy. Along the way it became clear to me that I needed two blogs: one for professional entries and the other for classroom work. You are reading my professional blog, and you can find my student blogs at http://krebs.edublogs.org.

So, my advice is to get started and find your way. Maybe you’ll choose to join a blogging challenge and define your purpose earlier than I did. You are unique and your blogging journey will be too, so have fun with it and good luck!

Sheri Edwards recently wrote a post called “Five Tips for New Bloggers”
She also started a Diigo group you can join intended for folks to share information that will help bloggers. It’s called ebchallenge

Finally, here is a Voicethread started by Nancy Carroll to gather blogging advice from others:

Thanks, eltpics!

Denise Krebs5 Comments

Updated 26 January 2019

Wow, who would have thought that I would go back to 2011–to one of my first blog posts–and update it today, almost 8 years later?

Yesterday’s ‘assignment’ for the #Blogging28 Challenge was to update an old post, something I had not really tried previously. I looked at a few posts and couldn’t think which to do, so I skipped that day’s work.

Today, when going to leave a comment on Tiziana’s blog (today’s task), her post reminded me about the summer of 2011 when I met people like Sandy Millin, Chiew Pang, and Fiona Mauchline. I went back to this post.

If you read in the comments, you can see the quick answers I received to my questions. Chiew was right; it was easy to join in the #eltpics helpful and welcoming group.

I joined the #eltpics community for a few years, even when I wasn’t an ELT teacher, contributing and benefiting from the amazing pictures shared by others from around the world. Then I changed positions, got too busy, and lost touch. Now, I find myself in a position where I have learned so much more about English language teaching. I’m teaching 50 grade 5 students and one adult learner. I’m also studying for a TESOL certificate. I find I need people and their amazing expertise. Reading Tiziana’s post and reconnecting with this one brought up two new questions for me:

  1. Will the ELTPics account on Flickr be safely archived for future use? The way I think I understand it is the pictures that are shared with Creative Commons licenses–which these are–will not be deleted. I hope that’s true. There are 27,560 photos neatly categorized in albums good for teaching English learners.

  2. As I said, currently I am in a position in my life where I need to  join the #ELT community and make connections. I’m asking the same question I asked in the post below, can anyone help me get started? Whose blogs should I follow? Which hashtags are the best to use on Twitter? Thank you so much for your help!

 Previous Post starts here:
krebssmaller

All these images were taken by @mk_elt and shared on #eltpics.

The more I learn about being part of the 21st century digital world we live in, the more I firmly believe it is about creating, contributing, connecting, collaborating and curating. It is so fun to learn something new and to join with others who are doing and sharing these things, as well.

This morning I learned about a resource that dedicated ELT educators are contributing to the world! Thanks to others who were willing to join the conversation, those of us involved in the June, July and August Project (Twitter hashtag #JJAProject) learned about eltpics today. I had never heard of the eltpics Flickr Photostream for teachers until I saw these tweets come by this morning:

eltpics tweets

Thank you to Sandy and Chiew for telling us about the wonderful photos available for educational use from eltpics.

I created the image at the top of this post with photos in a set called “Things Shaped Like Letters” by eltpics shared on Flickr with a Creative Commons BY-NC-2.0 License. I used Big Huge Labs Mosaic Maker to put them all together to spell my name with these lovely organic images. Can you read it?

I’d like to learn how to contribute my own educational photos to the eltpics.

Can anyone help me get started?