Moving icons

Today one of my students showed me how to embed free moving pictures in my blog:



(Visit his blog to see how to take this to an extreme.)

The Learning Goes On...

This year, unlike last year, I made it to the BaW graduation party. (Last year, I went Greek dancing the night before and overslept!) Things were not totally smooth, however--I tried to click on something in Tere's wonderful graduation page and my old overloaded computer could not handle it. It crashed and I got kicked out of Alado. What was worse, when I tried to reenter, I couldn't because the room was full! I sat here, chatting with Leanne in YM and trying to master my disappointment. Eventually, somebody left and I was able to reenter the room. I didn't miss too much and of course, everything was being recorded so I can listen later. Anyway, it was lovely. I had a great time. It's a warm, cozy feeling knowing I was interacting with friends all over the world!

When I finally looked up from my screen, I saw that it is snowing--big, beautiful fat flakes already covering the ground!

I will take a short screenbreak and then attend the EVO wrapup session at Worldbridges and then, at 1:00, the B4B wrapup party. What a day!

The Final 48 Hours

It's hard to believe that EVO 2007 is coming to an end. Doing the Week 4 threads for BaW completely derailed me. I essentially dropped out of Blogging for Beginners after Week 3 and just lurked in BaW. As a result, I didn't get to explore the voice tools of Week 4. I attended Isabel Perez' talk on creating activities and exercises during week 5, but I was working on the threads during her presentation, so I couldn't really focus on it. I barely dipped into the readings and gave up trying to post on the Forum. As I write this, my gmail inbox is crammed full of unread YG digests--hundreds of messages. I knew I was beaten when I couldn't decide if I should keep trying to catch up from behind or just try to work backwards! What I ended up doing was nothing: just watching the digests accumulate, occasionally glancing through the most recent one.

So, I am disappointed not to have done more; but I've still enjoyed it and must admit I've achieved some of the goals I had set for myself. I've learned quite a lot about wikis and have been using two in my UMEI005 class; I've gotten lots of ideas and new tools to explore; and I've kept up with old friends and made new ones. Maybe I set the bar too high. I thought that because I had done BaW once, I would be able to co-moderate a week, and do the threads for a week, and take Blogging for Beginners on the side, and still do everything that I didn't have time to do last year (which amounted to a good half of the total). Duh! Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that I couldn't do all that (and teach 005 and help my daughter with her homework and spend some time with my husband...)

But there is still lots to learn, and lots of fun to be had. In just a few short weeks, I will be flying to Seattle to the TESOL Convention, where I will meet many of my webhead friends f2f! Now that is something to look forward to!

Drowning in EVO

I just registered for Gliffy, a web-based application that enables users to create diagrams, flowcharts, etc. But when I tried to add my little diagram about nouns here, nothing showed up! :-( Then I tried to publish anyway even though the preview showed nothing. I got an error message. I told Blogger not to show the error message and published again. Bingo! I got an absolutely HUGE page with a tiny little diagram in it. So I went back to Gliffy and copied the code for a smaller image: http://www.gliffy.com/pubdoc/1152883/S.jpg Unfortunately, it doesn't show up in the blog! Grrrr.

I still haven't figured out how to deal with the fact that both count and noncount nouns can be definite or indefinite. Maybe I have to write those twice.

This has been my week to co-moderate BaW. Just keeping up with the emails on the YG has been very difficult to do. It didn't help that I had to be out three evenings (one teaching, two high school registration meetings) and Saturday morning (teaching). I actually felt as if I got less done--never got around to the readings, didn't post on the Forum--than in previous weeks. I had hoped to explore podcasting a little bit but I never did any experimenting at all. Maybe when EVO is over I will see if Carla will help me get started with that, since she has moved to Key West and isn't teaching for the moment.

Despite my frustration at not getting much done, I am enjoying all the new people in BaW07 and B4B (although I get confused about who is taking what--quite a few are taking both, as I am) and have enjoyed text and voice chats with Monica, Beyza, Marjan and several other people.