Pre-conference Workshops

As usual I didn't have time to write a posting during EuroCALL this year, I was so involved in attending all of the interesting sessions and taking part in the interesting cultural activities - one of which was the Irish Céilì dancing we did on Friday night. The band, Craobh Rua, did a great job of leading a bunch of neophytes through the various Cèilì moves - and didn't even laugh too much as we crashed into each other. What fun!

I wanted to express my thanks to Peppi Taalas and Lesliey Shield for preparing and conducting the pre-conference workshop on the Virtual Strand. We had lots of fun while getting a hands-on experience with the Conference Blog and chatting with Blogger and Yaplet. I was impressed by their dedication to running the Virtual Strand.

I was sitting next to Peppi while she chatted with a virtual participant during Panel Discussion. He was able to have a question of his answered by members of the panel through with Peppi's intervention. Synchronicity!

Sarah Guth and Lisa Griggio prepared and presented an excellent pre-conference workshop on Using Social Software for Language Learning - Web 2.0 tools available online. Participants learned about wikis, blogs, podcasts, chats, social bookmarks, slidecasts and more! Great handouts were also available to further stimulate participants on their return home. Participants were able to collaborate in teams to practice using these tools and come up with lesson plans they could use on the job. These ideas were all posted in the pbwiki Web2Workshops. Why not take a look and share your ideas too!