A Growth Experience that I will Remember!

   Earlier this year, I've set two goals for 2014. One of them was to give a presentation at a local conference. For over one year, I kept procrastinating this moment, but reflection lead me to pack my bags and jump for the adventure when I received this mail.

I've attended  web conferences , this time was different because I'll be the presenter! I've started working on my presentation, doing some research, getting in touch with other presenters, and getting trained on how to use the Blackboard collaborate platform, that  hosted all the conferences of the #RSCON5. The event took place 11th- 13th July, 2014 and featured 50+ presentations, 11 keynote speakers, 3 panel discussions, and a tech/app swapalooza.
   A group of skilled volunteers working day and night to make this global event a success-and it was! They were working on facebook, twitter, google+, and Ning,  before, during and after the event. Assuming different roles, most of the volunteers were also presenters at the conference, which made the task even tougher for them. The point is that they are volunteers, presenters, investing their time and comfort to make of this event a success, to inspire educators, to spread a culture sharing knowledge, spread a culture of tolerence, openness, hard work and a supportive community of educators worldwide. Through making connections with other educators and sharing ideas we make our teaching practice a better one for the benefit of our learners, and teachers can expand their PLN via various social media and platforms.

Presenters get the necessary support to promote their sessions through flyers, posters and badges to post to different social media. Here are mine

Attendees get badges from presenters for being to their sessions, they also get certificates of attendance.
Many who were to my session received this badge:

Recordings are available to view. Not only those of the RSCON5, but also those the previous ones. That makes of it a library of resources, ideas, tips at one's reach.

screen capture of my session info

There were 30 people to my session, people ready to be inspired from different parts of the world. Marijana Smolčec a felow teacher from Croatia, Marcià Lima from Brazil, Ayat Tawel from Egypt, Peggy George from the States, Najoua, Nadia, Kamel from Tunisia, Cécile from France... and many others... thank you for being to my session and being ready to share my experience. I received a lot of positive feedback, and the discussion was rich. You can view the session by following the link of the recordings in the paragraph above. 

I was really wowed by the presentation of Amy Burvall  RemixED: The Power of Remix, Mushup, and Recontextualization in the classroom. I wouldn't tell you more about it just to make you curious to view her session.

...It took me some courage to decide and I said YES, just as Chuck Sandy said ' I had no idea what I was doing. I mean I learned how by doing it'. I still have a lot to learn, this one was a growth experience that I will remember!

Change ... And the Journey Begins

   

       

    I'm proud to be one of the 200 quarter finalist educators, selected from a total of 2000 applicants to integrate the TAT, The Tech Age Teachers program. This Project is the first of its kind in the MENA region that IREX , in partnership with the Dream Blue Foundation , initiated ''to bring the successful Tech Age Teachers model to Tunisia'' (quoted from  News article delivered January 28, 2014 on the IREX site).

                                     

what the press in Tunisia says about the project

This stage of the program will enable half of the  selected number of  participants to access the semi-finals by August 29th, 2014, after a total training of 8 hours/week over 5 weeks, at the end of which we will, hopefully, get to the next stage of the program. But how we get to the next stage is the question.

         

 

            Well,   the process was clearly stated for transparency and equity for all the participants... During the first stage of the training we will be evaluated according to our keyboarding scores. Keyboarding is a skill that many teachers do not give importance to. At the beginning of the 1st stage participants will evaluate their keyboarding speed and work to make it better, and by the end of the training they will be able to measure their progress via a software that enables users to measure keyboarding speed scores.  Attendance, and punctuality is another requirement to get to the next stage. Presence is checked via a software, you log in and you are saved, you are absent and you lose 2 points of the session attendance score. But what if you come late? As the saying goes "Time is money", in the program, time is money. Being late from 1 to 5 minutes costs you 1 dinar, and you keep paying one dinar for each 5 minutes of delay. That is one of the rules to respect... Let's get back to the criteria of evaluation, another one is doing homework assignments and sending them to the server in due time, adds to participants 2 points to their score. More important is the motivation,to make a difference in all what you do you need to be motivated, that's why it's among the evaluation grid, TAT participants/ finalists need to inspire their students and other educators and lead the march towards  change.

I'll post more about the coming training sessions soon, stay tuned!