Come join the Electronic Village Online (by Carla Arena)

I’m here to tell you about how a simple acronym – EVO – changed my life and was a true turning point in my professional development. When I joined the Electronic Village Online for the first time to take the online session Becoming a Webhead (BaW), I had the feeling it was special in the sense of learning something new, understanding more about this online world, and connecting to like-minded educators for a period of time. Never could I imagine that the Electronic Village Online would be way more than my initial expectation. The Electronic Village Online was a new beginning of renovated passion for my profession as an educator, of lifelong learning and the joy of being always connected. It was not about a definite time, it was about constant feeding and improvement in who I was as an educator and person.

Every year, we gather for five weeks to network, to connect, to have fun, to meet like-minded international educators, and to dare. It is that time when we gain new insights on how to make a difference in our educational contexts, when we give ourselves some time to test new possibilities in the classroom in an environment where every educator is invited to experiment with the many choices they are given in the many online sessions they can opt to join. Throughout the years, as a moderator and part of the EVO Coordinating Team, I’ve come to see many educators flourish and gain new insights, finding new meaning to their professional lives and spicing up their teaching practice with a myriad of classroom ideas, activities, resources they learned in the EVO Sessions. I’ve seen them bloom to become great local leaders and multipliers of the ideas they’ve gotten from the different Electronic Village Online sessions. Some have even become digital stars, well-known in the online circles of educators via Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Webconferencing, among others.

In 2012, the prospect of educational training for educators looks more exciting than ever with our traditional sessions and some brand new ones. EVO will run from January 9^th to February 12^th. Here’s the list of what you’ll be able to choose from:

• Becoming a Webhead
• Developing our Mentoring Skills
• Digital Storytelling for Young Learners
• Digital Tools with Purpose in the Classroom
• TESOL-Drama Workshop: Teaching and Assessing English Through Drama
• Teaching and Language Learning Through Gamification
• MachinEVO – Video Productions of Language Learning Conversations
• MOODLE for Teachers
• Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments
• PLEs and PLNs for Lifelong Learning
• Podcasting for the EFL/ESL Classroom
• Social Networking: Making it Work for You and Your Students
• Teaching English to Young Learners and Teens
• Tutoring with Web 2.0 Tools – Designing for Social Presence

To check the session abstracts and to register for them, access https://evosessions.pbworks.com/Call_for_Participation2012

EVO is an eye-opener for everyone interested in improving the way we teach, share, connect and interact. I do hope you have the chance to experience this professional development program that is free, welcoming of novice teachers and more experienced ones, and totally addictive! I started as a participant and have never stopped joining the sessions and moderating some as part of my own professional evolution and the need to belong to this group of educators who are pure inspiration and passion.

Join us  to see what I mean!

Note: This article by Carla Arena originally appeared as a guest post on Teaching Village, and is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution-Non Commercial, No Derivatives 3.0 License. If you wish to share it you must re-publish it “as is”, and retain any credits, acknowledgements, and hyperlinks within it.