Well, I decided to take the plunge and shift my blog over from the fantastic Blogger to Wordpress.
Blogger has been a great home for the last two years for the various mini-blogs and out-of-class projects I’ve been doing with my students. I now feel like I have outgrown Blogger for a number of reasons, even though it is a great service. These are a few of the reasons I decided to leave Blogger in the end:
- Now that DigitaLang is getting more teacher-training work, I wanted a more professional looking website that integrated my blog seamlessly with the other content I wanted to have online (a contact form, a summary of the work we do etc.)
- Wordpress is is just as good at being a content management system as it is a blog. Wordpress now manages my whole website. I can add or delete pages and change the content from any internet connected computer. Before I had to use ftp and other complicated tools.
- I wanted to have more flexibility with my blog so that I could be as creative as I wanted and not have to work within the limits of Blogger. For example, I am planning to create a space where I’ll upload technology-based language lesson plans in the new blog. I probably could have done this with Blogger, but it would have been complicated and I doubt if it would have worked smoothly.
- Blogger has lots of clever little add-ons (widgets) that do clever things and make your blog look more interesting. Wordpress has more and they’re open source too!
All in all, I’m really pleased with how the new blog is shaping up. There is still a lot of work to do yet, there have been several technical hiccups, but I’ll leave that for another post 
All the best,
Seth.
Actually he’s not, but Mike Mara, a Spanish teacher from Dublin Jerome High school is, and he’s AWESOME!
I thought I’d seen cool ways to teach a language but this guy is just way out there. If you can make your students laugh (like surely Mike’s did) when they are learning a language, well you’re doing something right.
Mike has made a couple of videos, based on Justin Timberlake pop songs, to remind his high school Spanish students how to conjugate present tense verbs. The thing is they are so funny! Every time I watch them I can’t help giggling like an idiot! My favourite one is the “Conjugation’s Back,” which you can watch below.
Thanks to Joe Dale’s Blog for putting me onto this one 
One of the reasons I posted so little (be honest Seth, you posted nothing) between January and April this year, is all the hard work that has been going on behind the scenes of the “Click*” project I’m involved in. Click* is the (newly chosen) name for a comprehensive teacher-training course, funded by the European Community’s Leonardo programme.
Together with a group of truly fabulous colleagues from various institutions around Europe including WSL Czestochowa, The Open University U.K. and EAQUALS all led by Dresden Technical University we have been beavering away to produce what I’m pretty sure is going to be a really high-quality course.
We have blended our different experiences and expertises together to produce a wide ranging set of course modules from the academic theory of how to teach languages online, through simple to follow, expertly written guides of how and why to use WebQuests, all the way to basic guides on blogging, podcasting wikis etc.
I’m really confident that the materials are of such high quality that the project will be a great success. If the demand for the courses is anything to go by (we were more than three times over-subscribed for our first round of piloting) I’m sure the project will go brilliantly!
