Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2012 Newsletter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------In order to describe my experience with TED, I
would like to go back to the first day I saw the
announcement to join TED on the eTwinning
desktop. Having always been a big follower of
online seminars and learning events and always
eager to have new experiences, the announcement
grabbed my interest. The title of the course was too
promising and I could not stop myself from
applying.
Before I get to the details of my experience with
the course, I feel I should start with an overview of
what exactly TED is. The Transatlantic Educators
Dialogue (TED) is a Moodle-based course,
sponsored by the European Union Center and the
College of Education at the University of Illinois at
Urbana Champaign. The first TED course took place
in 2010, which means that participants this year
have attended the third Transatlantic Educators
Dialogue. The 2012 TED started on February 12th
and lasted until April 29th. We participated in 12
online sessions using Elluminate Live! for one and a
half hour each, every Sunday. We were also able to
join forum discussions and share educational
resources in the Moodle platform. 80 educators in
total from the US and the EU, divided into two
groups, took part in TED. The leader and
coordinator of the course was Lucinda Morgan, a
PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign, who also works in the office of
International Programs in the College of Education
at Illinois.
TED was a vastly different online course from the
ones I had attended so far. Whereas most courses I
have been a part of tend to closely follow the
typical format of a program, in TED there were no
specific tasks to be completed, no studying, at least
in the traditional sense of the term, and no marking
or any other kind of evaluation. The course was
more like a series of online interactions among
teachers from Europe and the US on various
educational topics. All the participants took an
active role in these online discussions, sharing
information about themselves and their schools
along with their countrie