Saturday 14 March 2009

What is "Ask Auntie Web"?

At MELTA, the Munich English Language Teachers’ Association, there are many teachers who are quite frustrated with new media technology. There it is, you can see it, you can smell it, you can taste it, but you just can’t quite get your hands on it. There are techie blogs out there, sure, Nik Peachey (http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com) is one of the best, but they’re “so high-igh-igh above me”, and it makes a teacher feel awfully old, doesn’t it, to have to trawl through the language and only understand maybe half of it. Well, it's a shame when good teachers with deep knowledge feel like idiots. That is one of the things that we really need to change. Lucy Mellersh built this blog for MELTA about a year ago to go with the tech advice column, Ask Auntie Web, in the MELTA Newsletter. But then MELTA kept it under wraps because we wanted to promote the MELTA Forum (http://www.melta.de/meltaboard/index.php). That forum is a communication platform for MELTA members. Yet we're a big community of teachers out here on the web, with great big questions and a great big pool of knowledge. So here goes a relaunch:

Let’s build Ask Auntie Web into the blog it could be. Let's make it a place to share knowledge. As you know, the most productive part of learning is asking the right questions. What have you always wanted to be able to do in teaching? What applications would you need to make your classes simply brilliant? What tech tricks have you seen somewhere that you'd really like to be able do yourself? Ask Auntie Web, and we can start a discussion.


Photo: George Sled, Panoramio

How it works: You can post comments under each blogpost. Or you can become an author on this blog, and join the writing team. Just send an email to "info (at) melta (dot) de" (this strange spelling is to avoid spam, so translate it to a normal email address). You can also follow the Auntie Web conversation on twitter. You haven't discovered twitter yet? Then read the first blogpost, below.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great! I will read this regualry and hopefully feel digitally inspired to write something in the near future. The last few months have been a digital learning curve for me as I'm using 'Moodle' for the first time. My phd topic is likely to involve digital literacy and online learning platforms so I'm keen to get using. Happy bloging.

Anonymous said...

Brilliant!

I think the average age of MELTA members is probably 45-55, so a blog about using technology in the classroom is very useful.

Thank you Auntie Web.

Anne Hodgson said...

Welcome, Sarah & John, I think we'll have fun and get a productive, collaborative thing going! Thanks very much for posting :)

Anonymous said...

I think this is a fabulous idea. I'll definitely be coming back. I love technology and sharing ideas on how to use it in teaching. Good luck with this project Anne. All the best.

By the way I found the blog via your Tweet!