CAMBRIDGE: Arrival and Day 1

Here I am, attending a refresher course aimed at practising teachers of English at Bell Teacher Campus in Cambridge based at Homerton College and only a 30-minute walk into the city centre!

This was the first picture I took on Sunday as soon as we arrived: beautiful buildings in secluded wooded grounds and incredible lawns with squirrels. Absolutely lovely!!!

After the first impact, our group was guided into our single en-suite bedrooms. Here is another picture, this time, of my own room: “student residential accommodation, not hotel accommodation” as Jim Scrivener so well put it.

At 7pm all participants gathered for a warm welcome reception at a bar called Nusha and it included drinks, cold buffet supper, music and chatting. It was really nice for a first contact with other participants, teachers like ourselves, who had just arrived from 16 different countries. Wow! Amazing, isn’t it? 16 different nationalities from faraway places such as Japan at Bell Teacher Campus.

Monday was our first course day and it was fantastic: breakfast at around 8 am in a gorgeous Harry Potter-style dining hall, and classes from 9am to 12.30 and then from 2pm up to 3.30. After that, off to the city centre to be back at 6pm for dinner (served from 5.30 to 7pm) also because there was a general meeting at 7.30. Hard work, folks, yes, but loads of fun and many opportunities to socialize.

                A picture of my first dinner here in Cambridge at the campus - Yummy!


Many, many thanks to PROALV and to our APPI colleagues, mainly to Manuela, who, in different ways, have made all this possible.

PINTEREST for visual bookmarking

blog.pinterest.com

I'm very curious about technology tools, especially those that are or can be used for educational and teaching purposes.
I had already read something on Pinterest and though willing to try it out, I had had no time to explore it till yesterday. And you know what? It's addictive: you start pinning, looking for other pins, boards... and it never stops!
Anyway, what's this craze about Pinterest? What is it? It's an online social pinboard service that allows us to "pin" images, videos, text onto the virtual bulletin boards we create. We can thus visually bookmark what we find interesting, useful, whatever, and even attach notes and comments (just like in a blog). But how do we do that?
Until a couple of days ago, one needed an invitation to join, but now you just need to register; registration is free and the first thing to do is to create a board or boards and what's really great is that we can create as many as we want to and whenever we wish. Once a board is created, we can start pinning by using the "Add a Pin" or "Upload a Pin" options: to "Add a Pin" from online, you will need the URL of the image or video. It's intuitive and just like other social networking sites, we can follow other people the same way they can follow us; we can also invite other users to contribute to a board. If we find pins we particularly like, we can simply click "like" or repin them to one of our boards.
I am a visual learner and therefore find Pinterest awesome due to the visually appealing content display on it. If you, like me, have more and more problems keeping track and organising the overwhelming amount of stuff we find and bookmark, then Pinterest might also be good for you .
I've just started (please check the icon on the right column of the blog) but am quite excited to add more and more pins and share them.As soon as I have more time after packing, doing housework and enjoying some quality time with my children, I'll keep on pinning.

Hope to meet you around  here, here and definitely here.
Happy Holidays and, if that's the case, Happy Pinning!!!

The Ultimate Guide To Pinterest from Michael Litman

Update

We do have now a SILVER MEDAL on K2, 1000 meters!
Thanks to the two Portuguese heroes.