At the German moodle conference I had the good fortune to meet up again with Stephan Rinke, Volkshochschule Essen. I met Stephan at my first moodle conference at the University of Duisburg last year and we shared contact details and links but we had both been so busy we had not found the time to solidify or contact very much. This time we have decided to change all that and hook up both virtually and f2f. We thought it would be good to work together more closely and share our knowledge more actively. I am really looking forward to this because Stephan is such a great contributor and knows so much about deploying web 2.0 in English teaching. I am sure we have a lot to learn from each other.
Stephan writes a few great blogs on a variety of topics associated with web 2.0, blended learning, moodle and life in general. The blogs have lots of engaging interactive features and tools to try out. Stephan is always busy contributing all kinds of useful web-based materials for his subscribers and his del.icio.us tags are a goldmine. I have already linked to his wonderful tutorial on how google docs works in all of the moodles that I run and plan to link much more as soon as I get a chance.
There is the Web 2.0 in foreign language teaching blog:
http://web20inflt.blogspot.com/
The German version:
http://web20infsu.blogspot.com/
and the more personal blog:
http://stephanrinke.blogspot.com/
I highly recommend subscribing to one of these if you are interested in teaching English, learning English, hybrid learning, blended learning, using web 2.0 in the classroom – or Stephan Rinke, of course!
Like me, Stephan is also involved in teacher training. He is currently conducting a comprehensive teacher training program designed to train 14 professional educators, specialized in a variety of subjects, on how to use moodle as a platform for their courses. The courses these educators design will be launched in moodle at the VHS Essen in 2009.
If that were not enough, apart from being responible for organising and overseeing language courses in Croat, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish and English (of ocurse) Stephan is also looking after a lot of the moodle side of “second chance” education at the Volkshochschule, the so-called ischool project. He also uses moodle as a communication platform for international projects like the European "Manging diversity through intercultural dialogue" project (Grundtvig ) and for collaborative learning at the University of Bochum and the VHS Essen. Stephan has developed a great deal of practical expertise on using web 2.0 in foreign language teaching and is currently working on a blended learning pilot project for XPERT-Business module “Finanzwirtschaft”
More on Stephan Rinke later….