You’re invited to the Electronic Village Online Session on Flipped Learning!

Every year, TESOL* educators around the world gather online for a period of 5 weeks with the intention of getting the best professional development, for free! This year, we, the flipped learning team, want to invite you to participate in our session, and why not in some of the other sessions offered. 

But what is EVO?

As stated in the EVO informative wiki, “The Electronic Village Online was first conceived as a project of TESOL’s Computer Assisted Language Learning Interest Section (CALL-IS)”, and it has promoted hands-on workshops sessions given by TESOL experts around the globe since 2000. EVO sessions are free for all participants and feature a variety of topics for teachers who want to enhance their language classrooms with the use of technology.

On January 7^th, 2017, the following EVO sessions will start:

• ·         Classroom Based Research for Professional Development
• ·         Design Thinking
• ·         Developing Intercultural Competence Through the Use of Online Resources
• ·         DIY Online Assessment
• ·         EVO Minecraft MOOC 2017
• ·         EVO ViLLAGE 2017
• ·         Experiential Learning
• ·         Flipped Learning
• ·         ICT4ELT2017
• ·         Moodle 4 Teachers
• ·         Non-native English Speakers in TESOL
• ·         QR Codes in Action
• ·         Teaching Listening: Principles, Techniques, and Technologies
• ·         Teaching Pronunciation Differently
• ·         Techno-CLIL
• ·         TEFL2YL

Volunteer moderators from all around the world offer high quality sessions and tons of learning to people enrolled. All of the offered sessions use a variety of platforms for communication with participants and for storing readings, videos and other resources and for holding synchronous sessions and adding the extra human component to the sessions! Sites like Schoology, Moodle, ANVILL and Blackboard are used by different sessions. Also, social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus offer a great array of communication opportunities between moderators and participants. And last but not least, synchronous communication also happens in some of the sessions via Zoom, Blackboard Collaborate, WIZIQ, etc. So, as you can see, by joining an EVO session, you’d be adding yourself to a global discussion around educational issues of today in the teaching and learning of languages.

Flipped Learning EVO session 2017

The flipped learning EVO session has run for 3 years. It was started by Helaine W. Marshall from Long Island University (current member of the FLN board), John Graney from California, Jeff Magoto from the University of Oregon, Khalid Fheti from Morocco and Kevin Coleman from Kansas but located in Colombia. Then, in 2015, Carolina R. Buitrago from Colombia joined the moderating team and in 2017, Martha Ramírez also from Colombia, has. Martha and I have been active contributors of the FLN blog and we plan to continue being so this year. Lots of learning opportunities and amazing experiences with flipped learning in our country..

This year in our session, we plan to invite teachers to explore the contents of our session through the lens of the four pillars of flipped learning proposed by the FLN (2014). We will invite participants to lesson plan their own flipped learning class considering their context and limitations, we will also peer-review lesson plans to build knowledge together. We will explore in-class flip or in-flip as an alternative when technology is not available in students’ homes. And we will use our Google Plus space to discuss some pressing questions for EFL/ESL and TESOL, in general.

We will also have weekly synchronous sessions to discuss the week’s topics and highlights and we plan to have some amazing guest speakers this year. We have already gotten confirmation from Jon Bergmann, flipped learning pioneer, for January 22. We also plan to  have Helaine Marshall (member of the FLN board) and Robyn Brinks-Lockwood (Stanford professor and author of Flip it! Strategiesfor the ESL classroom  and we are hoping to have Ken Bauer (President of the FLN) again this year.

It would be a great honor for us, the flipped learning session team to count on you for our session. If you want to join, please click here before January 8^th (Anyway, late enrollment is not a problem!). We look forward to having you there!

And we thank the Flipped Learning Network for supporting us and allowing us to share this information with all of you, the flipped learning community!

*Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages 

EVO changed my professional life

Have you ever blindly followed a recommendation someone made? Last year, Christine Bauer-Ramazani (who I like to call my tech angel) recommended EVO. EVO stands for Electronic Village Online, a professional development opportunity launched by the CALL interest section of TESOL International. I was surprised to hear of a group of altruistic ELT professionals who would just share knowledge for the sake of doing so. I had to enroll! Even though there were like 15 sessions, they offered a particularly interesting one in Flipped Learning. I decided to take that one because of my growing interest in the subject. This far, enrolling in that course has been one of the best decisions I've made in my career.
I enrolled and realized there were 237+ participants from all around the globe. The moderators were unknown to me at the time, but then I realized they were all very experienced professionals in the field of Educational Technology and English Language Teaching.  I enjoyed every minute of the session, participated in the weekly webcast, posted my comments in the weekly forum discussions, did my assignments thoroughly. In general terms, I enjoyed the course very much. During week 5 of the course, they had a guest speaker, Robyn Brinks Lockwood, the author of Flip it! Strategies for the ESL classroom. She was amazing and as soon as the session finished, I went to amazon.com and bought the book! It's a must-read for anybody interested in Flipped Learning.
One of the best parts of it was that I was going to the TESOL conference in Toronto last year, so I knew I would be able to meet the people in the course face to face. I was really excited! After the course I was definitely convinced that flipped learning was going to be my point of focus from then on.
Then, I went to Toronto and met them all! Helaine Marshall, John Graney, Robyn Brinks Lockwood and what's more important I realized there are a lot of people for whom flipped learning was as important as it is for me. They made me feel as part of something big!
After the conference, I kept in touch with them all and joined the CALL listserv. I have been receiving information about events, readings, webcasts, etc. From them since the moment I joined.
I also met Kevin Coleman, another flipped learning session moderator in our own TESOL Colombia. I invited him to come and do a presentation on FL, he came down to Bogotá and gave a killer presentation interesting more and more people in the subject.
Then, in October, Kevin invited me to become a moderator for the Flipped Learning EVO session this year. ME! I couldn't believe him! But there I was, one more stepping stone towards my "burning desire" (as Napoleon Hill would call it)...oh, and that's a secret for now 
I then took the Moderator Training with Nina Liakos, Vance Stevens, Elizabeth (I don't remember her last name) and a lot of very experienced EVO moderators. I learned so much. And now, I'm co-moderating the session with an awesome team (Jeff, Kevin, Khalid and John: The rolling stones of flipping) a combination of experience, energy, patience and perseverance. What an awesome team!!! We have over 300 participants and so far the experience has been fantastic !
EVO has shown me a couple of great things:
1. There are "intense" professionals out there who are willing to go the extra mile to make education happen.
2. There is room for my ideas! Somewhere around the globe there are people who care about nd connect with my thinking and that's awesome!
3. We all have something to share! And we are all called to contribute to the improvement of ELT, EFL, and education in general the world over.
4. It's okay to be opinionated! You just need to find a platform to share your opinions with people who care.
5. There are no limitations to learning!
EVO has changed my professional life because it has become the platform I can use to share and learn!
What are you waiting for? Join us at http://evosessions.pbworks.com
Let EVO change you!
Oh and I will be forever grateful to Christine-Bauer Ramazani for introducing me to technology back in 2009! 