MTALN has come and gone

The Montana Thai Active Learning Network 2009 group has come and gone. They are in Thailand now working on their action research projects. One of this year's highlights; I was flipping channels in the evening and there were our visitors being interviewed in the state capitol by some legislators. And this year, I got to go trick or treating with the Thai folks on Halloween, which really was a treat. More details at http://mtaln.blogspot.com/.

Bread and Soup Party - Photo from 300 Miles Away

My sister Amorette and her husband Steve started doing an annual bread and soup party here in Belgrade many years ago. Now they are back in my home town, and the party this year was at my mother's house. Yvonne Hauwiller knows my brother Bart's wife Shelley, so when Yvonne and Nun made the trip to Miles City, they joined my family for dinner. Bart brought me into the party for a few minutes using Skype. Not quite as good as being there, but I did get to see Nun and Yvonne and a lot of familiar faces from home.

MEA/MFT

Today we all went to the Montana Education Association / Montana Federation of Teachers convention in Belgrade. This was handy for me, since I live in Belgrade. I gave a presentation on Web 2.0. For handouts, I created a tag on my del.icio.us page, MEA-MFThandouts, and put that tag on all the information I wanted to distribute to the class. My handout was a single sheet of paper with that address, del.icio.us/willfree/MEA-MFThandouts. This solved the problems of paper waste, not knowing how many people would be attending and how many copies to make up, and copyright, since I did not give out copies, just a link to links to the content. The folks who got the handout only have to type in one address to get access to everything. And I can even add content to the handouts after the presentation is over, which I will actually do.

After the presentation, I sat at the Department of Education booth on the show floor. Nun, Yvonne Hauwiller and Jioanna Carjuzaa came by, but I did not get to see any of the other Thai folks today. Next week, I will be in Anaheim, California for a conference, so I will not get to see you all again. But I will try to stay in contact through this group.

Party at Brody's

OK. Looking at this video, I think I may have had a little too much wine. I should always remember to take the pictures before I pour a drink. (In fact, I usually do.)



The important thing is that everybody had a good time. And I wish I could post the taste of the excellent Thai food we got to enjoy.

Blogs are up

We have posted our blogs. You can link to them from our group's Learning Journal page. This was really the main goal, since it allows everyone to post their thoughts on the day's learning.

We did have some technical problems in the process, particularly getting everyone into the Google Group so they could take part in the discussions. Not everyone had an e-mail account that we could access here in the US. This meant creating an e-mail account, with userID and password, and then using that account to create a Google Groups account, since Google Groups wants to send a verifying e-mail to each group member. A reasonable system, but with a room full of people, it can mean a lot of userIDs and passwords. A single letter wrong somewhere, and things do not work. I think the next time we do this, we will try to work with the participants well in advance by e-mail, getting all the accounts set up before anyone is here on the ground.

MTALN

Dr. Michael Brody and I are creating MTALN the Montana State University Thai Active Learning Network. This network, organized around a Google group and Blogger blogs, will be used to record and enhance interactions between educators in the Department of Education at Montana State University, and educators from various teacher training institutions in Thailand. We have a Thai educator with us right now, and a group from Thailand will be arriving on the MSU campus October 14 for a two week visit. This is the second year for this program. It is our hope that these Internet links will allow each year's participants to stay in contact with us and with each other.