One of the things which kept me busy in February was the upgrading and re-design of the Greenland White-fronted Goose website. The client, my husband, wanted a dark blue background with light text. Even though I used a colour wheel to check the accessibility of the colour combination other people who have seen the re-vamped version of the website are complaining that it is unreadable. What to do? Do they just have traditional expectations of black print on white background or is this a genuine problem? Unfortunately for me changing the colour scheme is a major job as there is no template facility in the system I use so I need to be certain that changing the colour scheme yet again would be worthwhile.

The main content changes have been a major updating of the Great Britain section which really means a major update of the Scottish information since the geese occur mostly in Scotland within Great Britain during the winter.

Just back from a lightning tour to Oslo which was looking as beautiful as ever where I gave a talk at the mini-symposium How to use Web 2.0 tools in distance and blended teaching. There is still a great deal of scepticism about using any sort of ICT in the learning environment. It is right to demand evidence that it is beneficial but on the other hand whether or not it is beneficial ICT is used in the wider world which we are supposed to be preparing our students for and that alone should be reason enough to demonstrate responsible use of such tools.

In my talk which was streamed live through the Internet along with all the others and which I believe will be available in a video archive shortly, I described how I have used various tools in my English teaching over the last few years and took the opportunity to introduce the VITAE project as our bid to attempt to transfer integration of ICT in learning not only through demonstration of tools but also by sharing with colleagues, mentoring colleagues and becoming a master learner.

I have just taken delivery of a book called 'In Command - Kids and Teens Build and manage their own information spaces - and ... learn to manage themselves in those spaces' by  Robin T Williams and David V Loertscher. The title is almost longer than the book itself which is rather thin at 100 pages and badly printed with occasional lines on every page which are unaccountably paler than the rest as well as a few typos. However this is the first publication I am aware of which promotes the idea of students creating their own personal learning spaces online and gives practical advice both to the students themselves and their teachers on how to do this.

There is an accompanying blog at http://incommand.wordpress.com and a wiki at http://incommand.pbwiki.com/ but both are rather empty as yet. This publication is timely as the VITAE project is in the process of developing the train the trainers course which we aim to pilot within the next year or so. One major consideration of the course is the extent to which you introduce participants to individual Web 2.0 tools and make them aware of the educational potential of each or whether it would be better to go the whole hog and talk about students developing their own personal learning environments from the start. The 'In Command' advice rests on the creation of these personal learning environments and identifies three types of spaces, the personal work space, group work space for collaborative projects and 'outer space' which is the wider Internet.

One of my objectives while on Achill in February was to follow the experiences of two teachers new to the Achill experience. The result is in the latest show for Absolutely Intercultural and fills most of the podcast. I deliberately asked two teachers who were new to the Achill project and it was interesting to follow their progress during the intensive week on the Island. Both teachers reported initial enthusiasm but by mid-week experiences diverged. The one group hit a mid-week low with some students motivated while others seemed to let things happen. In the second group the enthusiasm continued unabated and was in a way an obstacle to progress as everyone wanted to have their say. But by the time we got to the end of the week and the students had given their presentations both teachers were very proud of their students' achievements. The work done by the students was based on discussions within the group as well as contact with the Achill Islanders themselves. They also experienced for themselves aspects of the Irish culture with inevitable trips to the pub where Dainora, our Lithuanian teacher could show off her prowess on the violin in harmony with local musicians and not so inevitable invitations to some of the Islanders' houses.

One group worked on the topic of migration, both what it is like to be an Irish migrant and what it is like to be a migrant in Ireland. The second group was exploring the meaning of cultural artefacts and their process of discovery included revelations about the students' own cultures as well as discoveries about Irish culture. The Achill experience usually marks participants at a deep level and I think that this trip was no exception.

The podcast ends with an excerpt of singing by Kate O'Malley who works in the Achill Cliff House Hotel where we had our dinners each evening. She sang 'The Island' a haunting song first popularised by Paul Brady.

As part of the EU VITAE project developing a train the trainers course for integrating ICT in teaching we have been looking not only at content and teaching approaches but also support tools. The idea is that the graduates of our course become mentors for their colleagues. I came across a very promising competence assessment and professional development tool at http://www.adultedonline.org/index.cfm (after reading this post from Christopher Sessums) which I think could be a very useful support tool for the course we are developing. This free tool is a self assessment tool to help teachers in adult education (our target group) assesss how far they have integrated ICT into their normal everyday practice. Not only that but it then uses the results to suggest appropriate professional development activities. Obviously it would be better for a European project such as VITAE to be able to have access to such tools in the language of the teachers. But another obvious extension would be for the tool to suggest that the person doing the self-assessment should be a mentor to their colleagues in those areas where the assessment shows they have a lot of expertise. This is especially relevant because two of the standard professional activities suggested by the tool are to find a 'tech buddy' or a mentor. That would therefore fit very well with the approach that this tool seems to be based on anyway.

I never realised it until the last couple of weeks but I love jargon. Not for the sake of it but because it gives you defined structures within which to work when everybody agrees on what things are called. I have just been helping a colleague with the finalisation of a project application to be sent to the British European National Agency, ECOTEC, and during the discussions with the British promoter and the various other international partners it has become obvious that we do not know what we are talking about. The words partner, supporting partner, silent partner, co-financing, matching funding have all caused difficulty when we finally realised that we were using different words to describe the same thing. In the case of partners and sub-contractors definitions have serious implications for funding and we therefore needed to be clear about what we meant when we used the different terms. It has made the process of putting together the application much more time-consuming than it need have been. It makes me wonder why we ran into such problems because the EU abounds with multi-lingual glossaries of agreed terms exactly because of the potential problems of misunderstandings. A particular bugbear of mine is the use of the word municipality to descibe what I would refer to as the local council or local government. But I have learned that you have to go with the flow in these cases otherwise you waste a lot of time explaining exactly what you mean.

Serendipity! Don't you just love it? As we gear up to talk about the learning outcomes of our VITAE train the trainer course in our next online project meeting along comes this award-winning film from my local university, Aarhus which helps to formulate learning outcomes much more clearly. The idea of learning outcomes is based upon John Biggs' theories of learning and learning styles.

When I was a student there was no question of spending time abroad as part of my studies or doing an internship unless you were doing modern languages which I was not. Even before university I had thought about and investigated the possibility of spending a term abroad while still at school but it never came to anything as I was rather a lone voice. Now in Europe, the idea of spending some time abroad either for study or work placement is being pushed more and more as an essential part of education in an increasingly globalised world. As well as semesters abroad or internships there are also international intensive study projects such as the Borrowed Identities one I participated in last February and which formed the topic of the last Absolutely Intercultural podcast. There I sought the impressions of the teachers and in the latest show Laurence Borgmann sought the views of the students. For them it seemed that language was not an issue but that working in a team was the most important skill to acquire. The show also gives advice to students hoping to receive Erasmus scholarships to support their stints abroad. It's not just a question of rewarding those with the highest grades. Awarding committees look at the whole person and in particular their motivation to spend time abroad. Laurence also talked to a German student who decided to go abroad himself after helping his girlfriend arrange her study/internship in China. What effect this has on the relationship is also explored in the show.

The educational press in Denmark is very limited. There is no equivalent of the TES in the UK and there are no newspapers with educational bents like the Guardian and to a lesser extent the Independent. So what do you do when you have a course to offer Danish teachers? The trade unions are very important in almost all aspects of Danish life and the teachers' unions publish relevant magazines so these were the first port of call when we were planning our marketing for the ICT integration and mentoring course inspired by the VITAE project. But it occurred to us that a course promoting (amongst others) the use of Web 2.0 tools should use Web 2.0 in its marketing too. And since a colleague had used Google Adwords successfully to rent out her flat in Berlin, we decided to give it a go. This is a whole new world for us, first of all in identifying the relevant key words. Should we use 'Web 2.0' for a target group wanting to learn more about it? In fact that is the key word which has given us the best results so far. Soon we will have to reduce the 34 words we initially thought of to the  20 or so as recommended by Google. But key words on Google searches are less significant than appearing on affiliated websites. These are clearly the most effective but you are not told who these affiliates are.

There is definitely a greater feeling of control using Google Adwords. I can change the ad wording and the keywords at any time whereas the printed ads, for which we paid a great deal of money, have probably already been glanced at and forgotten. I am also beginning to appreciate that those people who are sniffy about sponsored ads and adamant that they never click on them are probably doing the advertisers a great favour. People with a real grudge against the advertisers would be better advised to click as much as possible since we pay for every click regardless of the motivation behind the click.