Greetings Mynglers,

I would like to share with you the impressions of our Serbian and English teacher Marina Petrovic, who is now attending the LANCELOT course to become a certified online teacher.

“In July 2009 Myngle announced a joint scholarship with LANCELOT SchoolTM GmbH,  which offers online training and certification for online foreign language teachers. LANCELOT stands for LANguage learning with CErtified Live Online Trainers, and it was being developed for two years as a joint project of 23 EU Universities.

Since I started teaching online, I have always thought of how I could improve. I have always felt that some kind of training and certification is a must (even though I have been friends with computers since I got my  first ZX Spectrum, back in 1984). So, when I read about LANCELOT and Myngle joint scholarship for ten Myngle teachers, I jumped for joy. I immediately applied and impatiently waited for the results.

Our course started on 25th September, a week before our first synchronous lesson.  We were invited to LANCELOT Ning circle and we were given access to LANCELOT moodle site, which welcomed us with ten Learning Blocks sections with material to read and learn from. Heike and Holly introduced themselves on the forum and invited us to do the same. By the first synchronous session we have already connected via Ning site and read about each other on the forum. When the virtual classroom opened for the first session, I saw the photo of the rising sun and I heard Holly asking me ” What made you smile this morning” - what a lovely way to start your lesson :o)

Each week brings joy of learning and presents us with new challenges and teaching practices to reflect on. So far we have had six synchronous group sessions, but we also meet with each other for peer-to-peer sessions, and we are thoroughly enjoying the course. Each week we learn something new regarding different virtual classrooms and we discover them by attending a special event called  ‘Tech Corners’ once a week. We discover different methodological approaches and activities to best fit the online environment. We create our own teaching material and try it out in our group sessions, while the other Lancelotters give constructive feedback. We have discussed different cultures and done various tasks on intercultural competence, which is an important aspect of online teaching. Needless to say, our favourite part of the course is mingling together, meeting in various virtual classrooms, exchanging experience and encouraging each other.

I must express my special thanks to Myngle for providing us with such a wonderful opportunity to grow professionally. I dare say Myngle has been the only site so far to invest in its teachers so much, recognizing the fact that quality teaching is foundation on which one can build the long-term future.”

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Community, In the spotlight. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.