Action research is research that each of us can do on our own practice, that “we” (any team or family or informal community of practice) can do to improve its practice, or that larger organizations or institutions can conduct on themselves, assisted or guided by professional researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within which they practice. More in WIKIPEDIA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_research

There are usually six basic steps for teachers, who would like to find out something about their teaching practice, they are:

1. You have a hypothesis about one of your teaching practices (e.g. how you organise group work, how authentic you are as a etacher, if you use enough authentic listening material) and would like to find out if it is true or not true and/or how you could improve.

2. You choose the area of your reseach and formulate a question. Futhermore you study professional literature on your topic.

3. You select the appropriate methodology to carry out your research (questionnaires, interviews etc.), and you work out a detailed research plan (what, when, how and who will be involved.).

4. You carry out your research.

5. You collect the results, interprete them and present it, e.g. to your fellow teachers. Their feedback as well as your interpretation will make you able to formulate your next step 6.

6. You improve your teaching activity.

Blended Learning is the varied combination of multiple approaches to pedagogy and teaching. It can be accomplished through the application of virtual/online - and face to face (= f2f) learning.

Imagine:

A film (on DVD), or particular scenes, are used to initiate a lesson on a particular topic. While some learners are discussing this topic face-to-face, others take the opportunity to post their opinions on a weblog or in a forum(see Section Audio and Video). The teacher creates a classroom blog (see Section Weblogs) and moderates the entries of the learners. This is just one example of what a simple blended learning context may look like. It is based on Social Constructionist Pedagogy encouraging learning through collaboration and networking.

More info on Blended Learning see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_learning

By Tony Fitzpatrick:What is a blog? Blog is short for a weblog. A weblog is an on-line journal or diary. It consists of a chronological list of entries or posts. These entries can contain text, links to other Web pages or photographs. There are now many blogs on the Web covering a wealth of topics.
If you want to post to a blog, you usually need a log in. For more information see the EUROVOLT section on weblogs and webjournals .....

Moodle is an open source e-learning platform, also known as a Course Management System (CMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)). Moodle is designed to help educators create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. Its open source license and modular design means that many people can develop additional functionality, and development is undertaken by a globally diffuse network of commercial and non-commercial users, spearheaded by the Moodle company based in Perth, Western Australia.

cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle

Moodle is designed by applying sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University.

cf. http://moodle.org/

Latest development:

SLoodle is a project to integrate the VLE platform Moodle with the 3D world of Second Life. Imagine a Moodle course that, if you wanted, could turn into a proper 3D interactive classroom with all your Moodle resources available to your students in the virtual world.
A growing community is using SLoodle.com to work toward making this happen. As is the ethos of Moodle, the code will be open source and so we encourage all users, no matter how IT-savvy to get involved and make this a reality. Its benefits to the global education community could be huge.

By Kirsten Söntgens

An electronic portfolio enables its user to save all his/her work digitally, including oral and aural work.

EUROpean Certificate in Language Learning and Teaching to Adults.

An European framework for

• language teacher certification 
• accreditation of training institutions.

The ICC (International Certificate Conference)...

http://icc-europe.com/eurolta.php

 

In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a predominant "language" for the creation of a web page. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists, colours, fonts etc. and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. After the "language" HTML was created, XML was the next step. Today many webpages are built in XML.

Example of this "language":

<html>
<head><title>eurovolt :: </title>

...

You can see it when you go, e.g. to our project webpage, http://eurovolt.net/ ,

then go to "View" and click "Source".