intro

** Teresa Almeida d'Eça **
 * Intro **

I was born in the greater Lisbon area /in the suburbs of the capital), Portugal, in the exact plot of land where I still live. At the age of eleven I was experiencing my third school system. Curiously, the first time ever that I went to school at age five was in London, England. Then came the Portuguese school system, where I finished fourth grade, the end of elementary school in my country. Finally, I entered the American school system, which left a very strong imprint and defined my future.
 * About Me **

I stopped studying in English at sixteen, the time when I re-entered the Portuguese system to finish high school and go on to university, where I studied English and German. All this in Lisbon in the late sixties.

I deciding on becoming a teacher, because I had always enjoyed tutoring friends. Teaching English was something I loved doing for 33 years. And even more so when I embraced the "brave new world" of new technologies in the 1997-98 school year. Then I opted for teacher training, another fascinating facet of my career. I took a training course to become both a trainer of teacher trainers and a teacher trainer. I'm a Certified Teacher Trainer at the national level by the Conselho Cientifco-Pedagogico de Formacao Continua (Braga, Portugal) in the areas of Educational Technology: Web 2.0 tools and Educational Innovation, as well as English and Didacticds of English.

Joining the Webheads in Action in January 2002 proved to be a turning point in my career without which I would not be traveling to Yakutsk, Siberia, for the second time in just a few days' time. However, I need to emphasize other events in my personal and professional life that contributed to this very special opportunity. Joining TESOL in 2001, going to the TESOL Conference in St. Louis that year and meeting Christine Meloni, who introduced me to Larissa Olesova (from Yakutsk and Yakut TESOL) at TESOL 2004 in Long Beach, California.

That year I had launched the Becoming a Webhead online workshop with my dear friend Dafne Gonzalez. BaW has been running non-stop since then and Larissa was a co-moderator last year and this year. In March 2008 Larissa was at a presentation of mine in the TESOL Conference in New York and invited me to do two videoconferences for the Yakutsk TESOL Summer Workshop that year about my work with curricular and extracurricular blogs. Another videoconference followed in 2009 to talk about other facets of my online work. In Mar. 2010 I was in Yakutsk to give a 5-day workshop at the invitation of Yakut TESOL.

And there I will be once again, eleven months later, at the invitation of Dr. Olga Chorosova, Director of Institute of Teacher Training, North-Eastern Federal University, and Dr. Natalya Alexeeva, Chair of Department of Foreign Languages in Technical and Natural Sciences, North-Eastern Federal University and President of Yakut TESOL, to give an 8-day workshop for teachers of English.

Yakutsk, here I come!!! :-)

Here's where I come from (placemark on the left / West), where I stopped for two days (Moscow, in-between) and where I am today, Yakutsk (on the far right / East), approximately 9,000 kms away from home.
 * The Lisbon-Yakutsk Connection **



Before we get hands-on into the workshop, I'd like to know a litlle bit about each of you: your name, where you're from in this huge Republic of Sakha/Yakutia, where you teach and what levels/age groups you teach.
 * And who are my trainees? **