LEARNING DIFFERENCES This summer I took up a course run by The Friday Institute https://twitter.com/FridayInstitute. The issue was great because it was about the best ways we can approach our students and their difficulties.I teach in a vocational school in my country and more and more I have to cope with students who are struggling to get positive grades and families are not aware of their learning difficulties. The six modules were engaging, with lots of interesting weblinks and we could discuss online important issues:
Working Memory
Executive Functions
how we can better understand the difficulties of our students
Student Motivation
Coaching for teachers
We were provided with interesting web links for learning about Motivation and how to work with students with learning difficulties. I have kept most of the notes, I have bookmarked a lot of pages so that I will try to learn more about these interesting topics which were discussed online and I have written about this great course in my website - the one I use for writing about my learning experience on line as a teacher : https://sites.google.com/site/thenewworldoflearning/home/learning-differences This is part of my CPD, but I would like to say that I have learnt a lot. The activities were guided and had to reflect on videos and experiences shared by learners and teachers. We could also use GOOGLEHANGOUT for getting in touch with other teachers and share ideas. The Toolboxwas part of the final session and I could learn more about ways and tools which can help us teach and support our learners. You can find them in the weblink to my site. There will be a new session in autumn and I think it is worth doing such an experience as the tutors of this course have made a great MOOC on line. Thanks to the Friday Institute! You can access the hashtag of this MOOC if you are on Twitter: #all_learn And finally this is my certificate for attending the course online: I am proud of what I have learnt and I will try to better my teaching because "we are all different but we can learn together". We have talked about mantra and I have created mine .
BACK TO SCHOOL Getting organized and getting more engaged Yesterday I was online and I could follow some interesting sections about the new school year and how to approach it. There were some interesting webminars with SimpleK12 - this is the link where you can have access to the many webminars which they run for CPD and PLN : http://community.simplek12.com/scripts/student/webinars/
The day was centred on presentations by great educators who provided ideas about the best ways for approaching the first day at school with students and the best ways for getting in touch with families and parents. It was a great experience. I particularly liked the ideas expressed by Sally Sanchez who made a presentation about Teacher Zen, which I have now embedded and I think I will have to think more about her great ideas. Her ideas were inspiring as she suggested some key points to bear in mind when starting school again: 1) try to organize your way of working so that you can manage the beginning of a new school year in the best ways. She also suggested some tools for better organizing the activities and getting in touch with other teachers and developing a PLN 2)find a way to be connected with your students and develop nice activities and more creative ways of teaching. The ideas were presented in a 30minute presentation on line but I think that these documents should be read twice or more times because she has created a list of tools and documents to help all teachers. She made me realize that the first thing we do need to have is enthusiasm and love for what we do need to do.
This is a list of the tools we should use to get in touch with students and establish relationships with students and families:
google docs and google spreadsheets
Padlet
TitanPad
Today'sMeet
All these tools can help us to " break the walls" and try to communicate with our students, they can post their presentations with Padlet or they can collaborate and discuss with the teacher. Google docs is a great suite as we can work online and share documents. Google spreadsheets can help us to collect information like emails, data from the parents so that the teacher can work better. Some teachers provided this interesting link about the best ways for using Padlet :https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mAQJRu1aODAiBslDxNoliCARyAVrVX6hiK4nc_JdghA/present?slide=id.i0#slide=id.gf9f60697_10
I liked the approach: we can use any materials for getting organized and work with our students! Never give up!!! Matt introduced also a new webtool which is useful in education: audioboom.com https://audioboom.com/about/education This is a great use of the tool, especially for students with special needs:
But the tool can be used to give voice to students too: it seems to be a " cool " tool, you just need to follow the link and you will learn more.
Catlin has also provided us with two new web tools: http://piktochart.com/to create infographics , but it is not free http://www.easel.ly/ to create templates and infographics
