DIGITAL LEARNING TRANSICTION MOOC COURSE AUTUMN 2015

30th  December  

Reflecting on the  Mooc-ed course :  DIGITAL LEARNING  TRANSICTION   FALL 2015

After taking the first MOOC  run by  Friday Institute last summer I wanted to do some more activities with them. I had really appreciated the work and the activities which they presented last summer. If you are interested, you can see what I did online .Just follow the link to my website   https://sites.google.com/site/thenewworldoflearning/home/learning-differences, the topic of the MOOC was  " Learning Differences".
 If you are interested you can enrol for next year Mood-ed courses: just check online what they are going to present. I feel that we can learn  a lot from the educators who work in the USA as they are involved in bettering the system of education and they share  ideas and their experiences in different fields:

https://place.fi.ncsu.edu/

This is an interesting  MOOC  platform that provides  online courses for educators, most of them are American but I have also found the names of teachers working in European countries who are doing these courses too.
The MOOC courses are run by following  scheduled  modules which are released  every Monday. Usually, you are provided with the syllabus and information about the educators  and tutors before you start studying online. Each unit has a presentation online with a video and a long list of web links with videos and also materials that can be accessed online and saved on  your PC too. You are asked to interact with the other educators and to write your own plan - the final activity -based on the topic of the course. In order to get your certificate, you need to interact online and post in the forum of the MOOC. You are required to submit your task  or the online presentations you have created and you have to evaluate the other students' activities. If you have the time you can also  work online thanks to  Twitter hashtags they provide you with and sometimes they also run Google hangouts to interact online with the teachers. Last summer I had great discussions online with an American teacher online and other teachers from the USA and also Europe.

I chose to do the MOOC in September but I was very busy so I started later but they gave us more time to finish the activity. I worked online by doing all the activities and I was able to finish by 19th December; I must admit that it was really engaging. In particular, I liked the idea of thinking about what we all should  do in order to work in a different way.
This is the final certificate  which I got when I finished all the activities, for each week I had also to provide the feedback and think about the best ways for improving the course next year.

I would like to add that I have learnt a lot of new things as digital learning is now considered important also in my country, but most schools do not have good technology. This is true also abroad.
The course had a lot of links with the USA  and  its reality but I was able to think about my teaching situation and to see what is missing and what should be done to work better. It is a pity that resources are poor and most of the schools cannot  offer learning environments that are meeting the needs of the students who really want to be engaged.

This is the padlet where I wrote and saved the material and the interesting links they provided online. I must admit that it was the  discovery of a great community  of educators who share their knowledge. Everybody wanted to work better with their students. This is great because education can suffer because Governments  do not invest, but  most of the educators are lovers of their jobs.

Created with Padlet

And this is my Action Plan as presented online: 

This is the infographic which describes how flipping the classroom can empower our way of teaching and better the results in our classes. This is the main reason why I have devised an activity that aims at providing tools to the teachers of my school:

Yes, we can.
We can work better
We can help our students to work in a different way and work in the XXI century and help them  learn about new  skills! 



Created by Knewton

The Holocaust Mooc course by Futurelearn part 1 and part 2 2015

                      The  Holocaust
The Mooc platform Futurelearn https://www.futurelearn.com/
had an interesting course about the Holocaust which was on line in two parts this year. The course was developed  by  the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem and Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research together with Tel Aviv University.It was a demanding course, worth seeing. I must admit that it was followed by people who provided me with interesting links and some had met people who had been imprisoned and thus they had also personal interest in this course as they had also lost parents or relatives. A sad story which we all know and which we studied in our history books,but after more than seventy years   these people remind us that we must not  forget.

    
When we search the web, we usually find a lot of information about the Holocaust-
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust ,but the course was also an interesting lesson about   history that described how Germany became a nazi nation under the dictatorship of Hitler that aimed at destroying all the Jews. It was a plan that took years before they thought about the final solution. Many people supported this terrible plan which is part of the history of WW2.
The following padlet is a sort of the summary of what I watched and learnt and this brings me to January 2016. On 27th January we will talk about  The Holocaust in our classes, let's all share materials and discuss this issue with our students. Because we cannot forget what happened and we must remember.
In Reggio Emilia there will be an important exhibition: Istoreco is going to present the works by a child who made the sketches while she was imprisoned in a concentration camp. 

I am going to write a module about this topic and to read something in class : I would like my students to be aware of the importance of " Remembering" what happened.  

Created with Padlet

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year- SEASONAL GREETINGS TO THE WORLD

December 2015

Just a few days before Christmas and the holidays are going to begin.The long winter is going to start tomorrow- 21st December.
The year has been a hard one, I have changed school and students : it has been hard and I need to recharge my batteries in the next weeks. I am going to continue my PLN, I am just finishing some more courses online but I wish you all the best.  
I have just discovered this new tool  https://www.moovly.com/ and I tried to use it by using their templates for sending my best wishes to everyone. My posts will continue in the next weeks, there will be more things I have done and learnt about. As a life-long learner this year has helped me develop new skills and I will try to implement my teaching.

tiziana






For educators and teachers of English : this  is a nice presentation about this period of the year  worth seeing!! Thinglink offers great opportunities for making presentations.