This year I discovered a European website - called EMMA- which provides MOOCs, many have to do with education and learning. It is a useful website which can enhance our learning and help us develop as teachers and life-long learners.
EMMA is an innovative platform that provides free MOOCs. Some are self-paced - this implies that we can choose when to do the MOOC. I could enroll to do the MOOC about E-Portfolios before the summer but only in December I could work on the lessons as I was busy while working at school. If you do 70% of the activities you are given a certificate of attendance.
The course online was released in 2015 but they offered a " Self-development course" in 2016 too:
We had to watch videos, reflect on what we had seen and think about our ideas about ePortfolios.
Lessons were presented by providing an introduction, videos and a lot of links and documents online.The tutors made a list of sources for each lesson and I must admit that I bookmarked them as I am going to check them later.
The overall framework was clear and well-organized. I must admit that I have been given a great introduction to what is now required at work,at school and at university too.
Definition of e-Portfolios
EPortfolios have been used for showcasing learner work and to support formative or summative assessment processes.
Now ePortfolios offer many more possibilities like storing, archiving, thinking, reflecting, storytelling, collaborating and publishing about one's learning experiences.
E-Portfolios can show your achievements, your reflections and what you have been doing as part of your professional development
This is an interesting use of Portfolios and I think that we will be required to use them in our profession: this is what I have been doing when I do MOOCs online and in many cases I have been asked to reflect online and share my reflections after attending some conferences online.
ePortfolios Ownership We can have different types of Portfolios: - Individual ePortfolio - Institutional / Organization ePortfolio A good example is the European Language Portfolio - Individual ePortfolio within an institution/organization
I am already familiar with the European Language Portfolio:
In Education ePortfolios offer the opportunity to create and manage an online space of digital artefacts that provide evidence of competencies and abilities acquired over a specific period of time.
They should support growth and change .
My Reflections and what I would like to do in class with my students
First think about modern tools which can be used by them: Google Apps and in particular New Google Sites can be used to showcase their artefacts.
Here are some interesting Tutorials: I have just started my new website and I must admit that it is very easy. I might therefore support my students but I am sure they will be successful.
As a teacher I will continue blogging ....................................
As a teacher I will continue blogging and I will write about my profession and for my CPD as education requires reflecting on what we do in class, what we have learnt and how we can improve our methodologies:
Time for Christmas and time for holidays and thinking about the best ways we can better our way of working in a difficult situation for educators and also for the country.
While I was working online I came across some good documents which I could use in class with my students.
Videos online:classic tales
Useful for watching and viewing a story and learning new words.
A reading task which can be carried out while watching a film about this famous story by Dickens.
Watching a video advertising about Christmas
Watching advertising can tell us about a country and its traditions.
Watching a video about making " Panettone":
Watching how to make a special dessert in Italy while comparing what other countries have to celebrate Christmas or other special festivals.
Royal Christmas traditions in the UK
Learning about Victorian England and the tradition of Christmas.
Christmas is celebrated in a multitude of rich and cherished traditions. This illustrated timeline, brought to you by Balsam Hill Christmas Tree Company, captures the flow of some of the most popular Christmas traditions and figures throughout Christmas History.
Week 4 How can teacher collaboration facilitate collaborative learning?
We worked on our lesson plan this week and we watched a lot of engaging videos about projects and collaboration among classes working with projects and where teachers and students were engaged in collaboration and activities to be done together. Most of the activities were European projects and students were involved in working together and sharing their outputs with other learners. A good video was the one which I missed live online where Professor D.Butler answered questions related to collaboration.
Modern technologies and IT can help us while working with our students and support us when working and collaborating. A useful guide can be found online and downloaded : Colab Guide Lines . The website http://colab.eun.org/research offers a lot of useful material which we can use for designing activities which require collaboration and the use of new technologies. A good document to start with is the one presented dealing with the problem of assessment and the document shared dealing with spreading new approaches in education: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2012-horizon-report-K12.pdf
Tablets, mobile devices should not be banned but integrated within our lessons and tasks. New tools and apps are growing and they can offer a lot of applications which can help us while working in class and at home. Further resources were shared online and in the Mooc.
This is my Learning Diary about the four weeks spent together ;I have added the link to my lesson plan: I could also read a lot of interesting projects online, which I think should be shared and analyzed by other teachers. The main activities were all based on collaboration.
Autumn has offered interesting courses for reflecting on education, education online and Moocs. It is a new world which is built online and where networking and digital skills are now the main features of it.Educators are connected, learners are becoming more connected and knowledge is now shared.
Emma is the European Platform that has provides the Moocs for free with interesting videos and documents related to the topic. Lots of ideas and a great overview about knowledge and the future of education. The Mooc offered short courses from September to November this year and I was free to register and follow the tasks online simply by choosing what to see and when to do it. That's the reason why I like Moocs: I can learn online while I am at home or at school in my free time and sometimes the quality of the Moocs can be great.
I have just finished the session MOOCS with Distinction and I have watched some interesting videos and learnt about experiences which have been shared by many thinkers and educators.
I have particularly appreciated some parts of the Moocs as I have come across the ideas they have presented and can help us learn about the future in education.
Stephen Downes - The emerging new Consciousness in digital culture
Stephen Downes is well-known for his theories about Connectivist learning, learning networks and how and why they emerged.
He is an international speaker and has published many books online dealing with this new way of learning and working online : http://www.downes.ca/files/books/Connective_Knowledge-19May2012.pdf
He is interested in Open Educational Resouces and Moocs :
Global MOOCs for non-native English speaking 16 – 17 year olds: increasing digital and lifelong learning skills
The Teacher involved in the project :Inge Ignatia de Waard was born in 1967 in Antwerp, Belgium. She is currently researching mobile learning and MOOCs at the Open University of the United Kingdom. She has a background in IT and pedagogy (studied at Athabasca University, Canada) and has been an international public speaker, addressing audiences across continents on the subject of online, MOOC and mobile learning.
This section of the Mooc was really interesting as it presented a brief overview of a Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) project that uses Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) to enhance language, digital and lifelong learning skills for upper secondary school students (16 – 17 year olds).
David Weinberger, Ph.D., writes about the effect of the Internet on ideas. He is a senior researcher at the Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and was co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and a journalism fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center. His most recent book, "Too Big to Know," looks at the networking of knowledge and expertise.
Alessandro Bogliolo - Algorithms are forever
Alessandro Bogliolo is serving as e-skills for jobs ambassador, a Europe-wide campaign to raise awareness of the opportunities that digital skills offer for employment and employability.
He has been working on coding and providing courses for teachers online as coding and literacy should be mastered by everyone in today's world.
Internet is the tool, it provides us with a network of educators who are working online and they are sharing ideas, providing tips and helping us develop new approaches to learning. The learner is the centre of the new learning process as more choices are offered for learning and choosing to learn how,when and what can now be a reality.
Moocs can offer plenty of courses to people who would have never had access to learning online in the past.
How will they develop next? What kind of quality? Teachers and educators are still experimenting but the new way of learning has already begun.
The Language we study and speak
Easy or difficult to learn? It is considered the language of commerce and it is widely used by students working online all over the world. MOOCs are mainly in English and scholars and educators use it to work together and share resources and papers.
The English Language : a history about it and how it changed
English and W.Shakespeare
Learning more about the English Language: help on line and blogs
How can you assess Collaborative Learning? The week was really interesting as we had to think about assessment while students are working and collaborating. We were provided with some interesting experiences where teachers discussed how they worked and what they had to monitor and assess: formative assessment but also peer evaluation. It is important to see how our students work and see if they meet the criteria:
Anna Laghigna- one of the tutors- explained how she had worked with some projects and how students learnt and reflected on what they had done:
This is a useful guide which can help us develop rubrics and how to observe students while working together. It can be downloaded and used for assessing students better.
I appreciated the variety of tools used when writing the diaries and the experience which all the teachers showed while reflecting on the teaching practice: they have developed great skills and can work well also when working with PBL and assessing students who are collaborating,
How can you design Collaborative Learning in the Classroom? The main topics discussed in the second week were in relationship to the different tasks and how collaboration works. It was interesting and with lots of ideas about how to create rubrics for assessing collaboration. Embedding Collaborative Learning
The Collaboration Rubric
We were asked to start thinking about the activities we would like to share and work on. I did not as I did not have the time but I was impressed by the way rubrics can help us think when designing our activities. I really liked the ideas about the different types of rubrics which can help us when working with groups and with projects . Resources for the module Collaboration Rubric:
I have just started the Mooc " Collaborative Teaching and Learning" thanks to the European platform Europeanschoolnetacademy. Why is Collaboration important in education today?
The course is an interesting one about the importance of Collaboration in Teaching and Learning.
We also have social interaction online thanks to Twitter- educators in the 21st century can rely on such a network of thinkers, educators and people who love teaching:
The course is followed by over 1,200 participants and we are guided into discussing ideas and sharing interesting tools or projects which have been carried out by teachers in their schools.
Thanks to the internet we can learn more from the others and see what they have done: I have particularly liked some videos about collaboration and projects which have been done by some Italian teachers who described the reasons why they chose collaboration in their activities. Collaboration is required by teachers and learners and it is important for achieving the aims .
The approach in the course is based on presenting videos, reflecting, thinking about our experiences and sharing ideas by using social networks and padlet. Here you can see some of the videos where the teachers discussed what they had done:
Online we can find a lot of tools and this is the reason why PBL and collaboration can be enhanced by using modern technology.
I really appreciated watching the videos about young students and older ones working together and learning together, but what they did was successful as they also used modern technology. They were more engaged too.
Here is a list of tools which can be used to better our learning activities: most of them are popular among Italian teachers too. We only need to rely on better internet connections and train our learners to work by using such tools.
Some ideas I have found online.................. Thanks to the web we can find plenty of resources online ranging from videos to stories and activities. I was online some weeks ago and I could follow some interesting teaching ideas about the topic Halloween. Shelly Terrell provided me with interesting weblinks. It is true that this is a typical American celebration . However, it has become international and most of my students do go to Halloween parties in Italy too. In most supermarkets we will find sweets and decorations for the scariest night of the year. While I was walking in town yesterday, I could see some shop windows and also in most schools we have children talking about Halloween.
I found some nice videos which I am going to use with students in my classes. They will provide some material for " thinking, listening and reporting" in English. I might use some tools like edupuzzle https://edpuzzle.com/ for checking what they have understood.
Watching a video about how to make Halloween cookies :
Who provided me with lots of sources : Shelly Terrell, just check online
Have you ever thought you would spend more than six hours listening to a conference online and thinking you would not like to stop doing it? This is what has happened to me. Last Saturday was fabulous, a whole afternoon was spent online till late in the evening and we learnt from other educators who were presenting their ideas about their role as educators and how they felt about what they had been doing. Engagement, passion and love for their job and their interests in students, so many tips and ideas about how to work, how to support teachers who are beginning to work and also the importance of a network of educators who can learn together.
The conference was the place where they discussed and introduced their experiences and you could feel that they were passionate about what they had chosen to do. The two great people who made the event possible are two Icons in the field of Technology and Education: Shelly Sanchez Terrell and Sarah Thomas . As I have followed a lot of webinars they have presented I was sure that they would run such an interesting event but it was also the voices of the many speakers who had been invited to the event that made Suturday 3rd September such a valuable source of tips for everybody who was online. I liked to listen to the many voices of people who were living in the Usa , in Europe and in different parts of the world. Every experience was special, and I could listen to people who had decided to make their choices and live their experience of educators as people with passions. The term chosen "Edpassion" was the right one to define these teachers. If you check the word " educator" you will see that it has roots in the word " educere" meaning to lead, draw and take out - see the link https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/educere. The term " passion" comes from the Greek language and means " suffering" as explained online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passion_(emotion)
The focus of the speaker was on many aspects of teaching but the main focus was loving teaching: PASSION PANEL
Teachers can be the ones who inspire and provide the tips and ideas for other teachers and they should be ready to listen to their students and understand their needs. Engagement is really important to devise a better strategy and empower the learners to become " active" learners.
You can see my certificate for attending the conference - I was the lucky one to win a subscription to Simplek12 and now I am able to view and see all the webinars they run. I will therefore continue learning online and meet new teachers online who will share ideas, lessons and their knowledge about webtools .
Some weeks ago I was able to see the interesting webinar which was presented by David Little. The webinar was online on 20th August and it was offered thanks to a group of professionals - IATEFL http://www.iatefl.org/. This organization runs regular CPD webinars , just check online- they are offered for free and are seen by many teachers of English living in different countries : http://www.iatefl.org/web-events/webinars http://www.iatefl.org/web-events/sig-webinars Who is the Presenter
David Little has been a Professor at Trinity College Dublin and has studied the issue of learner autonomy and language learning- online I have found a lot of materials he has been working on- - European Language Portfolios and Learners
The European Language Portfolio ( ELP) is part of his great work in the European Union and teachers have been involved in implementing it: ELP Material 2008 pdf document
The Webinar : Learner autonomy and its implications for the discourse of language teaching and learning The webinar described how some learners can be successful and what teachers should do in order to help all the students master their knowledge and their autonomy. He focussed on different learning environments and how students could better while they were or became more aware of their learning process. This link is important as in our learning situations, the traditional ones with students who are learning in a non-English-speaking country we often face the issue of students who are passive learners and do not work well and they lack autonomy. Reflecting on our traditional way of learning and by analyzing learning situations in which learning happened and had a lot of successful learners can help us think about what language activities teachers should do:
The teacher can support the learner but what is really important is the idea of creating a good learning environment which can facilitate and support students: the role of L1 is not neglected and L1 is still important
An interesting idea presented by Professor Little was the one about optimal learning environments: intrinsic motivation is the key for promoting autonomy and the students' success
He underlined the fact that the target language is used not only for working in class but also by the students when they are thinking and reflecting about their own learning. This is really important as good learners can reflect on their process of learning . In my experience as a teacher of English I have done a lot of activities and created a lot of tasks to help my learners but I have never asked my students to use the language as a reflective activity. This will be my great goal this year as I am aware that in some ways I have made some mistakes while I tried to be supportive but did not give my learners " the tools" or rather " the tasks" which might help them and drive their learning and their autonomy. The role of Writing- a key idea in the presentation
I have always used writing as a controlled activity but what was suggested in the webinar was a great way for building autonomy among learners. We should provide opportunities for our learners who write down about what is happening in their learning . Working on reflection and narration can enhance their autonomy as learners. The webinar ended with a long list of activities which we can use and can provide opportunities for learners who are working on the language and their autonomy: instruments of scaffolding
What new ideas about learning and learners did the Presenter introduce? - any learner can learn well if he or she is aware of the progress and what has been done or achieved when studying the foreign language - L1 can be used and it is also important for the learners- teachers can, therefore ,use it if they are not English mother-tongue speakers - teachers need to provide opportunities for using the language not only in a guided written discourse but also in the personal reflections on what has been done - teachers need to think about writing tasks which help the learners : blogs, reflective writing , portfolios are just some good examples . I would also add writing articles for the school magazine or online presentations or working on digital storytelling thanks to the modern web tools. Professor Little provided some examples of students' assessing their progress: they showed the great level of language reflection they had and they used English in a correct way!
I wish to thank him for the great ideas and sources which he provided us with: food for thought and new ideas for my personal reflections on ESL and TEFL. I will have to check some sources about scaffolding and how we learn.
