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domenica 27 novembre 2016

Collaborative Teaching and Learning week 4


                                          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

Module 4 Resource Section



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.

EMMA Moocs

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  :





http://www.downes.ca/post/7804  ( about  open education )


MOOC – Diversity and Community in Online Learning from Stephen Downes


He publishes his daily newsletter http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm


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).





We were also provided with the slides:

Hack the MOOC: alternative MOOC use from Inge de Waard



David Weinberger - The networking of knowledge

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.

venerdì 25 novembre 2016

The English Language


                                     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


  http://www.grammarly.com/blog/ undefined



https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/


http://blog.dictionary.com/

References


Dictionaries and Reference Tools, by smberdaxagar


Check your vocabulary online


https://www.arealme.com/vocabulary-size-test/en/


Teaching and Learning  Vocabulary

http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/02/16-websites-to-teach-and-learn.html

venerdì 18 novembre 2016

Collaborative Teaching and Learning Week 3 Assessment

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: 


Guidelines for  assessing Collaborative Learning
http://colab.eun.org/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=6481260d-0e05-41a0-ac8f-535e4b5c5536&groupId=5897016

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.


Sources :

https://www.edutopia.org/resource/checking-understanding-download

I really liked the post by a teacher on twitter







Interesting  diaries online which have been shared

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,

http://abfromz.jimdo.com/




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My learning diary will be presented later in week 4.

giovedì 10 novembre 2016

Collaborative Teaching and Learning Week 2- Designing Collaborative Learning

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:
Learning Scenario Template:
6 Example Learning Scenarios:
Resources for the 'Asteroids, impacts and craters' learning scenario: