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
