Edmodo Conference 1st August 2017

I have just learnt how to use  Edmodo. I have no classes yet but this  summer I did a course run by one of the Ambassadors of  Edmodo in Italy- they used  Edmodo and it was really nice to work with other  Italian teachers who shared their activities.Working on Edmodo was easy and I could enroll in just a few minutes as I had the account.  I discovered some interesting activities which  we can create online for our  learners and which we can use while working in this  learning  enviroment  with our  students.

I think that I might try it this year as it is  a safe environment and  it is well-organized.  Students and educators are supported, they have communities and can learn together.
I was invited to watch the conference they had planned to do in August and I did  it, I tried to watch as many sessions as I could and  it was really engaging and  interesting.
Here you can find my reflections and what a lot of teachers shared in the conference.

1st  August   Edmodo Conference 2017- An opportunity for educators to share their experience with Edmodo

On 1st August I followed the  conference online which they  presented in live streaming  and I appreciated the passion of the people who have made  Edmodo one great community of  learners and educators.

It was underlined that they had set up Edmodo having a  mission: connecting  learners and I think that they are doing this quite  well.

There was a great introduction and all the speakers focussed on the importance of being connected and providing learning opportunities for everybody. Edmodo is user-friendly and it can also support the teachers who have to work with large classes. Edmodo offers a learning platform which can be assessed by learners, educators and families.
The experts and developers of  Edmodo  focussed on the new features for the new school year. You can see the video which I have embedded and which explains why we should try using it. Teachers can use it for working online in interactions and for testing students too!
Learners in the XXI century need to be able to be connected and work online, teachers can rely on quizzes and  sharing materials and quizzes. This implies a revolution in teaching which is loved by the educators who shared their views.
The speakers were people like me and also experts in education

                                       Edmodo  and   Personalized  Learning

Why should we choose this Platform?
It was underlined by many  speakers that we can focus on the learners and their learning.
Technology can really support us!!

 

Edmodo and  Connecting Learners and Communities

 

  

 

 

Why  Teachers  love  Edmodo

 

Features

 

 

 

Teachers  can save  time

 

 

 

 

 

What Edmodo is offering for the New School Year

 

 

 

 

 

 

Assignments  with  Edmodo

 

 

 

Edmodo as a  Virtual Learning  Commons

 

 

 

 

Dealing with  complexities in education

 

 

 

 

 

An Italian  Ambassador : Lucia Bartolotti  speaking about her  experience

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lucia Bartolotti was a great speaker who  presented the Italian community and what she had done for the teachers who were supported  by providing translations and some important functions. She also underlined the importance of  getting connected  by using also  mobile phones , which is  a peculiarity of the Italian students.  I have met Lucia only virually but I really loved listening to her speaking and showing how  hard she must have worked to help develop the biggest community of teachers in Edmodo.    

                            

Teachers speaking and sharing their ideas about  Edmodo



More Teachers discussed the issue of using  Edmodo and what it can offer. I cannot but try to use it. 

 

 

 

The recording has now been uploaded and I am going to check the  speakers I could not see online.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tweets Worth Sharing

 

 

 

 

#EdmodoCon17 Watch Lucia Bartolotti - One of our #Italian Ambassadors talk about #PLN ~ in 5 mins https://t.co/xlEZCZWkA1 #engagemore pic.twitter.com/bQ3F1ZRV5s

— Edmodo (@edmodo) 1 agosto 2017

#EdmodoCon17 Sal Khan is @Edmodo is this real?
@khanacademy helps so many teachers make connections with students https://t.co/wMQ3llGqPn pic.twitter.com/Kaz7Hc92lk

— Edmodo (@edmodo) 1 agosto 2017

#EdmodoCon17 Watch Resa Mai - Virtual Handshake: Growing Your PLN Near & Far - in 5 mins https://t.co/krqxPiEklO #PLN #engagemore pic.twitter.com/s1ZZ1wl5ex

— Edmodo (@edmodo) 1 agosto 2017

Thanks to the  speakers and  I am  looking  forward to next year's  Conference !

Teaching Art and English

Teaching Ideas about  Art and  English


Link :https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AClaude_Monet_rue_epicerie_Rouen.jpg

Last year I started teaching in a secondary  school where students specialize in Art, Drawing, Fashion and  Media studies. In the Italian school system it  has been classified as " Liceo Artistico" and this implies that our learners are involved in learning about Art and  usually love Art.
I have always been a lover of  Art  and  ever since I started  studying  Art at secondary school I continued learning about  it.
As our school system has been reformed we are working on new methodologies and competences. Teaching  Art implies working on images, scultures, and architecture. In the final year of the secondary school our learners will have to be able to use  English in learning about  some school subjects they are doing. They can do this if they can use the language correctly both in writing and in speaking and if their  teachers are  competent in English.

Teachers of English  do not teach  these subjects but they can help teachers of the other subjects in teaching their subjects in English.
The term which has been introduced to define this type of teaching in English of the content of other subjects is  CLIL.

There are many sources online  dealing with  CLIL. Last year and also in 2017 I could do the  EVO sessions about   CLIL and we  were provided with lots of  websites and tips. Most of the teachers who did them were teachers of  other subjects , only a minority were teachers of English.

Here are some weblinks and  important  documents which we can use to introduce the language which is related to the topics the students will learn about. The team of teachers working with students will share  the content, the language input and the tasks or projects which need to be done in order to work in English.
Most documents are in English and students can read them, work on the comprehension and also listen to them. A  B1+ or B2  level in  English should be required but I think it is important to start learning in English  and getting the students interested.

CLIL

https://www.languages.dk/archive/clil4u/book/CLIL%20Book%20En.pdf

This is an important  blog with lists of websites that can be usef by teachers.

http://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator/clil-art/

Lessons

The online community is now sharing ideas and tips.  It  would be better to find more ideas about  English and Art  but I am sure we will find more materials.

https://elt.oup.com/elt/students/networkitaly/clil/Network_2_CLIL_Lessons.pdf

https://clilart.wordpress.com/

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teaching-teens/resources/clil

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/clil-art-dali

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/clil-art-lesson-plan-vincent-van-gogh-11301500

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/clil-art-design-drawing-equipment

Sources for images

It is important to choose the right images and check if they are  copyrighted.  Here you can find links to images about art which you  can use if you  provide the link to the owner of the images, for ohers which are not protected by  Copy Right you do not need to provide the  name.

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Art

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Google_Art_Project

                                   Source :https://www.wikiart.org/en/edgar-degas/dance-class-at-the-opera-1872
                                   Public Domain image

                  Source: https://www.wikiart.org/en/camille-pissarro/london-st-paul-s-cathedral-1890
                  Public Domain image

WikiArt  is an important  project where you can find a lot of images and most of these are now in thre  Public  Domain. Check the images online and you will find the information  on the website
https://www.wikiart.org/

Pixabay

This is an important  website which offers over 1,500,000 images. They are all free and you can download them and use them freely.

https://pixabay.com/en/

Images can be used  for introducing  a topic or for working on the  language required  in  describing  a place, a paintings and for using  English in a  less controlled  task.

I have used many images from this  website as they are good quality and you  can use them  in  students' presentations with  Padlet or  Thinglink.

Youtube

We can find a lot of interesting  presentations about  painters and their works: here is   a presentation about  Van  Gogh

                                          Degas   and the  French  Impressionists

                                          An  American in Paris:  Mary  Cassat  

Some of the most important  museums have  their  channels: you  just  need to  check them.

Soundcloud

The National Gallery of  Ireland : Soundcloud      https://soundcloud.com/ngireland

This website offers interesting   podcasts for  listening  exercises - most are related to  Art or

the history of  Ireland.   It is   worth trying!!






Social Networks

Today many socialnetworks deal with Art and there are a lot of  groups online. I like Twitter as they  try to promote special events and some museums and  art galleries can enhance our learning about  Art as they promote events which can also be found on the Intternet  later.   If you are abroad you  can  take advantage of such information to get to know more about  special events. 

Van Gogh painted 'A Wheatfield, with Cypresses' in September 1889. It is one of three almost identical versions of the composition. pic.twitter.com/3RtXF2hUlc

— National Gallery (@NationalGallery) 29 luglio 2017

The colours and sinuous shapes of this landscape by Matisse are typical of works of the Fauves, a group of artists working at this period. pic.twitter.com/2rihCFoQDy

— National Gallery (@NationalGallery) 1 agosto 2017

Finally ,I would like to remind you about the importance of  Google with  its  Project - Google Art:

https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/


I happened to check it  and  I  visited  a lot of interesting  places !    

My advice is  very simple: try working on some images and choose some  videos and you will
start working with  Art  in  your  classes.

Podcasts and ELT

Podcasts   offer great opportunities  for  listening in English .Teachers and learners can benefit from  working online  and listening to them. In some cases learners can also  download them  and listen to them  many times so that they can  work on the language and  on summarizing the content.

Good leaners  need to work on their  listening skills and today we can really  improve our level of English. Teachers can rely on  them for learning more about  the topics they are interested in and these podcasts can provide really interesting documents which are worth  listening to. 

This interesting  webinar with  Pete Sharma  explains why we should  use  them and suggest listening to them :  I cannot but  agree with him.  The Language exposure can develop our students' listening skills and  podcasts can provide good quality language input.

Developing students' listening and speaking skills through ELT podcast from kaniz fatema

Some Useful Links for  Elt  Learners

Searching online : thanks to a directory you can search online and find many weblinks for  English leaners.

http://www.learnoutloud.com/

http://www.eltpodcast.com/   ( it provides with  some old  podcasts with  different levels of English)

VOE LEARNING  ENGLISH : this American  website offers interesting recording which students can listen to and which have been developed for  Elt leaners   (https://learningenglish.voanews.com/z/1689)






The BBC: the webisite offers a lot of material, in some cases you need to download  the podcasts.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts

If you check online you will find a lot  of interesting podcasts and all of threm deal with culture and radios. Choose what might be interesting and  work on them with your students.

Learners of  English can benefit from  listening to activities with podcasts :   the British  Council offers really interesting  activities  online https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/learnenglish-podcasts


PODCASTS AND  ELT  TEACHERS


I have discovered a lot of interesting websites where you can find  podcasts-  https://soundcloud.com/
is one of the most important ones.

You can find interesting interviews in English and learn about many topics.



The Platform AUDIOBOOM  offers some more opportunities for listening to interesting  audios:

https://audioboom.com/listen

There are many  podcasts and we need to select what might be useful for our  lessons or for our  self-development.

Listen to what I have  found online, but  I am sure that there must be many more.

Enjoy  listening to them!!!






https://audioboom.com/posts/5340163-zadie-smith-with-david-baddiel

Teaching Reading and Extensive Reading in ELT

Last year I could do an interesting Mooc thanks to Coursera and it was a Mooc which was focussed on the issue of Teaching  Reading Skills in English.
The course was  Teaching  EFL/ESL Reading : A Task-based Approach and  it was run by the University of London UCL Institute of Education.

One of the language  instructor was Dr. Amos Paran : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amos_Paran

The syllabus was based on 6 modules :each week we had a task to do and to discuss the issue with the other learners.

These are the main topics which we covered in the syllabus :

- What is tasked based Language Teaching?
- What is Reading and what does it involve?
-  Teaching  reading in the Second Language Classroom
-  Focus on Language in the  Reading  Lesson
-  Extensive Reading
-  Designing  Reading Tasks

 I am particularly interested in reading as I feel that reading is a skill which needs to be enhanced    and which requires a lot of work done at home.
Good learners are usually good readers and most of the students I teach need to be supported by the teachers as they are struggling learners.

One of the activities which we had to share had to do with creating a learning  environment where students are encouraged to read.

This is my task where I explained the importance of a  classroom library and how technology can help them share their ideas about what they have learnt or read about:

 

All the activities were assessed by peers and I had to focus on the tasks of the other learners.

 

For the fifth week I had to present my Extensive Reading Assignment: you can find it online as I have published it:  

Coursera Module 5 Presentation About Extensive Reading Peer Graded Assignment

Publish at Calameo

Finally in the sixth week  I created my  Task-based Reading Task:  I feel that if we  worked by following these ideas  dealing  with tasks we could probably reach better results in the students' language acquisition and improvement.   You can find my task  here :

Constructing A Task Based Reading Task Activity By Angiolini Tiziana

Publish at Calameo

 

 

I really liked the approach  and I think that we should more  focus on task-based tasks  as traditional approaches do not help our  learners.
Engagement, doing tasks which can help the learners to learn also by doing and reading to widen the cultural horizon of the learners is a way for achieving better results and becoming better learners.
I will focus on some websites which offer interesting reading tasks online and ebooks  in my next posts.



                                                Resources to learn more about  TBA
My post about  TBA:

http://educationalandissue.blogspot.it/2016/05/task-based-learning.html

Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) from Ronald Suplido Jr

 

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/a-task-based-approach

Here is an interesting  interview with  Prof. Ellis  dealing with the issue of  task-based approach

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdRibzXW2TI

  

 



PBL: interesting resources and ideas in today's webinar by Shelly Terrell

Project  Based  Learning

Friday night is  my  favourite day spent online  while learning from the others for just half an hour . I am a life-long learner and I love to learn from a  great  teacher and  expert in new  technologies I have met online: Shelly  Terrell.

You can see her  30 minute  webinars which  are  followed by  passionate  teachers and  learners from all over the world who want to learn about   the use of  new technologies and can help them develop  better  lessons.

Her webinars are free and can be followed  by anyone: here is the link to the service which you can access if you want to follow her presentations  - Uk time 9:00 p.m. in the  summer time.

https://americantesol.adobeconnect.com/_a754204412/terrell/

This Friday she  worked on  PBL by  providing  some tips and  a long list of resources.  I had  followed her webinar last year too and  I am just embedding the many recources which she  shared on line and which I will check in the next weeks.

First of all, I need to say that after doing the Mooc about  PBL I became aware of the importance of collaboration and the use of webtools in education. PBL can really  change our way of working and Shelly  reminded us that  education and  learning  need to provide topics and issue for discussion and also for carrying out  researches.  When I was  a secondary school student  part of my tasks  were based on doing  researches and working in team but we could not work from home by using  internet or a smartphone. Now our  students can  work from home, in school and with  people living in different countries.

Project Based Learning with Technology from Shelly Sanchez Terrell

Shelly presented the main framework of what we  mean by  PBL and  provided  some tools and activities which we  can use when we work on  PBL  activities.
 

Project Based Learning with Mobile Devices from Shelly Sanchez Terrell

Why PBL?

There are many  reasons for  choosing   it .
Online you can rely on the  great  site  ttp://www.bie.org/  which can  provide you with lots of ideas and tips.

"PBL is an effective and enjoyable way to learn - and develop deeper learning competencies required for success in college, career, and civic life. "  
See   more  online   http://www.bie.org/about/why_pbl

Shelly has provided us with a webpage  where she has collected most of the resources related to   PBL:

http://www.shellyterrell.com/pbl.html

The main  steps of  PBL  can be  summarized  into these   steps:

1) starting with a  problem

2) working with the students in Group to discuss the problem 

3) reseraching the problem

4)  finding  a solution

5)  working on a presentation or  a product

The driving   question

When dealing with  step one-  we need to be able to find a  driving  question that can explain the problem    https://www.edutopia.org/blog/pbl-how-to-write-driving-questions-andrew-miller

The driving question is important as it will guide the project work.

 For the  students it creates interest and a feeling of challenge . 

Working on  PBL tasks implies  teaching  and working in a  different  way and  students will work with new tools and collaborate, they will work on different   skills and  develop skills which they need in real life.

More references are online:

http://www.bie.org/tag/Gold+Standard

http://www.aral.com.au/resources/guide.html    ( ideas about  action  research)

Some examples of   PBL in  Europe :  E-twinning

In  Europe we have  good  examples of projects like   E-twinning  :https://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/index.htm
I have not worked on this project but   I know that classes  work together on some topics and they make videos, learning  diaries and webpages  showcasing   what the students have done. 

Link to some  projects   https://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/projects.cfm

THE ISSUE OF  EVALUATION

Shelly  reminded us of the importance of  evaluation and  provided us with some links  which  need to be  checked to find out more:

 https://thedigitalshift.wikispaces.com/Rubrics

https://newtechnetwork.org/resources/assessment-in-pbl/       ( you can  find  a rubric for downloading)


THE   WEBTOOLS

After checking on line   I could  find these interesting  links for  webtools in  PBL:

https://wvde.state.wv.us/teach21/PBLTools.html

http://www.teachthought.com/learning/project-based-learning/15-tools-for-better-project-based-learning/

https://www.commonsense.org/education/top-picks/tools-for-project-based-Learning

A  good   website created by a teacher who shared tools for  PBL:

https://sites.google.com/a/livingstonisd.com/pbl-tools/


Thank you   Shelly for your  great support online: I will study more to develop  my   students' skillls and I really think that   PBL   can  be  a great   journey into learning.