A Million Thank You's to Everybody

Tech Log Week 10

Well, our voyage is drawing to a close. It’s time to pack our things, keep all the wonderful moments we’ve spent together as valuable souvenirs, and go back to our daily lives knowing that nothing will be the same again!

The luggage is heavier now, due to the tremendous weight of newly acquired knowledge and all the experiences we carry with us. Images of memorable times spent with new friends will pervade our memory forever. Thanks to our shipmaster’s (Donna Shaw’s) guidance we managed to arrive safely at our new destination: Innovation and Change through Technology (ICT Land!).

It has been a long voyage, with many places to explore - Webquests, Interactive PowerPoints, ANVILL, Learning Styles, Rubrics, ABCD Models, Lesson plans, Wikis, Nicenet, and many, many more – and we always found a safe harbor in all of them. Even if we had already visited a place, it was always gratifying to pay it a new visit and discover new things to do and ways to explore it. I couldn’t have wished for a better voyage! Everything was special, valuable and useful! I can’t wait to put it into practice.

If there were any other places I wanted to visit and explore? Well, certainly there were, as the way to ICT Land is full of wonderful surprises, but the most important is that I received a map with a lot of highlighted routes to follow on my own. Am I not an autonomous learner now?

It’s time to say goodbye but I’ll keep you all in my heart! Thank you for the excellent time we spent together!

Digital World: Teachers Today

Giving Advice

Last Week!

It's Project Day!

Tech Log Week 9

Already week 9! It’s hard to believe we have been together in this voyage for two months now. A week and a half to go, it’s all that’s left. So, let’s enjoy the rest the best we can!

For this week, the discussion focused on Learning Styles and Technology. Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Theory was not new to me; in fact it had already changed my way of teaching several years ago. I started paying more attention to my students as individuals and not just “bodies” that were sitting in front of me having to learn in exactly the same way. But MI Theory changed me in the first place! I’ve always been a reflective person. I like to think about my actions and analyze what I say and do (pretty annoying sometimes!! LOL) and understanding what my strengths and weaknesses are helps me become a better teacher. When I realized I taught according to my own strongest learning styles I understood what was keeping me away from some students. I couldn’t reach them because I didn’t understand them. From then on, I always tried to integrate activities for all learning styles in my lessons. I deeply understand bodily-kinesthetic students and I think these are perhaps the hardest to “please”. Sometimes there isn’t enough movement in our lessons, I believe. But if we change rooms and have some activities outdoors or just ask them to go somewhere and do something that will be enough. Using technology makes it easier to work with all learning styles. Each student may choose the best option for himself/herself or we can design activities to meet all intelligences. The charts included in this week’s readings give us excellent ideas and Dee Dickinson’s article presents some programs and projects that may also be explored in our classes.

This week we had to post our final project plans. Mission accomplished! It’s been fantastic working with Laura and Natalya and they gave me precious suggestions to improve my Plan. I’m looking forward to receiving Donna’s feedback and to have a chance to implement my Plan.

Learning Styles

Tech Log Week 8

This has been a pretty hard week for me, having to conciliate family holidays with work. It hasn’t been easy I tell you, but I still managed to do things, a bit late this week, but I tried to do my very best.

I really enjoyed working collaboratively with Natalya and Laura-Cristiana. They gave me valuable suggestions and I tried to analyze their Project Plans the best I could in order to help them with their final plans. As our Projects are very different, it was great reading the excellent ideas they have to use technology in class. I think this way everybody gains new insights into classroom technology use. I loved using the checklist, an excellent way to have our students assess their schoolmates, as we had already seen in previous weeks.

The Discussion and the Week Task were deeply related and I consider them to be a sort of wrap-up of this course: the importance of technology to develop autonomous learners and how to create more opportunities to use it in the classroom. I have written so much about this topic that I’m running out of ideas! :-) After all, this is week 8 and we’re coming to an end. It’s only natural that we feel much has already been said… and done!

I created a wiki for my future project and had fun discovering how to work with it. I also created a class on Nicenet and posted the first assignment. These are just drafts as everything will have to be carefully planned and organized before I can start the Project. We’ll see what will happen in a year, when I start implementing the Project.

I loved experimenting with the new tools suggested for this week. I knew some of them and had already created some materials, but I loved ANVILL and EasyTestMaker, for example. I hope we will have a chance to try some of ANVILL’s features. ;-) It’s a great way to have students practice their aural/oral skills and I think it’s awesome that it doesn’t emphasize the importance of having role models! The most important is just to communicate!

I already knew Tools for Educators, but I had never used the Comic Strip Dialogue Maker, so I had fun creating a dialogue. Hope you like it!

Summer Holidays!

Tomorrow is THE DAY!!

A Tribute to Partnership

Tech Log Week 7

This is a different week for me! I’m finally leaving to enjoy my well deserved HOLIDAYS!!!

However I’ll take everything with me to continue working! I have no idea what I’ll manage to do, but I’ll try hard not to fall behind in my work!

Weeks 6 and 7 (so far) have been mostly dedicated to creating my Project Plan. It’s giving me a great pleasure working on it and trying to picture it in my mind. But I confess it’s rather difficult to think about something that will only happen in a year’s time! I’ll be back in school only in September 2012 and so I have to write about something that is going to happen in a distant future. Portuguese schools are undergoing some major changes right now, and so I don’t know how things will be when I go back. Another problem I’m facing is that my Project is to be developed throughout the school year, and so, I’ll have to think about different strategies to use each term. This would take me at least a whole month to design, because I would have to plan my lessons for the whole year in advance. Of course this is impossible! I don’t have that time and I’m going to be on holidays the next 2 weeks. My family deserves having me around without the computer on all the time. :-) I’ll do my best to be as clear and detailed as possible, but some activities and strategies will only come to me when I go back to school.

This week’s topics are Learner Autonomy and the One-computer Classroom, something already discussed in previous weeks, although in relation to other topics. We have seen the importance of students’ autonomy and the strategies we may use to promote it. The novelty this week is the definition of autonomy. Yes, autonomy is important. Yes, it is our role, as teachers, to develop activities that make our students more and more autonomous. But what is autonomy after all? As Thanasoulas shows, the definition really depends on the theories you use to describe it. For me, the most important is to understand “that autonomy is not an article of faith, a product ready made for use or merely a personality quality or trait.” To achieve it certain conditions must be met: “cognitive and metacognitive strategies on the part of the learner, motivation, attitudes, and knowledge about language learning, i.e., a kind of metalanguage.” So, as we can easily understand, autonomy is something that we acquire and learn. It is a lifelong learning process that starts in the family (primary socialization) and never ends. Therefore I think teaching our students to be autonomous learners can be a very difficult task if we are swimming against the tide: other teachers, parents… They will be confused! However, we must never give up no matter how difficult things may be. We want our students to have their own opinions, to fight inequalities, to be active citizens and help change the world for the better.

About One-computer classrooms, well, I believe most strategies and activities we have seen and experimented so far can be used in classrooms where there is only the teacher’s computer. Even the Jeopardy games we created last week can be used as a whole class activity, having students use the classroom computer one at a time. I think teachers are well capable of dealing with this situation as this is probably everybody’s working environment, or was in the past. The most important here is to let your imagination fly! :-)

This week was also time to choose partners to work with in the next stages of our Project Plans. Hard choice, as I would love to work with everybody. It turns up I will work with Laura-Cristiana and Natalya. I’m looking forward to it! I’m sure we will learn a lot from each other!

School kills Creativity

Engaging Students

Tech Log Week 6

After the storm comes the calm! :-) After the work overload of the past weeks, comes an apparently calmer week.

I particularly enjoyed this week’s topics – Powerpoint and Interactive Classes, a way to engage students – because they’re all related to PBL activities I so much appreciate.

Although I make use of PPT presentations a lot, and so there was nothing transcendental for me in this week’s readings, still I managed to learn some new handy hints. I discovered new keyboard techniques I was not familiar with – the B key was a complete surprise ;-) and I tried it immediately!

As for the basics of slide creation, design and composition, two things caught my attention. First, the meaning of Serif and San-serif fonts (quite interesting!) and second, something I must confess I had never thought about – colorblind people. I tend to stick to black and white presentations (with some exceptions, of course, depending on my audience), but I had never ever thought about avoiding certain colors. I will pay more attention to this important question in the future!

I loved creating my own Jeopardy Game! I think students will like it, but I just loved creating it! :-) This is exactly the fun of it – being able to create our own materials, and then see the sparkle in our students’ eyes. I would love to have time to design and create my own materials for all my lessons! One day…. :-)

It’s pretty obvious the potential PPT has in engaging students. Not only is it different from having a teacher delivering the lesson all the time (imagine having to listen to the same person for 90 minutes non stop! Yuck! :-)) but we may create interactive lessons. The students don’t just sit and “enjoy” the “film” (where’s the popcorn?? LOL), they really have to participate – move around, complete tasks, predict, search for information… you name it!

And something really very important is that we need to teach our students how to create their own PPT presentations. Sometimes we just take it for granted that they know how to do it, or that they learn it in ICT classes, but reality is quite different. We mustn’t keep this knowledge to ourselves but share it with our students. I’m sure they will appreciate it and their future presentations will be much better.

I will take the rest of the week to work on my Project Plan, trying to tie up loose ends. I’ll try to write a reflection about that, if I manage to. ;-)