domenica 28 maggio 2017

MM10 Week 3-4 Collaborative Course Design

MM10

Week 3-4

In weeks 3 and 4  we worked in teams to design a course.
We were asked to document the steps and to reflect on the process. Finally we had to share the final module of our  lesson in the topic section  using  screencast-o-matic and to publish the recording on Youtube or Vimeo.

It was a new experience as I had never worked on line with other Teachers and  we were good at it as we made interesting blocks dealing with  the issue of our  course.

Here are my  videos:

                                           TEAM COURSE COLLABORATION

 
REFLECTING ON THE PROCESS (1)
 
 
 
 
REFLECTING ON THE PROCESS  : THE  COURSE BLOCK (2)
 
 

 
Dr. Nellie  created a padlet where all the teachers who were working  in Week 3-4  posted the links to  their videos:  https://padlet.com/nelliemuller/er5kllwctsh4



Made with Padlet



We all developed  great  courses and  I think that some of us will start working online by using  this  PLATFORM: MOODLE is really great as it is user-friendly and it provides  a lot of interesting  activities for our learners.

giovedì 18 maggio 2017

MM10 Week 3 Blocks available to a Manager

WEEK  3

LEARNING ABOUT  BLOCKS......
This week we learnt a lot - these were the main objectives: 
 
  • Teaming up for the collaborative courses
  • Discuss the role of a manager of a school and in a Moodle course
  • Explore Moodle Tools in the  Manager  Practice  Area ( MPA)
  • Document the blocks available Moodle MOOC 10 main course area as a student.
  • Document the blocks available in the MPA as a manager of the course by showing how to add blocks. 
  • Work in teams to design a course.
  • Document the steps and reflect on the process using screencast-o-matic and publish the recording on Youtube or Vimeo. 
 
 
We had to work on the TEAMWORK POLICY DOCUMENT as we were a Group: we followed  Nives and created ours.  I had to choose and work on the theme which had been suggested by one teacher in the Moodle. We started working together. 
 
 
    Here is the video showing you what we created as a team in week 3-4: you will find  the descriptions of the activities in the next posts.  This is the final output of what we worked on together. I did not speak while recording as each teacher had to describe
    his/her part and I just wanted you to see what we worked on. An interesting topic which was  presented in different subjects and by many Teachers who worked together.
    I think that we worked well!!

                              WE ARE ALL IN THIS  TOGETHER

     
 
Here you can see my video for this week's activities :
 
                                            Blocks
 
 
 
We shared our videos in the  Padlet  :
 
 
 
 

Made with Padlet

domenica 14 maggio 2017

MM10: Week 2 Course Design with Activities and Resources

WEEK2

This week we were asked to reflect on the features of  an effective
course design.

We worked on the TPA ( TEACHER PRACTICE AREA). This was the practical area of the Moodle where we discovered the main
resources and activities which we can use when designing our courses. 
Here are my videos for this week's activities : 

                                                     RESOURCES IN THE TPA



                                                    ACTIVITIES IN THE  TPA



Here is the link to the padlet  created by  Nellie Deutsch  for all the videos we made:

 https://padlet.com/nelliemuller/zcvupexrjqig

sabato 13 maggio 2017

MM10 Week 2 Learning and Teaching online (2)

WEEK 2

LEARNING AND TEACHING ONLINE (2)

We continued exploring the Platform and we created some vido tutorials. Here are mine.

My video Tutorials

                                                 Audio and Video Recording



 
 
 
 
Blogging on Moodle as a Student
Adding an external Blog
 



                                                  Adding  a Post  in the Blog




MAHARA- DISCUSSION ONLINE
I am new to the use of this eportfolio named  EXABIS.
I checked the materials provided and also the links. I confess that I was puzzled because I thought of MOODLE as a LMS while it has a lot of external links.
 It is a special plugin and once you have it on the Moodle it can be used for students' and also teachers' eportfolios.
It can be used for collecting artefacts, links to the portofolio and activities which students have done. 
It is a sort of  your  ID  card with references to what you have done.
I think that by using the MOODLE the  teachers could easily have access to what the students have done and  showcased.   
I am curious about it and I will check on line what is being presented in this MOOC.
LINK  


MAHARA.(My reflections)
WHAT IS IT?
from the  WIKI 
"Mahara is an open-source e-portfolio for education. An e-portfolio is a type of web application that allows users to record and share evidence of lifelong learning."
I have never come across it, I have heard about it and  now I might try to use it.
Meanwhile and I can say that after I have used  Exabit  having a portfolio online is  really important.
In education if we have MOODLE and EXABIT we can  check the students' tasks and I really liked the activities dealing with  exporting posts in the  blog area.
I will have to learn about the best practices as I have never used eportfolios in education but they seem to be very useful.  


MOODLE AND MAHARA - EXPLAINED BY  NELLIE  DEUTSCH: GREAT VIDEO




We shared our  activities  for  WEEK  2 in this padlet :

https://padlet.com/nelliemuller/zcvupexrjqig


Made with Padlet

venerdì 12 maggio 2017

MM10:Week 1 Learning and Teaching online(2)

WEEK 2

                  Learning and Teaching online


Week 2 was divided  into 2 sections. Participants had to conduct discussions on teaching and learning and  practiced  using Moodle resources and activities. We were automatically enrolled in the Teacher Practice Area (TPA) course where we were given teacher rights to generate resources  and activities .
 
We could learn  a lot  how to do some important things on the  Moodle Platform:
  • Learn to record audio and video using PoodLL, navigate and update personal Moodle profile, and post to the online discussion forums.
  • Discuss the meaning of  student  engagement
  • Exabis Eportofolio  and  Mahara
  • Blog on Moodle and beyond throughout the course
  • Teaching as a way to learn by creating video tutorials and sharing the videos with others. 
  • Collaborate with team members and decide on roles. 
 
 
DISCUSSING ONLINE
 
AUTHENTIC LEARNING- MY POST
If we check online we will find plenty of ideas and documents  related to this issue.
From one of the documents I have found online, I can say  that it is related to motivation and  real world problems (see the document I have seen   https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI3009.pdf )
Educators have been involved in this issue as more and more knowledge is becoming complex and  often we cannot rely on reliable sources of information but  there are also  sources of information which are reliable.
When we teach our  students we do need to teach them about  sources and try to know more about who owns the website/ papers. As new digital tools have been reshaping our Learning environment we need to know that we can build fake news and  learners might not be aware of them. 
Similarly, we need  to or rather we should equip all the learners with the necessary tools they need to be able to use :  these tools are " critical thinking  skills" so that everybody can manage. I would add that it goes beyond technology and it involves the learners who become " searchers " and life-long learners
LOTS OF IDEAS CAN BE FOUND ONLINE
 
MY REPLY TO NIVES
Hi Nives,
It is important to teach our students how to work and be engaged and just from the first years spent at school they should be guided into thinking deeply and asking themselves  questions about what they are doing. It is an approach which  is  based on  self-discovery, working in team and as a pair and they learn by making predictions and making also mistakes. They learn in a different way because they are provided with a general framework but they will have to work  to develop their own knowledge.
I think that  PBL can offer a lot of interesting  tasks which we can develop with our students and then they will be able to follow new paths into learning. If they learn by heart and don't work on what they've acquired they will be losers. They learn if they are able to present a poem or  a writer by writing an article or  making a video about what they have just studied. They will have to read, choose what they are interested in and write about it.
I did a MOOC about competences and how to teach and evaluate them: teaching literature meant not only studying   a poet but it meant working  asking questions, finding  links and think about now and the past. It means that students had to  write about their experience and they could enter the texts and the many voices behind them.
Critical thinking  skills are high order skills and thus it is  difficult to teach them but if we  start  to develop them we will be teachers who are helping learners to develop and write in a better way.
In ELT we work on different  skills and  when classes are motivated we can help them develop into  higher order skills .
 I follow Shelly Sanchez online and she provides a lot of tips for making  language learning  different
  
 
MY POST ABOUT  STUDENTS' ENGAGEMENT
STUDENT ENGAGEMENT  MEANS LOVING DOING WHILE YOU ARE LEARNING
I think that student engagement is related to the passion, love and success in what they are doing. This implies that the students who have difficulties   risk failing if we  do not provide them with the right tools, which in education should be in relationship with self-esteem." If I make mistakes is not good but  I can get over difficulties." Every teacher should know this but often we demotivate  learners. 
Here some sources which I used to give my defition:
 
First of all students don't feel they are under pressure while they are Learning and they love doing  tasks and activities which have been presented in class.
The role of the teacher becomes the one of the guide, the tutor as  in most tasks students are free and work on their own while working in projects.
Teachers work with them and support them, they monitor the progress and what they are doing thanks to the use of technology. 
Here is an interesting  video which summarizes what  engagement means to me:
 
 
 
There are many teaching  possibililies to get them engaged:
  1. working on projects with classes from other countries
  2. making presentations and using new  web 2.0 tools
  3. choosing a topic that might  interest the students and who might decide they want to work on it together
We should also teach our students how to use the modern web 2.0 tools and learn about  critical thinking skills.
The teacher is important but it is the learners who are the ones who decide and work on their Learning process.
They are ACTIVE LEARNERS. I think that we can become better Teachers if we think about our learners and love them.
 
 
 
 

martedì 9 maggio 2017

MM10 Week 1 Introduction and Video Tutorials( 1)

MM10

Last year  I started  MM9 but I had to give up. I therefore decided to take the session in May which was presented online by Dr. Nellie Deutsch.
Moodle Mooc 10 was  a new experience for me as I had to work together with Teachers from all over the  world. The project was based on the idea of collaboration.



This is my first post  about  WEEK1.

WEEK 1 Introduction




We were asked  to introduce ourselves, to team up and to think about  collaboration in the  CPA ( Course Practice Area).
We were also guided online about how to create  tutorials and videos while working on the Moodle Platform.
For online courses and topics we were suggested checking online:https://alison.com/learn

We had to watch  video tutorial  on how to use Screencast-o-matic (free) and SlideSpeech (free).  I was familiar with both but  I must  confess that Screencast-o-matic is my favourite one.


We learnt  about  how to use a text to speech program such as SlideSpeech so that we could add the notes to our slides or we could use text to speech programs to convert your text to MP3 so that we could  add it to your screencast-o-matic file. 

Here are some interesting ones:

 
Video  Tutorials  shared by  Nellie Deutsch in the
Mooc



 

Week 1-  Video Tutorials and Activities
We started working online and we could explore  some features of  Moodle by using screencasting and uploading the videos on the Youtube. Here are my  tutorials:

My Profile on the Moodle




Layout of MM10


The Rich Editor on Moodle




I started feeling a bit  worried about the " journey into Moodle" but I felt I could manage and tried to work hard , most of the weekend was spent online!!