LEARNING TO TEACHING ON LINE # LTTO COURSERA SUMMER 2015

Coursera:  LTTO - LEARNING TO TEACH ON  LINE  MOOC  Course by the  UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH WALES  https://www.coursera.org/unsw

Reflections of a learner and a teacher:
LTTO  is a must for anyone interested in Online Learning.
August  2015
My  reflections and some suggestions for anyone who might want to learn about  it.
The journey had started six weeks ago. I  had decided to take up the course which seemed to challenge me. I am not tech-savvy and I work online because technology is now part of our  work, and it is  influencing our  life as educators and teachers. I have learnt a lot now thanks to Coursera where I did a lot of courses  in the past. These courses have given me ideas and prompts about the best ways for implementing my teaching. 
This course was " the best one " I have ever done online.
Here are the interviews of the two tutors that can  tell you how they have planned and thought about it:

They were great guides for us and planned everything in the best way to enable us to work well online.
I must confess that  I got engaged in every activity they had planned so that I would suggest  more people take this course when they plan to do it again.
First of all follow this hashtag # LTTO and  Twitter so that you can learn about this  MOOC. These are the name of the great Professors who worked online and  helped us carry out our journey into Online Learning:
Negin Mirriahi

Simon McIntyre


This is the course syllabus: 

Module 1 What is online teaching and why is it important? An overview of online ethnographies and technologies and their place in contemporary education.

Module 2 Open and closed technologies: An examination of the pros and cons of the use of open web 2.0 tools vs. institutionally supported systems in educational contexts, and an examination of relevant activities.

Module 3 Planning online learning: Understand how to define your learning outcomes, develop appropriate online activities and assessment strategies, and to choose the right technology to use. These themes are continually revisited throughout the remainder of the course.

Module 4 Online learning activities: Types of online activities and teaching scenarios. An overview and exemplification of a range of fully online, blended and mobile learning scenarios, online resources and activities. Issues concerning accessibility and inclusivity are also explored.

Module 5 Online assessment strategies: An explanation of aligning assessment with learning outcomes and designing assessments for learning. Considerations of using technology to enhance assessments – benefits to the instructor and the students are discussed. Design and purpose of standards-based assessment and rubrics, and issues concerning assessment feedback and practical affordances provided by technologies are also explored.

Module 6 Online resources: What role can online resources play in effectively supporting student learning? Understand how to find and use a range of Open Educational Resources (OER) in your class, and explore options for creating and your own online resources. Issues of Creative Commons and Copyright in online education are also discussed.

Module 7 Engaging and motivating students: How to manage your time online as an instructor. Best practices are discussed and identified for building an online community of learners.

Module 8 Evaluation strategies: What are some evaluation methods for determining whether your course design change has been effective? How can learning analytics from the use of online technologies help you identify that your course design is helping meet your intended aims and outcomes? Suggestions are offered for ways of gaining feedback from students to inform your continued teaching practice and pedagogical decisions.

The module were presented in the best way: videos, self-reflections online and personal development online after watching the videos.
Personal research could be  carried out after we had done some more  activities online and we were sent  a long list of links dealing with the points we might need to develop.  I have bookmarked a lot of links and I will have to continue  learning since there is going to be a great change in education online. There is so much to learn and web tools are now a sort of obsession: which to use? How? Which can work better?
More questions : open LMS or not?  Now I am doing an introduction course to  Moodle to see how it can work and if I can decide to use it.

What made the course interesting were also the great discussions online: we had a lot  of good students who  posted a lot of comments  in the forums and this  made it an enriching experience.

We had two activities to prepare  which were  based on what we had been doing and I wrote a specific blog online as  a teacher blog to get my students more engaged.  The project has just started but this course has given me a lot of interesting ideas and tools that I am going to use when I get  back to school  in September. The blog, padlet and other  web 2.0 tools will help me teach on line.
I am pleased to say that Coursera with this  MOOC  has really  widened my horizon and I have met a great number of  teachers  like me who are carrying out  a  CPD and are interested in learning.
This is the link to my  blog: it is still under construction but  I have devised an online activity about  WW1 to be done with some students in the new school  year.
http://learningtogetherinenglish.blogspot.it/ 

I would also  like to leave this interesting link where they have  collected our  interesting links related to this course:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yujGIqATN953Et6bUaptzx16viJPScdlLfODMKmKnIw/edit#gid=0

Some teachers have also  written their learning diary online: this is a great online diary by an English  teacher. 
Here is the link to  Hannah Ruthryreman's blog:
 My learning diary
She has done a great job! Thanks  Hannah for sharing the great experience that you have now  acquired.  
In particular I liked this section of the blog that she has written and shows us how she is engaged in  CPD : 

https://hannahruthtyreman.wordpress.com/category/classroom-practice/technology-classroom-practice/

We have been given a long list of  tools and blogs for learning more. This is a great   blog which  was  shared on Twitter:

http://nikpeachey.blogspot.gr/p/my-downloads.html


I am also aware that there are  a lot of issues that are important when working  on line.
I came across this  interesting article on line about  CREATIVE  COMMONS: 

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2015/08/copyright-and-creative-commons-explained.html#.VdeM9vntmko


So thanks to the Tutors and people who worked on line for developing this " cool " course and I am looking forward to the next session online!!
Thanks to the Community of learners who worked with us.

MOODLE MOOT VIRTUAL CONFERENCE ON LINE 2015: MOODLE AS A DIGITAL BOOK

8th August 2015

Moodle as a Digital Book

 

Eduardo Lina (http://eduardolina.blogspot.co.il/) made an interesting presentation on line by providing interesting ideas about the best way for working on line while teaching in a different way last weekend. 

The interesting LMS he uses is MOODLE  ( https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/Main_page) which is a learning platform that enables teachers to do courses on line for their professional development and which is now  widely used in many universities and educational institutions all over the world.
I  used  Moodle for my  professional development on line in Italy this year and I really enjoyed working on the platoform in two courses: the tutors  presented a lot of  interesting activities with WEB 2.0 tools and  I  could imagine that  this environment could be  a good  platform also for teaching  young  learners and enhancing  learning.


The presentation by Eduardo  was provided on line thanks to Nellie Deutsch
( https://www.wiziq.com/nelliedeutsch) who worked hard to organize the three day on line conference   together with other teachers  from all over the world and wiziq.com.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L2K9gyo3gnyKayDkVVxguZ1D3toB5aedSJvAdq6xJR0/edit#heading=h.1xvvcz8blxm8

I have seen some of the presentations on line and I am going to see more in the next  days.
I have decided to focus on this part of the  conference on line  by Eduardo Lima as I got entrapped into the ideas  he shared with us. We are now moving into a new age for learning and most of the activities  we plan should   engage our  learners while they can choose how to work and decide also what they are interested in. 
While at school we are still paper-based ,here Eduardo showed a more engaging  Learning  Environment where his students could interact, work on line, carry out  reserches and  reflect. A great point in the presentation was his reference to the digital skills so that our learners can use the new  Technologies while doing their homework from home too.

Eduardo presented his digital book after describing how his country , Israel,  is now pushing teachers into the digital age.  I would add that this is now the  trend everywhere: last spring and this  summer  I did two MOOCs run by the European Schoolnet  Academy - http://www.europeanschoolnetacademy.eu/- where more than 3,000 Teachers worked on Tablets and later on Games for learning about new and better ways of teaching in the XXI century.

The digital book Eduardo  has  created  is a great tool, a project which he is going to implement this year, but it is  a tool  that might be interesting  for  any language teacher because  he could choose what videos to embed in the  LMS  and  he could manage to provide students with materials on line which you can choose to upload to the Platform.
What I particularly liked were his ideas about  creating a virtual classroom where students could be  engaged and work on their own , while the teacher  can guide them and check how they interact and what they can do on line thanks to posts and the forums. The teacher monitors the forums and can delete inappropriate posts  or comments.
MOODLE is  a really versitile platform because  you can  add a lot of functions to the structure of your course on line and it is free.
He said that you can use a lot of tools and upload a lot of files, documents, it can work with Google so  it is a great modern  tool that  most  schools  should have for  having online courses or  also blended learning or  flipped classroom.  

Eduardo underlined the best qualities of  Moodle in his presentation  by talking about the integration of Moodle with many  tools.




He also reminded us about the importance of  engagement for learners.
What he described and showed us on line was really a new way for teaching because it was based on the students' interests: he devised activities for writing and presenting themselves by providing  tutorials for the new tools and links. He also thought about blogs to be written on line by the students  by using Blogger. 


Since I am studying about the best ways to implement my teaching I have just  applied to do a Mooc about  using  MOODLE -  https://learn.moodle.net/ . 

We are learning in a new environment now :  I wish to thank Eduardo and all the  Teachers who worked on the  VIRTUAL CONFERENCE  LINE  because I realized that although  education is not financed in the best way in many countries, I have seen that a lot of  teachers are continuing  learning on line to offer better learning content and better and engaging lessons.

Now I have just taken up a Moodle course as a beginner learner on line  and I am  going to try to create a project and see how it might look like.

I have also learnt  that I could set up a new Moodle account  in the cloud:

   https://moodle.com/cloud/

Thanks a lot  to Eduardo and his project which I have just seen  on line.