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.
 
 
 
 

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