ISTE 2018

I am part of a community of educators who love learning about technology. I am not an expert but I am learning online thanks to great teachers who have deepened their knowledge in technology and  teach online  sharing their  tricks for using some apps and web tools.

ISTE is an international event which is visited by many teachers and educators. Last year I could not follow any post or hashtags. This year I could and I really enjoyed being part of the group  of  people who were not at the conference in Chicago. The community has a name" #NOTATISTE and  educators have shared ideas, posts and interesting news about the event which is not online but thanks to modern technology we can learn about.

First of all I would like to say that thanks to Peggy George I could see more resources  which were presented in the conference. The Live Binder she has presented in one webinar  before the event made me think that this year I should be online. I followed the  Google Plus community online and it was great!

Click here to open this binder in a new window.





Shelly Terrell  has often talked about this event online and in her posts so I cannot but say that  these important educators have made a change in my  CPD.

 http://teacherrebootcamp.com/2018/06/19/iste18giveaways/

Kathleen Morris has also helped me enter this world, which is  new to me: she wrote a great post

 https://www.theedublogger.com/2018/06/11/notatiste-2018/

Social networks have been spreading news and interesting ideas :

Adobe Spark is one of my favourite  tools :

RT ClassTechTips: RT AdobeEdu: We're LIVE from #ISTE18 with Monica Burns of ClassTechTips. We'll be discussing Adobe Spark Classroom Activities and more! #NotAtISTE18 #NotAtISTE https://t.co/5CCInD59y6

— SimpleK12 (@SimpleK12) 26 giugno 2018

I wish to thank Pam Hubler for her interesting post where I could find most of the resources online I need to check:

https://www.spedtechgeek.com/edtech-blog/how-to-reduce-your-fomo-when-notatiste18


Shared ideas in some blogs which I have found online while I was checking the community today:

http://mustech.net/2018/06/notatiste18-fun-takeaways/


There are many tools which I would like to use and which I think might offer great teaching opportunities for  enhancing my students' learning:

https://wakelet.com/   mainly used for collecting resources

https://flipgrid.com/

I have just registered to Flipgrip which is now free, this was the great piece of news  which I had found online some days ago.

I will also try to learn more about  Google Apps as I do use most of them but  I am not an expert.
I have already appreciated the great use of  the new Google Sites to document student learning:

  https://sites.google.com/gtrainerdemo.prtaylor.ca/learning/home


Finally my video documenting my journey into ISTE 2018: I was not in Chicago but I have learnt a lot also from home:

   

This summer I will have thousands of documents and blogs  to read about as  I have bookmarked so many interesting posts and tweets.

Thanks to the community of the #NotAtIste18: without any help I would have never thought that  I could learn about  ISTE while living in Italy!!

Summer has arrived.....it is time to think about myself and making plans for September

I am a lazy person and  when summer arrives it means that  I can relax for some weeks and be less  stressed .Every year I end the last days of the school year with some regrets.   I wish I could have worked better and provided better learning opportunities for the less able students and the ones who want to learn more.  Sometimes we cannot do much but  I think we should work better for the ones who are struggling  learners  and be able to provide different types of  activities for the different  learners we have.

Now it is time to reflect, tidy up and read.  I read a lot online: blogs, articles and also posts from many educators I can follow online. I recently bought an ebook by Shelly Terrell Sanchez and I will read it online. She is a great teacher and a technology expert.  I regularly follow her in most of the presentations online she makes and her blog posts are really inspiring.

During the first weeks of July  I am going to finish some Moocs which I had  started and did not have the time to finish. It is part of my CPD  and I cannot but learn online since in the last years we have had some problems in my family and I had to decide to spend the summer at home.

In spite of this I am now planning  new activities for next year:  I am working with another  teacher and we  are responsible for  Cambridge  IGCSE  exams. We started in September  2017 and  this  autumn I will be online to learn more about the best strategies to help our learners.  It is something  new which I like doing. This summer  I am going to plan part of the activities and check the materials we might use in the first term.


I will read some literature - I am going to do more about  short stories and the modern literature  for my next year's students. Hopefully, there are plenty of  resources which are free online and which can be used.

I will explore  Europeana , the European platform which  I worked on in one Mooc - https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en.  I will also share what I have learnt online as  I found a lot of interesting activities and tools which we  can use in order to work on projects and lessons dealing with the European heritage.


Some conferences online will take place this summer and I will try to follow  them, althought  I am living in Europe and many are in the USA or  speakers will present their topics online while I am sleeping in Italy.

Summer can be a source of   interesting ideas and help me  recharge the batteries.

Summer is the season of the year in which I am ready to work on myself to get engaged and find tips and suggestions which I will share with my friends online and in my school.

Enjoy the summer!

Immigrant issues, children, Europe and the world

The globalized world has seen  changes in the  conditions of many people- in most cases people have achieved better living conditions.
However, great economic crisis and  wars have made the life of many people worse. This has happened and is still happening everywhere.
For years now our seas have become routes for escaping from violence, wars and  for finding a better place where to live. Italy, Greece and Spain have been reached by many poor people hoping for a better future. In some cases they live separated from the others, waiting for a special visa to continue their journey.

What is really sad is to see  how many families try to come to Europe or  leave from Mexico to reach the USA and their children are often not respected since they have no rights.

Some days ago we had to see the images of  young children crying because they had been separated from their mothers in the USA. They were left alone and who knows what will happen to them.

Time created a special cover to describe the situation, a  young child crying  in front of  President Trump. You can see some  photos taken by the same photographer who  took many  pictures describing what  is happening  on the border  between the Usa and Mexico
 http://time.com/longform/john-moore-getty-photo-separation/?xid=tcoshare

An early look at next week’s cover, "Yearning to Breathe Free," by Barry Blitt: https://t.co/xlzrHEXdNN pic.twitter.com/24SRk1AqlQ

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) 21 giugno 2018

Similarly also in Italy we have had a lot of young  children who had left their country to reach places where they could find a better life. Some had left their  families home and were hoping to go to the northern countries in Europe, but they had not been given permission to leave Italy. Often we have babies and mothers arriving here and they are separated from their husbands and fathers.

What is often forgotten is the fact that children should not be saparated from their families and that they have the right to education.

We do need to remember that  'No Man is an Island'  and these words borrowed from a poem by John Donne -https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/island.html-  remind us that we are  part of the same  world and that every child has the right to have a better life  and should be given access  to education.

If you watch the news or listen to the news you will see that the tragedy in our seas is continuing and that more and more we cannot cope with these tragedies. Educators need to help children and students to reflect on these global issues. The  families are here or want to come and live in richer  countries because they are in need. If we reject them we will not cope with the great contradictions of our age.  Italy was a  poor country in the past and many left for Germany,Switzerland , France and the USA. We hoped to find an open door. Most were given access and found  a better life  abroad.
The future of the world is in being open to accept the others.

7Cs Framework EMMA MOOC

Designing Online Courses with the 7Cs Framework

Two years ago I did  a course on the Platform Emma and it was about the  7Cs Framework.
It was about  the use of technology and how to implement learning and designing learning in order to better education.
Today we are involved in a revolution which is reshaping our way of working.  Online courses are offered to university students, educators and also many Moocs are based on some of the principles described by using this term.

If you search online you may come across many sources:

7 cs update from Grainne Conole



More information can be found online by following the link

https://opennetworkedlearning.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/the-7cs-of-learning-design.pdf

Pedagogic aspects v7 from Open University Learning Design Initiative

In the Mooc run by Emma we were given a lot of sources and tips for designing activities :

Flexible blended learning: A snapshot of online and mobile learning material formats and tips from Media Zoo on
Vimeo.


I also learnt about new platforms and LMS: here is  the presentation of Cloudschool



Cloudschool.org 
Explainer from Cloudschool on Vimeo.

Storyboards were  introduced:

In the final activity I was asked to work on my course online and to provide a sort of plan/design which was based on the principles and ideas presented in the  Mooc.

Here is the outline of my course:



I learnt that online teaching  can enhance learning if you are able to work  on the framework and the output and you know about most of the webtools and technologies.

Hopefully educators are now sharing  ideas and supporting  educators.  

QR Codes

Two years ago I came across QR Codes used in education.  The tutor, a Turkish teacher of English, was working in  a Mooc and explained  how we could use them in education since our students are today equipped with mobile phones and use technology in almost every activity they do. She said that she had used them with her university students. The Mooc was focussed on practical ideas and tips about  how to use  QR Codes.

 I did not do the Mooc, I just watched some videos online since I was busy online with other  courses  but I saw some webinars where educators used them in the next months . I realized that QR Codes can help us in education and also in teaching languages since we can provide links and any task we want just by using a simple bar code. I was  surprised and felt that I needed to learn more about them.

Here is the Live Binder created by a great educator Steven V. Anderson: he has provided most of the links to the software and also some  ideas  about how to use them.

Click here to open this binder in a new window.



Nick Peachey has explained about QR Code Genarator in the video  and it is  a clear explanation of how we can use this simple tool in education.

 

The next step is to try to use QR codes with my students. Since they depend on their smartphones it will not be too difficult.  I might  try them next year and hope they will work better.