I started blogging when I was doing some Moocs online some years ago.
I am still blogging about education and the use of technology in my job.
I am a life-long learner and love doing what I do.
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.
"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 :
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 ofstudent 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.
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 withthe necessary toolsthey 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
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
STUDENT ENGAGEMENT MEANS LOVING DOING WHILE YOU ARE LEARNING
I think that student engagement is related to thepassion,loveandsuccess 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 withself-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:
working on projects with classes from other countries
making presentations and using new web 2.0 tools
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 areACTIVE LEARNERS. I think that we can become better Teachers if we think about our learners and love them.
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 useScreencast-o-matic (free) andSlideSpeech (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.
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!!
Sutori is a user friendly app which can be used to write stories and people can collaborate while working on them.
I have just started using it but it is really engaging and you can make nice presentations or just tell stories by using images, writing texts, uploading videos or audio recordings. You can have forums, quizzes and it is easy to share the final product you have created.
Here are some tutorials which can help you work on it for the first time, but you will not have many difficulties if you have already used Tackk or Padlet for boards and presentations.
Here you can find a nice example online : you will see that it is well-organized and it presents great potentialities for educators and students!
EDpuzzle can be considered one of the best tools online for creating lessons with videos while getting students engaged. It is the perfect tool for ELT lessons as teachers can choose the videos they want to use with their students and create questions or quizzes about them. It is useful when introducing topics or for brainstorming ideas.Students of English can benefit from listening and watching a video with questions about it.
I started using it after ZAPTION closed down last year. I could move the videos I had chosen from Zaption to EDpuzzle. It took me some hours to learn how to use it. It is user-friendly and really useful because teachers can share the videos with their learners and give them tasks to do from home.
You can find the link to some comments written by educators and here I have embedded a nice flyer informing people about the advantages of using this tool.
Links online where some educators describe the great qualities of this tool which is free :
Just some days for relaxing and reading at home. Spring is in the air and we are going to end the school year in June. It's holiday now- just some days for getting relaxed and find new ideas and inspirations for the last lessons at school. I was looking forward to them!!
It's Easter time in Italy and we'll get back to school on 19th April in my region.
I hope we will be able to rely on better days as what's happening around us is making wars but nobody can win and what remains is just sadness and death. Happy Easter to the world and the ones who are suffering because of wars. I wish we could all live in peace because too many generations of children and families have had to cope with atrocities and human beings suffer because of decisions which they had never shared.
The book provides a useful guide for people who are interested in using technology in their schools and are willing to work in a different way. I have found some interesting information which I think might be useful for developing new learning environments where learners use new tools, collaborate, share information and follow the new ideas about learning in the XXI century.
I feel it is worth sharing as more and more we are required to change our approaches and collaboration, creativity, working online with other schools are the reality of many learners and educators.
In Europe we have a lot of projects where we are asked to follow this path. This ebook is not published by a European publisher but it can help us as there are a lot of links and projects we might try to read about.
Enjoy reading it!
