The Journey » elearning

eLearning 4 Educators

carlaarena — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:31:11 +0000

One week, or maybe more, considering the Pre-session part. The online session for Brazilian Educators I started to moderate this week is in full steam. Those common words pop up here and there, overwhelming,scared, no time, busy. All part of any educator’s life even when they are not talking about technology. I’m in awe to see the willingness to succeed, this hunger for understanding that these educators have shown. The best part is to connect to educators in different parts of Brazil in diverse educational settings plus my dear friends at Casa Thomas Jefferson, the binational center I work for in Brazil.
I can’t think of the many times I tried to inspire my fellow workmates, to let them see what was out there in the online sphere that they and their learners would benefit from…Well, I guess it’s a matter of being ready, mature to face this totally new space for them.
Of course, the beginning is daunting, but I’ve been trying to soothe more agitated souls who feel uncomfortable, insecure to get started. Even before reading the tutorials, “listening to me”, some feel that “this” is not for them. Yet, most of them realize it is! They are grasping what the Web is about, they’re adding information to our wiki, they’re already blogging, they are doing the weekly tasks, interacting in forums, making new human and neural connections, going on Web2.0 Safaris, talking at edmodo. I, as a moderator, am there to give my helping hand, but letting them get their feet wet. Some of my friends have finally that I’m not extraterrestrial, and this is world is closer to them and to their learners in a way that they could never imagined if it weren’t for their own experiential learning.
This to prove that workshops can trigger interest, but living, feeling what it is like as a learner, can truly make the difference.
Below is just a sample of our collaborative effort. I showed them an image of Web2.0 tool logos before they read or say anything related to it. They said what that represented to them. I added my comments today after letting them interact to each other.
Note: I just loved using docstoc for the first time!
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Webtools4educators_week1 – Get more Business Documents
Dear all,
Here’s what everybody has written so far in this forum as for Friday morning. I compiled the main points so that you have a better view of the thoughts of the group as a whole.
Very interesting points of view. What I wanted to know here was really how much you knew about the Web2.0. From what I realized, nobody mentioned it. Just Lueli after doing her homework, the Web2.0 Safari! That’s great, because everyone here has the chance of a fresh start. Of course, we might have seen some, or very few, of the web2.0 tools shown in the image. Do you think I know them all? OF COURSE NOT! Do we need to know them all?
Well, we would need a lifetime and maybe some more reincarnated lives to be able to handle all that is out there. All that without sleeping! So, no, you won’t get to know most of them here. You’ll bump into some as we go along and after the course is over. Yes! The main idea was to make you realize that there’s a whole new world out there to be explored, conquered with persistence and confidence. And, I guess, this session is the place for it, mainly giving you confidence to get out there! The tools, you’ll always be able to find. The purpose here is to start the connections that enable interactions as many of you mentioned in your reflections, leading you to social learning, mentorship, partnership. You’re not alone on the web. As soon as you start your online networking, you build up your online presence, you’ll take larger steps with a confident attitude, for you’ll learn where to ask for help, how you can organize yourselves in the midst of this sea of information, how you can aggregate dispersed resource into a meaningful one. You’ll learn to be a learner again. You’ll learn that what you preach to your students about the importance of making mistakes, also holds true for you in this brave new online world.That’s the idea!
No, Pat Fleury and Lueli, you’ll not be illegal digital immigrants looking for a green card. Your green card has been officially issued this week! And you’ve already started this enriching trip to whatever destination you set for yourselves and your learners. Soon, you will all get your digital citizenship as netizens!
Overwhelming, Gabi, Telma, and all, sure! My question is: how to turn overwhelming web2.0 tools into effective, pedagogically sound resources for your 21st century classrooms?
A big yes to you, Kelly! The new online endeavor is everybody’s chance to find out you can do unimaginable things with your never ending creativity. Right, Pat Faustino?
I agree with you, Daniele, that we need to put our classroom walls down and truly connect to our digital natives and immigrants in ways that truly make sense. Just like Cecília mentioned, we need to see what is going on around us. We need to be part of it.
True, Cleverson, it’s a complex system, but let us embrace it because, as Vini points out, being digital is not an alternative any more, it’s the way to go.
Don’t get me wrong. No! We won’t neglect what we’ve done for our students and for us so far. We won’t feel small facing this huge online space. No! We’ll make it part of what we are as teachers and what we believe education is all about. Adaptation to this process will take a while, we might change our views, take other directions, but we’re already there!
After all we’ve been exploring this week, what do you feel is the biggest difference between what was once the Net and what is has become? They call it Web2.0, but names are just names…I want to know how do you feel what’s out there nowadays differs from the past online world?
Uff! Guess I got excited with all that you’ve been writing!

Disconnected, Connecting, Connected

carlaarena — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:43:45 +0000

Time, overwhelmed, overloaded, chaotic are some of the frequently used words in the Connectivism online session that has just started with Stephen Downes and George Siemens.
Due to hurricane Ike and the need to evacuate from Key West, I was disconnected at first and enjoyed some quality time with my family. Then, I started connecting, reading things here and there. Now, I’m in full swing, interacting with some in the MOODLE forums, Facebook group and reading some interesting blog posts. Still a lot is needed for my synapses to make sense. So, here’s my take. I won’t complain about being overwhelmed, overloaded, time-constrained, I will take another direction. I’ll set two goals that I want to achieve during these weeks of Connectivism even with limited hours on my day.
My two main goals will be:

Get out of the comfort zone of my circles of friends and network, and connect to other participants’ ideas, reflections. I tend to stick to the Webheads, my dear ones, and I still can do it, but I’ll try to fit in other circles of like-minded educators.

Learn about learning and find ways to effectively apply what I apprehend from the Connectionist principles into my e-moderating practices. If possible, trying to adapt some of it to the Web Tools 4 Educators session which is just beginning.

With almost 2,000 participants in this open course, only by having an individual focus with attainable goals, will we have real chances of thriving and making the best out of this networked experience.
PS: I love to observe how the connections are being made and the roles people take in such an open-ended approach of a course. Interesting to say the least.

Social Bookmarking

carlaarena — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:24:13 +0000

I just prepared this slideshow and would love some feedback. Did I miss something something essential to add to it? I’d love some feedback as to make it a nice one that can be shared with learners and educators, as well. There are some wonderful resources on social bookmarking. However, most of the time they are related to one service or the other. I wanted to give a broader view of the concept and why it can be so powerful in knowledge construction.

Online Icebreakers

carlaarena — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:44:39 +0000

When you are open to explore what out there, ideas, resources seem to converge. Coincidence, convergence, whatever…The fact is that for the past days I’ve been giving a lot of thought on how to best engage, hook students up front from the beginning of their e-learning journey. I’m devising an online course for Brazilian educators and the point is that if they don’t get excited with the possibilities ahead of them, how could they inspire their own learners? So, I’ve been reading, thinking and exploring a lot and just yesterday I read two interesting blog posts on how to use starters, grabbers, icebreakers in the beginning of a course. It doesn’t mean it needs to be online. How could we use attention grabbers to hook our learners, to have them motivated to take the risk, to collaborate, to inspire them to go beyond?
As always, Michelle Martin’s Web2.0Wednesday idea has a perfect timing to what I’ve been mulling over. So, here are a few digital ideas for the classroom we could use to have a grand beginning: Kevin Shadix suggests hooking learners with simple stories. To do that, for example, you could use Slideshare just like he did.

Hooking learners with a simple story « the Shady Learning Blog via kwout

Rupa talks about the use of comics as an attention grabber. You could use ToonDoo, for example, to produce and customize your own comics, or even have your learners produce a comic strip to introduce themselves. Cool! Need to test that.
If they are a Face2Face group, I’d ask to take a photo of their partners and using a mobile, they could send it to a Flickr account (Flickr gives you an email to send photos to) with the title having the name of the person, and some thing curious the photographer found about their peers.
This could also be done using Picwing . Beforehand, just set up an email at picwing that students can send photos to, like classxxx at picwing.com. Then, students can send their photos to this email with their names and a curious fact in the Subject line. Another possibility is to ask them to email a photo of their favorite room, place, city, etc. This would be really fun!
One more idea with photos: students could choose one of the geeks drawn by Extra Life and blog it saying why they chose that specific geek. The photos are copyrighted, but we could get in touch with the artist to see if he could let us use it for educational purposes. I’d love to see this into practice.
Wow, ideas are popping up!
Another one that I tried with a group of moderators in the beginning of the year and it worked well was recording our introductions in Voicethread. We, then, could invite learners to add their intros and ask questions to the instructor.
Here’s what we did:

Well, some ideas that might help me and others! There are tons to add. What’s your idea? We could certainly make a pool of nice web2.0 icebreakers!
Just got this nice idea from Nik Peachy. He suggested the site Yearbookyourself to make up a version of you in old times. Totally fun! Here’s one of the results:

Yearbook Yourself – carla arena’s Homeroom via kwout

UMapper – U Map it!

carlaarena — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:15:15 +0000

Vacation, trips. Maps are part of our reference, our guide.
Just found out about UMapper and couldn’t resist testing it. I had fun playing with it, getting different perspectives from the city I love. It’s easy to use and has great potential for the classroom, as students can collaborate to create a roadmap for others to learn more about their countries, hometown, or neighborhood.
Here’s my first example, but I plan to explore more and add photos and more information about the city of my heart, Brasilia!
UMapper / Explore / Brasilia via kwout

The Web2.0 in 64 seconds

carlaarena — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:04:57 +0000

Hard to explain something so complex in seconds, but the Web2.0Wednesday activity pushed me to try, to see what came up, how I saw the Web2.0.
Here it goes. It’s certainly an oversimplification of reality, but the essence is there.

Replying to Comment Challengers

carlaarena — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:43:31 +0000

Dear Colin, Inês, Sue and Kevin,
Here’s my reply to you all about the Comment Challenge. Thanks for inspiring me to go even further now!

The Comment Challenge is Just Beginning

carlaarena — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:34:57 +0000

We all wish we had more time to explore, comment, post. Not perfect worlds, but this month was filled of ideas on how we can keep the flow of conversations into a deeper, more meaningful level in our blogs. My participation was imperfect, but this doesn’t mean I haven’t gone far. The comment challenge girls, Sue Waters, Kim Cofino, Michele Martin, and Silvia Tosano were just everywhere showing by skillful commenting strategies how to keep distributed conversations aggregated in clusters of meaning. Participants had a variety of levels of engagement, but each learned what he/she needed to apprehend at the time of the challenge.
For me, the challenge was just the spark for further explorations. No, it’s not over! Finding ways and time to connect is a multi-faceted process. You go far, there’s even more to discover. Ideally, it’s time now for us to keep using the skills, strategies, ideas we’ve been exploring in the blogosphere. However, I feel we should go on exploring possibilities as a group as we’ve done so far. I don’t know how, but maybe still using the tag and the cocomment sharing system to highlight new blogs, interesting posts, comments worth reading? Well, I’m speaking up my mind…
My top 5 lessons from this wonderful commenting experience?

Connections keep coming in different ways
A simple idea can take a bunch of very busy educators to go beyond, always beyond
Keep commenting. New nodes of learning are formed by the connections generated in the comment area.
There are people interested in what you have to say. Keep blogging.
I’m thinking of a totally new approach to next year’s blogging4educators Electronic Village workshop due to the input I’ve gotten from the challenge.

I’d like to thank everybody who enriched my professional development, my days, my life with such meaningful comment connections!
The challenge has just begun.

Five Comments in 30

carlaarena — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:00:39 +0000

Yesterday I tried hard to follow the Comment Challenge guidelines and write 5 comments in 5 minutes as suggested by Toni Tallent.
It certainly gave me the dimension of how long we spend to comment! I tried to keep my comments shorter than usual, though I also didn’t want to leave something totally shallow like “great post”, or “excellent idea”…It doesn’t add much to the blogger’s idea. I have the principle of commenting only if I have something to add to the blogger’s post.
I tried hard, but then realized the issues involved in commenting:

On most of the blogs, there are different commenting patterns. Some are moderated, some are not, some have verification word, some don’t.
Bandwidth is an issue. How long does the page take to load? Is it too heavy on videos?
Technical glitches mainly when you post a comment and I don’t know why it’s not submitted…
The kind of reasoning you’re going through to react to a blog post may lead you to take much longer you intended to.
The size of a blog post matters! Keyboarding skills, as well.

Though I failed as for me the challenge became 5 comments in 30 minutes, I could see something interesting happening:

If I became more straightforward in my comments, I could reply to more blogs.
It led me to comment on blogs that I don’t comment and just love the people writing there, like in Julie Lindsay’s e-Learning blog
It’s interesting to just sit, write and speak up your mind.
I’m terrible managing my time!

My strategy for this challenge was just to go to our cocoment page and choose the blogs that appealed to me in terms of blog title or post title, which shows the importance of both! I love to read “Quest for Excellence” anecdote. When I commented on”blogger in Middle Earth” I said I didn’t have a strategy as Ken had set up for himself, but, in fact, thinking back I did as I just mentioned above. It also shows how diverse our styles are. Ken planned everything ahead, I just started doing it!
Ken pointed out to commenting on Michele’s blog. I had the same problem and lost a lot of time there because my comment just wouldn’t go through, I rewrote the comment, and I guess she never got it… Without even knowing, Michele might be losing some of her readers due to technical glitches with her blog host(?).
It’s missing one blog here! Easy to retrieve it through tracking “my conversations” in my cocoment space. So, the last blog I visited for the challenge was Kevin’s Meandering Mind with his inspiring post about his online tutoring experience.
Maybe 5 in 5 is not for me, but definitely was an eye opener!

Connections Brazil x Trento

carlaarena — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:55:15 +0000

I had this lovely feedback from Seth, whom I’ve been following for a while. He always has great ideas for the classroom and shares his technical expertise with the Webhead group.

In my online listening class I gave the option for students to choose the listening practice of their preference in our delicious bookmarks. Seth’s audio about Trento was one of the options.

One of my students commented on it and asked some extra questions about Trento. Well, I decided to contact Seth to see if he could reply to her. I got his immediate feedback and here’s the wonderful information about Trento he recorded to Luciene.

Here’s Seth’s post and audio reply to Luciene.

Who said that e-learning isn’t personal, meaningful, contextualized, communicative, networked?

Thanks, Seth, for being such a generous Webhead! I’m sure not only Luciene will be thrilled for such a feedback, but also the whole group will profit from it.