Archive for the 'Teaching' Category

Edublogging with Passion

Published on 2008-11-27 in Connections, Learning, Teaching, architecture of participation, begin2blog, blogging, blogging4educators, edublogtalk, education, microblogging and twitter. 0 Comments Tags: .
A friend of mine in Italy, Seth Dickens, has kindly asked me to talk a bit about edublogging. We had planned for an interview, but due to technical issues, we went for a recording.
Edublogging… How many times have I written about it, gave tips, presented, and tried to inspire others? Fact is the ones who endure the first stages of discoveries and experiments are the passionate educators, those who teach with heart and soul, who truly believe in their transformative potential as an educator. These are the ones who, later on, become passionate edubloggers.
The point of my talk was what I’ve been saying from the beginning and what I wrote about in the article “Blogging in the Classroom: It Doesn’t ‘Simply Happen‘ “. Persistence, fearlessness, being passionate and knowing that you have something that will add value to someone are key to make it a successful endeavor.
We make lists of how to be a successful blogger, but formulas are not in the core of Edublogging, conversations are. Conversations don’t mean that you need to get tons of comments. They mean a talk to yourself, commenting on other people’s blogs, and yes, getting comments when your readers feel the urge to interact with you. I sin as a blogger, for I am not consistent as I should be or as would be willing to. However, I’ve decided to let it go, for I have little ones and a husband to care for. I have professional projects and other ways to connect. Nowadays, Twitter is my means of quickly connecting to others, though it’s not a substitute to blogging. Twitter is connection, blogging is reflection + connection. One complementing each other in my circle of learning.

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Through blogging, edublogging my mind pours out, I learn, share, re-shape who I am and how I see things. But, my ultimate question is how could I show that to other educators? Maybe I can’t. Just through their own blogging journey they will learn what passionate blogging is all about, some will just find the excuse for not even giving a try. Blogging is a transformational act one should be willing to undergo. It won’t work if it’s just mechanic, technical. No. It’s humanistic, contextualized, personalized, collective, cultural, intense.
I’ll never forget some memorable posts that show the power of blogging:
Marina’s post - A psychologist talking about her experience about being a clown.
Having Dennis Newson as our class mystery guest
Motivating my adult students to predict a short story by Edgar Allan Poe we read in parts in class.
The rich cultural exchanges my group had with Dennis Oliver’s group in the US due to our International Exchange blog.
Emerson, a quiet adult student in class, surfacing as a wonderful blogger and commenter.
Discussion with Russian students and readers about the Brazilian movie “The City of God”.
Sharing Love Stories
Wow! Just so nice to travel back in the past through blogging. It’s a record of a moment, a state of mind, it shows us and our learners in ways we’d never share in the old brick and mortar classroom in such intense exchange and connection. These are just some of the examples mainly with students in it, but there is the other side of edublogging as a professional and personal development. This is another story and certainly deserves another blog post!

Telling Stories, Developing Multiliteracies

Published on 2008-10-02 in CALL, Collaboration, Connections, EFL, Learning, Network, Teaching, Webheadsinaction, architecture of participation, education, multiliteracies, video, web2.0 and webheadsinaction. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .
I just got this video via Twitter (a microblogging site) from a dear friend, Ana Maria Menezes, a mineirinha, who has a bag full of tricks to share.

The story is simple, but then, I just realized that it is a wonderful springboard to explore language. Imagine a group activity, or even a collaborative project with sister classes in which they have the same claymation and learners are responsible for creating the stories to go with the animation. They could even record the stories.
How motivating would that be? Is it the kind of experiential learning we could add more frequently to our lesson plans? Do you have any other ideas to go with this video? Or do you have any other video that could be used for the same idea?
Originally posted at http://webtools4educators.blogspot.com/2008/10/telling-story.html

eLearning 4 Educators

Published on 2008-09-20 in BrazilBridges, CALL, Collaboration, Connections, Learning, Network, Teaching, Webheadsinaction, architecture of participation, blogging4educators, elearning, multiliteracies and web2.0. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .
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!
_______________________________________________________________
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!

Creativity Messiness

Published on 2008-08-31 in CALL, Collaboration, Connections, Learning, Teaching, Webheadsinaction, architecture of participation, multiliteracies, webheadsinaction and writingmatrix. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .
I’ve been giving some thought on creativity these days. I read a simple and enlightening article on Scientific American mind on the topic, How to Unleash your Creativity. Three professionals of different backgrounds discuss the creative process. Julia Cameron mentions that she has found
the creative process to be teachable and trackable.
The professionals talk about the techniques that can be used to awaken this creativity in each one of us. YES! Everybody is creative, but there needs to be an effort to unleash our creative potential. Creativity doesn’t come naturally to all. There are ways to enhance it. Robert Epstein mentions the four competencies to develop our creative minds:
There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them.
… The second competency is called “challenging”—giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.
John Houtz argues that failure is also an important part of the process:
The creative individual thinks of failure as a new opportunity: “Okay, why did I fail? What was wrong? Let me try to do something else. Let me go forward with it.
This brings me to what happened the day before yesterday at my house. I turned off the TV when the kids were having some snacks. Afterward, they just kept the big screen off and started playing around, inventing a game, creating characters for themselves, imagining some of my decorative beads were, in fact, diamonds. They also made up a character for me. I was supposed to be the bad girl (does it mean something here?!), and they were the good guys trying to defeat evil! I asked them how the game would go and also questioned some strategies. They saw that some of the plans they had would not work, so they sorted things out. We had fun. However, what called my attention was the way the creative process happens, in the middle of total mess. You can see the room in the picture here. They had to scatter their costumes all over to find the perfect outfit, they had to negotiate the moves and strategy. The creative process was not linear. There were lots of decisions and steps happening at the same time. As a mother, my tendency would be to say, “oh, my! What a mess! Clean it up now!”. However, I felt this was a wonderful moment to boost my kids’ creative thinking and see how things would unfold.

CreativeMessiness

This little anecdote should be a starting point for our own reflection as parents, educators and human beings. It was a fantastic reminder of the best of our childhood that we tend to kill at school, creativity, imagination, dream. I read this wonderful post by Ewan McIntosh about his talk with Mitsch Resnick about the spiral of imagine, create, play, share, reflect, imagine that kids have. By 1st grade, we start to interrupt it by our test-driven grade-oriented ecosystem.

So, here comes my 8-year old son with some papers he filled in the first week of school with activities related to “getting to know you”. I couldn’t believe that he wrote:

Boredom (2)

We all have our moments of boredom, and I think we need them as a do-nothing time that will give us energy for the activities to come in our lives.
As an educator, I can understand that we have a syllabus to follow, subjects to cover, time constraints, but my question has always been:

How can we create an anti-boredom atmosphere in the classroom that leads to engagement, motivation, willingness to be in class and not doing something else?

I guess there’s no easy answer, but nowadays, with the Internet and with this exciting NetGen little ones, there’s so much that can be done to grab their little attention span and have them there with you.
Just thinking out loud, but here are some ideas:
  • Though we have a lesson plan, be it written or in our minds, with a clear sequence of steps, tasks, etc, let us give every class we teach “Creative Booster” moments that we let our kids` imagination fly and we just embark on it with them.
  • The surprise element: let us rethink our teaching practices. How often do we change the way we present new content? Start in a totally unusual, unexpected way. You might be surprised with the result.
  • Let the students be producers and not mere spectators, recipients of knowledge.
  • Enchant by telling stories and listen to the kids` stories.
  • How about a treasure box of ideas for fun classes with made by your students?
  • Ask open-ended questions and not obvious ones.
  • Explore the topic of a dream classroom and listen to your students` ideas. You might get some wonderful tips for the creative classroom.
  • Find partner classes for projects. Projects are always an effective way to boost creative outcomes.
  • State a problem you have or a friend`s problem (real or totally invented) and ask students to collaborate and find solutions for it.
  • Use art, visuals, words, music, body, action, mind, technology to enhance the creative classroom.
  • Have your own down time in which you focus on pleasurable things in your life to give yourself some creative input. Read magazines, books, watch movies, take photos, a long shower. You`ll surely find inspiration in the little pleasures of life.
The fact that creativity is for everyone and is teachable is certainly a reminder for myself that we need to explore it in the classroom for the sake of humankind.
Of course, at the end of the game, I asked the kids to clean up the room, but though creativity can be messy, there`s also organization involved.
What other ideas could we add to nurture the creative minds around us?
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Watch this video on Creativity by Ken Robinson:

Icebreakers4Kids

Published on 2008-08-30 in CALL, Collaboration, Connections, EFL, Teaching, Webheadsinaction, architecture of participation, audio, education, multiliteracies and webheadsinaction. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .
Inês brought up an interesting issue on my last post, the fact that my ideas for icebreakers might not apply for a kids’ classroom because of online accounts restraints. True that I had adult students in mind, but she got me thinking. Inês is a Portuguese educator and was mainly concerned about signing up for accounts for kids under 13.
Some solutions that might apply: instead of having kids create signing up in sites, the teacher could have one class account and invite students to be editors (generally kids have their parents’ or personal emails that could be used for the invitation), whenever this is possible. Also, in the case of Flickr, for example, the photo activity could still work if the teacher had an account, for the students could send their photos to the Flickr email connected to that specific account. Besides, I would adapt it and ask students to do the following:
  • Draw their avatar and upload them to Flickr by taking a photo of each avatar, or just scanning the drawings.
  • Take a photo of something in their class that called their attention on the first day of class.
  • Students could create a comic strip with Go Animate (I checked the terms of use and didn’t find age restriction), or a film with fictional characters at Dvolver 
  • They could create an online scrapbook page with scrapblog or glogster. Yes, I know. You need to register, but maybe you could work on teams and the teacher could set up 3 or 4 accounts in advance for the class. I have some email options to create different accounts for my groups. The teacher could have different topics for the students and they could change one of them to create a scrapbook page.
  • Students could send e-cards to their parents and friends. Only rule I have: I should check the card before they hit the submit button to make sure the language used is appropriate. Or you could ask them to send an e-card to you telling you about what they wish the schools were like. I’m sure you’d get many insights from the little ones.
  • You could have groups make up stories and create images for an online book at Mixbook.
  • With Picwing, photo tool that I mentioned before, the teacher only needs to create an album for the class, and the students could send drawings and photos to the email provided by picwing for each album you create. Here’s one example of mine I created for my hometown, Brasilia. Anybody can send a picture of Brasilia to my album using the email address brasilia@picwing.com . So, you could have something like classxxx@picwing.com as well.
  • Students could record their introductions in Audacity and the teacher could upload students’ introductions to a podcast site like Podomatic or Odeo.
Just some ideas. Any other suggestions?
One thing that is interesting for the little ones is the fact that once they have their online production, it could be a bridge between home and school. In my school, whenever I have a project, I send an email to parents to tell them about their kids’ projects.
Just make sure you have parents’ authorization and that they understand your approach to online use.
Transparency leads to understanding and appreciation of our collective work.
 

Online Icebreakers

Published on 2008-08-27 in CALL, CarlaArena, Collaboration, Connections, EFL, Learning, Network, Teaching, Web2.0Wednesday, Webheadsinaction, architecture of participation, edtechtalk, edutechbr, elearning, multiliteracies, voicethread, web2.0 and webheadsinaction. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .
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.
http://shadylearning.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/hooking-learners-with-a-simple-story/

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:
http://www.yearbookyourself.com/gallery.php?id=qbSjvrWiJsIUUWXLHXGZskK7WvaVz6AY

Yearbook Yourself – carla arena’s Homeroom via kwout

The Comment Challenge is Just Beginning

Published on 2008-06-02 in Collaboration, Connections, Learning, Network, Teaching, blogging, blogging4educators, comment08, edublogpractice, edublogtalk, education, elearning, tagging and web2.0. 12 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .
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.

What Will YOU Do Today for Your Students?

Published on 2008-05-30 in Learning, Teaching, education, multiliteracies, video and webheadsinaction. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .
I learned about this inspiring video via Vicky Davis.
It gives teachers a general view of possibilities the online world offers to provide the students with meaningful, contextualized, exciting learning. A world of explorations.
Download

So, what will YOU do today?

Pushing the Share Button

Published on 2008-05-14 in CTJ, CarlaArena, Collaboration, Connections, CrisCosta, EFL, Learning, Teaching, comment08, edtechtalk, multiliteracies and teens. 1 Comment
I don’t know how this happens, but it’s more than just commenting. It’s a deeper connection which is not limited by geographical distance or the fact that we’ve never met f2f. The fact is that because of blogging and the conversations going on more intensely for the past months, Cris Costa and I have been sharing and blogging more than ever. I care for all who’s out there, my readers, but sometimes I feel I HAVE to blog because of Cris, and she always mentions something I’ve shared with her. Deeper conversations, stronger connections.
Well, in one of our conversations I mentioned we should have a selective “share button” in our minds for everything we felt like blogging, be it personal or professional. It’s not an ideal world, but Cris compelled me to share here after her wonderful post about teaching, teaching practices and memories. I guess this is also part of our comment challenge challenge! I’ve been making new connections, strengthening old ones as a group of highly excited, passionate bloggers are willing to take their time to keep hitting the share button every single second and it’s been a huge collective knowledge builder. I’ve been learning in every possible way from this journey.
Well, going back to Cris and teaching and me. Cris talked about her own experience, how she’s changed as an educator, how she understood that the human touch and connecting to students was what really mattered. I, too, learned that books don’t teach or enhance learning. We, educators, together with learners, do! I remember how I’d rely in tons of papers, activities, games to have the feeling that I was teaching, that I was being approved by my students. Then, I realized that what really made a difference was the human touch, the personalization, the intimacy a classroom with so many brilliant souls provides.
I realized that what really made a difference was harnessing individual talents, encouraging students to be and do their best, tapping into their interests, passions. I learned that we didn’t need tons of papers, resources, activities…We needed to connect, to be good listeners, guiders and followers.
My teaching changed and I changed along the way.
I’ll never forget, for example, a conversation class on teens we had.
I showed my teens this video. Then, we talked about it, they taught me some teen slangs in Portuguese and they produced cooperatively wonderful poems on our class wiki. These are the connections I look for and I miss now that I’m not currently teaching f2f, though I’m having a wonderful time with my online students and connecting in unexpected ways, but this is another story, blog post…

Their poems:
Teenagers want to discover things, Passing through unbelievable experiences With their body and their spirit Meet every kind of people, culture.
And more than this. They want to enjoy their lifetime To know themselves, To know what they like And expect about them and the world.
by Andréa and Joanna
_____________________________________
Teenagers
Some teenagers are okay And others are wicked insane Even if some people say they are always the same They can´t understand that this is part of their games! Yo, man.. fo sho..
Some like soccer Others prefer the Net They can be rockers and bum a cigarette
Probably lives with passion Maybe in need of an exercise set Or don´t live without fashion They are different, I bet.
by Joseane, Felipe and Leonardo
____________________________________________ Teenagers want to be more informed Know about what the world can offer, New cultures and different people Teens want to enjoy their lives They want to have as much as possible Teens are always under pressure But they were made to be freeThey are always trying to find the real liberty Without getting out of reality They want to find new feelings New love and new experiences
Matheus and Breno
_______________________________ Living in a Dream
Every teenager has a dream It can be like Martin Luther King. They want to make the difference Also looking for love and peace.
If you do have a dream, Make it real. It can be just like having an ice cream or as hard as living in Rio.
Never give up. Keep on going. So start cheering up ‘Cause the world is rolling.
Patrícia, André and Gabriela
_____________________________
What do Teenagers want?
They want parties They want to go out They want to enjoy their life They want to know about everything They don´t have feelings In reality, they have nothing That´s what they say about who is never working…
Is that a real conclusion we can take about them?! I will tell you what A teenager is more than a friend…
Teenagers dream Teenagers sleep Teenagers cry Teenagers think Teenagers die Teenagers drink Teenagers dance Teenagers decide
They come to the conclusion By heart or outside They are just younger But they are people, anyway
People that are always learning And that can teach too.. You should dream as a teenager And think about what is true…
Roberto
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No. I’ll never forget those teens and many students who changed me, who taught me, who are my inspiration and my optimistic view of education.

Project-Based Learning – This is What I believe In

Published on 2008-05-07 in CarlaArena, Learning, Teaching, Webheadsinaction, comment08, education, multiliteracies, video, web2.0, webheadsinaction and writingmatrix. 2 Comments

This video about student’s projects is what I believe in. It can tell much more about the power of learning than any educator’s discourse…
I believe in
  • the power of students’ creations
  • learning by doing
  • creating connections among students
  • monitoring their work rather than pouring information
  • the value of each one’s discoveries
  • the sense of being able to produce something of value to one and to others
  • personalizing information
  • letting learners find hidden worlds and exploring their own worlds
  • helping learners develop their multiliteracies skills that will enable you to solve life-long issues in their personal and professional lives
I’ll never forget in one of my conversation classes. There was this dude who would come to class holding his PSP. He walked and acted as if he couldn’t care less. Though it was a conversation class, he’d only participate when I gently forced him to.
One day things changed. I was doing this project with the class in which they had to plan and present and advertisement to the group raising awareness to a certain social issue. It could be a Turn TV off day, whatever. Well, we didn’t finish the project in one class, and I told them that they could think over during the week and if they wanted to present something in any kind of media, I’d bring my laptop the following class. Surprise. The cool, couldn’t-care-less dude left his classmates in awe with his topic and presentation.
Lesson: learners are paying attention to you. Just let them do something that taps into their interest, that drives them that they will surface and surprise you!

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