One of the lessons my students loved most was the “Virtual Trip to London”.
I had been to London on a school trip with a group of older students and when I came back the young ones started asking loads of questions so I decided to prepare some lessons about it.
While there I had collected some maps of the city which were quite colourful and with drawings of monuments and sites – actually they were produced by some sightseeing tour organization – and so I used them to show what the city looks like. There was plenty to do on them: locate main attractions, find out more information about attractions, prepare a guided tour, ask and give information about prices, length of tour, and so on. It was a good chance for them to practise the language concerning travelling. When I thought they had got enough details about the city we went to the lab, we got on a bus and started our tour
We did it this way: we jumped on a bus here, and then, whenever the kids decided they wanted to jump off and visit a site, they just googled its name plus “virtual tour” and that’s it. They visited Madame Tussaud’s, then they decided to have a look at the Statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, some girls hopped off in front of Harrods and went for some shopping and so on
It was great fun for everybody. While exploring London they took notes of what they saw in order to be ready to tell their mates and so the following lesson we had a nice discussion about what was really worth visiting.
The activity proved useful because it gave lots of chances of reading, speaking and improving vocabulary while letting the kids free to choose where to go and what to do. Here is a comic a girl created after the experience.
I have just come back from an eTwinning PDW which was held in Vilnius and as after any eTwinning event I have a lot of thoughts and opinions I would like to share.
Vilnius is a city which I knew only virtually thanks to a project I had worked on and so it has been interesting to be able to match the images I had seen to the real places and monuments which had been illustrated and described together with their legends by the students of a school in Alitus.
The chance of admiring the tower of the ancient Gediminas castle and the statue in the midde of the largest square in town, or the chance of seeing the lake that, according to a legend, was created by the tears of a young woman in love allowed me this time not only, as it usually happens in such meetings, to match a name to a face but also pictures and images to real places.
As for the people, I always find exciting to browse through the participants’ list and find out that among others there’s also one of your contacts or, as it happened this time, a partner in a project that had just been closed. Then they introduce you to their friends and you introduce them to yours and the net becomes larger and larger and relationships closer and closer. The atmosphere gets warmer and everybody is ready to start.
The workshop was about Web 2.0 technologies in Education and was demanding but really interesting above all for one like me, so fond of new technologies.
I am sure that we teachers need to use Web 2.0 tools in our teaching activity but I am still looking for the right way to do it. I’ve got plenty of ideas and I am full of enthusiasm but how can I transmit such enthusiasm to my students without creating confusion in them and, above all, making sense of what I do? I thought the PDW might give me some answers.
As at any eTwinning event I met a mixture of languages and cultures and all the participants have something in common: we all are willing to learn more, all aware of being lifelong learners and all willing to open up to the new world, the world of Web 2.0 because all of us care for those kids who are in front of us every day and from whom we don’t want to estrange.
As Anne Gilleran reminded us in her presentation eTwinning & the professional development of teachers, thanks also but not only to its learning events and to its PDWs, eTwinning offers a wonderful opportunity for both formal and informal professional development in the field of the new technologies and their application to teaching activity. Somebody said that if technology can never replace teachers, teachers who are not good at it will be replaced by the ones who are and so if we stay in eTwinning we have a good chance of staying in teaching.
The eTwinning community is getting bigger and bigger and the data that were shown are impressive: more than 133.000 registered teachers, 12.000 teachers participating in projects, more than 300,000 students actively involved in projects, more than 20,000 log in each day to the Desktop, 2270 members of groups, more than 2,000 teachers took part in learning events in 2010.
As we well know anyway, just knowing the tools can’t be enough because “If you bring in these technologies and don’t think ahead to how they’ll be used to promote learning and the acquisition of skills, then the only thing that will change in school is the electric bill” (D. Thornburg)
and as Elena Shulman said during her workshop Web.2.0 tools: tags, ratings and comments for educational use of learning resources, educational ideas are more important than the tool itself. Consequently what is fundamental is to describe the experience and give ideas of how it can be used. She introduced us to the site lreforschool.eun.org and to some criteria which should allow us to easily reuse resources, give educational guidelines to share materials at any level, facilitate the building of communities and increase the availabilty of digital resources.
In how many ways can technology be introduced into a classroom? Stasė Riškienė, a Lithuanian eTwinning Ambassador, does it through mobiles as she showed us in her workshop Mobile Learning and Cooperation, practical work with iPods
It is amazing to see how many activities you can do and how many things you can learn using iPod apps even though I’m not so sure iPods are cheaper than netbooks.
Honestly I don’t know if I have found answers to my questions but I have surely found new ideas and above all food for thought regarding the way I teach. Too often I work and create just following my enthusiasm without thinking too much on details and so I think that the criteria Elena illustrated will be helpful.
As for mobiles, in my school we are not allowed to use them and I am one that respects rules, but after the workshop some ideas came up and after all every student has a mobile and so it is just like having a small lab in the classroom, so why not try? It might also be a way of showing the kids a different way of using it.
Was it only work and technology? Of course not! How can I forget the kids dancing in their traditional costumes or the choir of children who sang We are the World? Or the beautiful evening on the lake of Trakai when at the dinner table we found out that English is not the only lingua franca but Russian can be and even Italian? And we found out that what unites us is much more than what divides us. We found out that eTwinning doesn’t give light only to classrooms, just like in the video below, but also to the night on the lake thanks to our yellow and blue lanterns which we let fly in the sky above Trakai.
I have been working on a pilot project for some time now with one of my classes. The project is called Acer-European Schoolnet Educational Netbook Pilot and it ” is interested in exploring how the introduction of netbooks and one-to-one pedagogy in schools could change the processes involved in teaching and learning.” http://www.netbooks.eun.org
Students and some teachers have been provided with a netbook each and have been asked to prepare scenarios about topics they are free to choose. I have prepared two scenarios and both have been chosen as examples of good practice I must admit I am very happy and proud of it! The scenarios have been translated in the six languages of the countries that are taking part in the project: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom. The first is about weather forecasts and you can see it below.
I love my job, I really do and I think I’m very lucky to live in a period when teachers have so many possibilities to be creative using so many tools. Every day I find out a new one and each seems extraordinary and I want to have a try at once. I had never dreamt of creating comics in order to illustrate literay devices or crosswords as a means to revise Shakespeare’s sonnets. I enjoy trying new ways to reach a goal and I feel quite confident now with the use of Web2.0 technology. I have anyway a long journey ahead of me. The problem now is to make my students really creative. I always hear people talking about these “digital natives”, but what does it exactly mean? As far as I see, young people are confident with their computers only when they want to change their desktop background or to edit their profile and upload photos on sites, but when I ask them to create a presentation, the only thing they can think of is a power point. They don’t know about prezi, glogster or other tools. Of course they are fascinated when I then show them some examples or when they watch my presentations about Hamlet of Geoffrey Chaucer and always ask me “but did you really do this???” Then I create tutorials in order to show them how to do even better stuff, but if I’m lucky one or two try to do something similar, the rest is satisfied with what they have seen and that’s all. I know motivation is the spring for all this: mine comes from my need to be interesting and not boring during my lessons, from the awareness that young people need new products and new ways in which topics are to be introduced. And last but not least, from the fun I have while using such tools. But what about their motivation? What shall we do in order to make them really want to do something different? Because it takes time to learn how to use a new tool and they are often lazy, but if I can make it, of course they should make it much better and faster. This is the challenge for me now: make them really want to use Voicethread to show their school to their partners in a project. It won’t be easy.
Today with my students I wanted to do something they had never tried before: acrostic poems. When I told them that they were expected to write poems, their first reaction was a discouraging smile – worse, sort of smirk. When I added that the poems would be acrostic poems they looked quite puzzled: what the hell is an acrostic poem? This is what their eyes were telling me. Then I wrote an example on the blackboard: ANT Animals are Not Tolerated here. An easy one but above all short. Reaction: how are we supposed to be able to do it? Using pen and paper, was my answer and they felt the challenge. I told them they had to use the word SCHOOL and I must say they started working at once. They formed small groups – they are 32, quite a large group – and started exchanging ideas.
They way they approached the task was different: some started with great enthusiasm and created the first poem after few minutes, others could not manage with vocabulary very well and took out the glossary in their texbook, but they all worked and the results really are unexpected. Here are some examples: self-analysis Students are Creative, Happy and Original, but Often Lazy I really like this one! Another: Students Can Have their Own Opinions of Life – an assertion of their rights -, and then Sea of Chatty students and Humour in Our Original Lessons- a positive vision of their classes and themselves -, or School is Care and Hard but Obviously it is Often also Light – school is not that bad after all.
Other preferred going out of school and so we have Some Children Have Only One Lifestyle – against omologation?- Sometimes we Can Hang Out with an Old Love – this was made by a group of girls, Sisters are Chatty and they Hate Of course Our Lifestyle – probably some family problems here, and this one Sandwiches are Cheap but Huge and Often they make you Overweight and Lazy – a protest against the bad quality of the food they find in the school vending machines. These are some examples, there are many more. The comments came out of the discussion that followed the composition and they really enjoyed it. After the discussion, they asked me for another word
When they finished, I asked them to use some adjectives to describe the activity (we are studying how to express likes and dislikes and motivate our opinions) and what they wrote on the blackboard was: funny, nice, thrilling, interesting, constructive, creative. What I think is that they worked together and helped each other, they worked in autonomy and used the material they needed, they used new vocabulary and practised what they already knew.
Today I’m quite disappointed. I had sooooo carefully prepared a lesson plan about Halloween and had also found out a lot of sites where the kids can find games, crosswords and puzzles which I thought, actually was sure, they would like so much, then last week I asked them to do the activities in the plan and hand them in today. Well, only 8 out of 18 did it! And the 8 who did it mostly copied and pasted some information from various sites
And now I’m here wondering where I went wrong. I know that “ teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty” (Albert Einstein) and try to do my best to fulfil this.
I thought they would be delighted at doing the Scavenger Hunt I had prepared and they would be curious to learn. We had decided to work on Halloween together, so the theme was not imposed. I put all my enthusiasm in the activity and thought I had communicated it to them too. But it went all wrong! Of course now the articles are flooding edmodo, where I’m collecting them, but it’s not the same. I think that sometimes I have so much fun in preparing the activities that I take it for granted the kids will like them, but it doesn’t work like that. The fact is, I really don’t know what I should have done. Today I was too disappointed to talk to them about this, but I’ll do it tomorrow and see what comes out.
Anyway I will give myself another try: Christmas is coming and it will be my second chance!
I found the video through Twitter and after asking its author for permission, I embedded it here on my blog and hope that somebody else will see and appreciate it. Isn’t this an example of Connectivism? Connectivism states that learning is not something individualistic and internal but it lies in the ability of creating connections between data, information, images. The question here is: why do we connect? My answer is because I want to learn and share what I learn, and I want to be part of a bigger community and a “global staff room”. The video presents reasons for connecting: people of different ages, backgrounds and jobs have anyway a reason for connecting. I am a lifelong learner, I am curious, has always been, and now in few minutes I can find any kind of information. The problem is of course how to manage all this but once again thanks to ICT tools I have learnt about RSS and Instapaper and a lot more which helps me organize all the data I find and need and so create my PLN. I am also a teacher and I know that I have also the responsibility of being a sort of guide for my students who, despite their self-confidence, are not as expert as they think they are. The more I know, the more I can help them too.
Here is the presentation of the project I have created with my partners during the learning lab. It has been interesting and quite easy, I must say. We have agreed on the theme, Christmas, since it seems a relevant one and we have worked on it using Google docs, which is a great tool for collaborative work. I will surely test it with my students, I can’t wait to do it actually!
“Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be.” David Thornburg
I found the quotation on a blog and you can find the post here. It is worth reading because it is a really interesting post and a meditation about the role of a teacher in our technological world. It would be easy to reply using another quotation by David Thornburg
“If you bring in these technologies and don’t think ahead to how they’ll be used to promote learning and the acquisition of skills, then the only thing that will change in school is the electric bill,”
because I think the point lies exactly there. Teachers have to develop their students’ skills and make them independent in their study. Technology is essential to this extent because it presents many different tools and platforms which help the kids do a lot of things, from note-taking to writing and reading activities, to online experiments and that’s when the teacher’s role becomes important. A teacher should guide them and give them the chance of choosing what is more suitable for each of them. During traditional classroom activites, it is not that easy to help mixed-abilities students but thanks to technology we can make them find out what is best for them. It is when I use ICT tools that I see my students really involved because they can accomplish their tasks in the way which is better for them, according to their intelligence and talent. And it is through such tools that it has become easier for me to find out their intelligence and talents. But it is not easy! On the contrary it is quite a hard job: always looking for tools, test them, trying to understand how they can really be effective and of course preparing activities which can go with the curriculum.
This is not my first blog, but it is the first I have created for myself. I mean, the first blog I created was for my younger students to help them practise English, the second one was for older students to stimulate them to study literature, the third one was for my colleagues to help them learn how to use some tools and this is the first which is for me only
Thanks to eTwinning and to the learning lab about exploiting Web 2.0 I have the chance to write here … what? Well, I don’t know yet but I will surely find something to discuss about and share with others.
As for the topic of the lab, I have watched the videos on the lab site and I am sure we cannot ignore the importance of Web 2.0, above all if we considered how much our students are involved in the virtual world which surrounds us. And the same is true for us as this video by David Truss so well shows.
Wow, I have just written my first post! Feel like Julie Powell
