A teacher just commented to me that a collaborative project she once did amounted only to a certificate and a webpage where pupils’ contributions were uploaded, even though they all worked hard. A feeling of ownership and real collaboration was not achieved. Her second criticism on her experience with collaborative projects is that in her case it was not really integrated in the curriculum. She concluded by saying that if she found a collaborative project that was nice and challenging, she would not mind taking part in it.
I have been deeply touched by her two criticisms to collaborative projects, because I think she has a point. However, I cannot agree to her conclusion because I have been trying to make things nice and challenging on my own for the last 4 years, without expecting the solution to be provided to me.
When I went back to school after some years working for different administrations, Like a Bird was my first eTwinning project. It was a nice project that was not really integrated in the curriculum. I must say I was conscious of that then, but that was not my first priority. I had landed in a difficult school, where projects were not considered, and I wanted to prove the motivating value I had claimed for eTwinning as a lecturer was real, even in difficult environments.
Like a Bird had been very well designed by my friend Cristina Grau, and I did not want to miss the chance to work with her. It was very good to make pupils engaged, too. They were highly motivated by this project because we visited Cristina’s pupils in Cardedeu, which is 30 km. away from l’Hospitalet, where I teach. So, they could feel part of something bigger. eTwinning was certainly more than just a certificate to them thanks to that visit, which consolidated eTwinning in my school.
In my second project, My Present, my Past, my Future, I knew the time for experiments was over. My first priority was to build a project where pupils reached a balanced development of the four skills and covered as many key competences as possible. I wanted my eTwinning project to help me teach curricular aspects, because I needed to raise standards, and I believed eTwinning could help me in that.
And that was what some of my pupils actually achieved. These pupils took a leading role and worked hard. They are still very nice to me when we meet in the corridors of the school, as we had a great time and created a very nice blog together. Unfortunately, not all the students worked so hard.
So, for these last two years my eTwinning challenge has been to make assessment, together with planning, guarantee that all students improved their English.
I needed to find ways that would ensure a balanced development of linguistic sub competences and other key competences. To make sure all pupils had to go through it, a very strict and yet flexible assessment framework needed to be implemented. It should apply to all my pupils and eTwinning had to fit into it, Thus we started Fluwiki for class work in general, and My Present my Past my Future 2 as our eTwinning project.
Fluwiki was successful, but the second edition of My Present was not. I was doing too many things, using too many tools… Restructuring things was necessary
What was enlightening to me was to discover that it did not matter the eTwinning project had to be interrupted. It was part of a larger scheme that was actually working and could be developed without eTwinning. At that point I was about to drop eTwinning, even if it is a project I like a lot.
Then I realized my eTwinning projects could develop any skill and have any objectives, provided they fitted well into my overall planning and assessment framework. I did not need an eTwinning project to develop the 4 skills, I needed it to complement, reinforce and make my planning and assessment richer!
So, this year we are working on a small eTwinning project called What Tales Tell us, which is about developing some very specific skills, based on reading comprehension, like understanding the difference between using online dictionaries and translators, the use of phonetic transcriptions, and more.
It might turn out to be something really nice, but if it doesn’t, most of my students would have achieved the objectives I wanted it to cover, according to their needs, and with not much effort on the part of anyone.
After 20 years of teaching, I wish I had understood earlier. It might have been crystal clear to you but it was not to me. I know I would never have arrived this far without the help of eTwinning.
I think Word 2007 readability statistics can be of great help to make choices about real materials from the Internet you can use with pupils.
They are also very useful to me when I write in English. Too bad they are not half as good when I look at them in Spanish!
I often spend quite a while trying to make a text in English sound clear and simple. The last few articles I have written, I wrote them testing readability statistics. I have to say I have not succeeded in making their reading ease or grade level improve after I get the first result, no matter how hard I try it by double checking content. I still do not know understand why this is so.
However, these statistics are certainly useful to make me realize some flaws in what I am writing and fix them, and that is quite enough for the time being. I strongly recommend you to use them if you have Word 2007 installed in your computer.
From http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/learning/development.html
What we teach our students must be based on the curriculum, but also in our ability to tailor it to a particular school, class and pupil.
This means that we have to set teaching goals that are based on minimum standards, and then design learning situations that allow for different pupils’ performance and give us plenty of information about where learners are and what they need.
As there are not two pupils alike, our design must allow for varying degrees of achievement, where formative assessment can tell us where our pupils stand in their learning process, as a class and as individuals. This knowledge will help us monitor our teaching practice, fine tune how we can help pupils and determine whether our goals are appropriate, or not, and why.
What we are talking about, therefore, is finding ways to establish clear objectives based in the curriculum and available resources, which can be achieved at different levels by different pupils through the design of appropriate learning situations that promote active appropriation and transfer of knowledge and give us, through assessment, useful information about how effective our instructional design actually is.
Besides, goals should ideally transcend the subject taught and be public while the results of learning situations should be shared inside and outside the class.
To orchestrate all this is what turns the teaching profession into an art.< /br>
It goes without saying that teachers must master and communicate efficiently the subject they teach, but to really help pupils become competent, this is not enough. Teachers need planning skills that are backed up on current literature about how we learn. They also need awareness of specific methodologies and a full repertoire of teaching strategies that include the different learning styles.
Teachers must, in other words, find a balance between how they plan the progression of their teaching and what the class dynamics involved in the pupils’ learning tells them about the effectiveness of the plan and the actions undertaken.
If teachers are to transmit knowledge and accompany pupils so that they learn what we want to teach, we must create the best possible learning conditions. This implies devoting time and planning to enable students to share and restructure their understanding through reflection, dialogue, collaboration and information processing. It also means approximation to the same concept from different perspectives and using and asking pupils to use different strategies at different times.
It is also important to ensure a proper balance between moments when pupils listen and process information that would enable them to carry out different activities, and others where they are asked to produce materials or show how they would solve specific situations Observing pupils in action will inform teachers on what they have actually learned, so as to guide them on what the next step should be.
Applying this process systematically to different learning situations has no fixed rules; all depends on the objectives we set ourselves, the skills involved, the specific content, the level of the students, the options and resources that the teacher can counts on, how skillfully these are combined and his or her willingness to observe the process and reflect upon it.
I developed my understanding of Planning in the taxonomy I developed for Edu22.
I use gold stars in my classes. They are a very important part of my assessment scheme and if I am to talk about them just now is because I think not many people use gold stars the way I do.
Each of my pupils can get as many as 100 gold stars per term. There are four sections they can get gold stars for: Writing productions, oral productions, integrated skills (presentations), and classroom participation.
On each of these four categories, a maximum of 25 gold stars can be obtained, and we negotiate a fixed number of gold stars per type of production. A paragraph, for example is usually worth 5 gold stars, while podcasts are worth 12.
In the end, the total amount of gold stars a pupil gets amount to 30% of his or her final mark for that term. That means that a very weak pupil can pass if he or she has managed to submit productions, while a strong one may get a poor mark.
A gold star scheme implies that I have to design quite a number of tasks to allow my pupils to practice what we have learned in class, so that they can reach the maximum number of gold stars. This is good for me because I have to think fast and adapt to what I perceive they need or would enjoy the most.
In practice, my instructional planning in the wiki amounts, broadly speaking, to 3 to 5 paragraphs, 2 podcasts, some activities to review the vocabulary and grammar we have worked on and one presentation per term.
The idea behind is that pupils are forced to work the different language skills evenly while they can still decide how much they want to contribute to it.
In this way, we use our wikis as class portfolios. Furthermore, as at the end of the term, they have to claim the number of gold stars they have achieved, in theirl Gold -Stars-Self -Assessment, it becomes an individual one.
I use this learning strategy with pupils of all ages
You can see it here applied to:
fluwiki.wikispaces.com (15-16 year olds)
wikicfgs1y2.wikispaces.com (VET pupils)
Any suggestions?
From http://i.istockimg.com/file_thumbview_approve/306682/2/stock-photo-306682-baby-boy-playing-teacher.j
Asking pupils to assess their written productions, either individually, in pairs or group is a good solution to lighten the burden of correction in ePortfolio structural designs. Here I suggest some ideas for that, and I encourage you to share yours.
I tell my pupils to use spellcheckplus before they submit any written production, and this strategy has been extremely useful to me. When combined with online translator, which I know they use and dictionaries like wordreference which they are reluctant to use, it certainly helps them to assess what their write, and I try my best to reward them for that.
Making students understand why and how I know when they are handing me a fake production is the first step to make them improve their strategic behaviour.
They should know that google translator tends to glue words together, but some have not even noticed. They do not understand a word of what they are translating and blindly and with little reflection they copy what they get from google.
Besides, Google Translator leaves a blue background when copying and pasting a text to another document and does not translate words that are misspelled in the original language.
As they know they will be punished if I spot an automatic translator, I tell them it is not bad to use a translator occasionally, but that they must have some control of what a translator provides.
If they use SpellCheckPlus combined with wordReference they would little by little be able to control Spanglish and check how any phrase is actually translated into English.
What happens if they do not follow my advice? I mark red all their productions and they have to correct them if they want a good term by the end of the term.
Of course, it is easier said than done, but they are beginning to understand why I refuse to correct some of their productions, that they are able to find some of the answers to their own errors by themselves.
I feel I am helping them sense how complex languages are, and how lucky we are not to have so many useful tools we can easily use, and not only that, I am forcing them to take responsibility over their own productions.
I’m still looking for the right template for this new website, but I certainly need to start explaining what it will be about.
I’m a Secondary Teacher and Education Consultant and I am starting this website to link both profiles.
Sometimes, my classroom practice is the source I draw upon to make my claims as a consultant. At times, the process goes the other way round, and ideas and conclusions I draw as a consultant are validated with classroom practice. Whether the process goes one way or the other, it does not really matter, but this is a good way I have found to feel I am improving as a professional, and find new perspectives and interests.
The articles I write here will be based on the flow of reflection that moves from theory to practice and from practice to theory. This website will be the place where I want to force myself to actually put my ideas into words.
I am not a native speaker of English, so I apologise for any defective constructions and wrong collocations. I really hope the exercise of writing in English will actually help me become a better writer in English, but this is not my main concern, as long as I am able to communicate.
To organise this site I have used the taxonomy on teacher competences I developed as a member of the team in Siglo22. My focus will be on me as a teacher, hoping this approach might be inspirational to others.
You can see my profile at http://es.linkedin.com/in/nuriadesalvador and follow me on Twitter at @nuriadesalvador
Twitter: @nuriadesalvador
- Insults by Shakespeare - TED Education http://t.co/aMJxKf9g
- @PremioFT Gracias. ¡Suerte con el premio! Hacéis una fantástica labor.
- new teens website (13 to 17) from the British Council: http://t.co/MSV3AMiw
- II Jornada Creativitat i enginy davant els reptes educatius actuals organitzada el 9/06 per la UOC i Espiral http://t.co/QBQINGD8
- @arodera Estoy en psicol evolutiva en la UB, con M. José Rochera dirigíendome