Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Every good thing must come to an end.

Now that my workshop Moodle for Teachers - Advanced is about to end, I feel very sad. I had the chance to meet marvellous people and follow a path that has given me a lot of personal satisfaction. I have learnt and learnt and learnt, or better learnt, unlearnt and relearnt all through the course. This has been an extremely positive experiece. Thank you Nellie, Ludmila and Glen for opening a brand new world to my eyes and thank you Carol, Katrina, Sam, Magda, Richard, Jeanine and Roger for being there with me. In 4 days we will have our last live session, we'll say goodbye to each other and all this will be over...brings back memories....
So, let's go through those memories now and make the point of what happened!

Just before the beginning of the workshop (workshop preparation), we have been invited to set up our own blogs and start sharing our thoughts there. I had set up my own blog some time before but never had the chance to use it, so I immediatly loved the idea! The first thing we had to do was to put down our own SoP (Statement of Purpose). It was great reflecting and looking for information and finally seeing a personal post appear in the blog!

Week 1 was about reflecting and writing about 21st Century Education and VLE (Virtual Language Environments) and creating our Team Business Card with our partner! Carol, my partner, is a marvellous person, full of ideas and creativity! She has a lot of experience and is very nice and outgoing! We had good laughs together and I have learnt a lot from her!!
I have to say that all my mates have been very helpful throughout the course. I had skipped the Intermediate Course and I got a lot of suggestions on what I should have had a look at on my own while taking the course!

Week 2 was rather intensive, me, Carol and Magda having to prepare to facilitate that Sunday's live session! Magda, Carol and I enjoyed collaborating syncronously and asyncronously using a thread in Google Doc, live conversations with skype and WiZiQ and loads of Web 2.0 tools. And thank you Ludmila for all your help! During the second week, we also had to set up a WebQuest in our personal sandboxes.

“Beyond Moodle” we went, as Week 3 arrived: connecting Moodle to mobile or virtual learning environments! And we discovered some of the great potentials Second Life has. Glen was guiding us throughout the week, and it was thanks to him that I discovered some of its tools! One of the assignments of the week, was to write a book review. Carol and I reviewed Using Moodle, 2nd edition, by Jason Cole and Helen Foster, and we thought it would have been a great idea to present it in SL! With Telmea Story (Glen)'s help, Couky Clary (Carol) and me (Sunflower Lionheart), built two prims, made 2 whiteboards out of them, and embedded the google doc presentation in one and an xtranormal video in the other one. Then we prepared 3 notecards to distribute and got ready to present on that Sunday's live session. Great fun! On that Sunday, Sam showed us how he was able to connect his Moodle course with SL by Sloodle. It was extraordinary, Sam is really talented and he was invited to share his experience at the IT4ALL talk the following week. Well done Sam!

We're in week 4 now, and we have to finish our Professional Development Project course design. My PDP is about Moodle and Web 2.0 Tools for Foreign Language Teachers. I made an example with an hypothetical lesson 5 (content: modal verbs) of an Intermediate English Course. I am looking forward to seeing my mates' projects as I am sure I will have a lot to learn from them, again!

M4T-Advanced has been rather intensive and it has given me unique learning opportunities. I could develop skills on Web 2.0 tools, instructional design, SL and I could broaden my views on a lot of subjects!

Here's a thank you to all my facilitators and mates. Enjoy the video!


Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

TED talks celebrated the gift of the human imagination. You will love this talk by Sir Ken Robinson!

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.

Intelligence is diverse, dynamic and distinct.

Creativity is about original ideas that have value


Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

I just had the chance to watch this very interesting video by Sugata Mitra on truly child driven education.

Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emerging phenomenon.

Every teacher that could be replaced by a computer, should be.

If people have interest, learning happens.



Tuesday, September 07, 2010

"Using Moodle" Book Review - pictures and a video from SL

Just got back from Conviviality Corner's Sandbox, where I enjoyed taking a couple of pictures of the two whiteboards Carol and I used to present our book review!








I made the following video using Flixtime.


"Using Moodle" Book Review - Google doc + Xtranormal + Authorstream

I am happy to share with you this review my friend Carol and I made of the book " Using Moodle" by Jason Cole and Helen Foster.
Hope you enjoy it!


And here you can watch the video from slide 6:




Last Sunday Carol and I had the chance and honor to present our book review on SL. We built two prims that we transformed into whiteboards and we embedded the google doc with the slides into the first whiteboard and the xtranormal video into the second one. When Telmea Story (Glen) gave us the chance to present, it was great to experiment how effective a lesson in SL could be. We zoomed into the tools and advanced the slides and everyone could follow. A real life situations was being recreated as we were talking and it was a phantastic experience! We could also distribute 3 notecards to each participants with some info on our work. Just lovely! I'll have to check if someone has recorded the session, I'd love to post it here! More news to come :)!!!



Sunday, September 05, 2010

Wallwisher with Jing and Screentoaster

This is a tutorial I made using Jing and Screentoaster on how to use Wallwisher. Hope you enjoy it!