#EduGoalsMooc The Goal Minded Teacher: Challenges to Transform Student Learning.
WEEK 5: CHALLENGE & FINAL REFLECTIONS (of this week).
Week 5 at #EduGoalsMooc has brought along the final step in the path we began on February 13. In my opinion it is not the end of anything but, on the contrary, the beginning of many things which I will detail in another post here.
We have dealt with the issue of how to foster collaborative learning and turn it a common practice for us teachers and among our students since the world we live in is global and digital tools allow us to connect ourselves and our students worldwide. So, it seems obvious that we must engage ourselves in this learning process and help our students develop the necessary skills in collaborating and problem solving with peers worldwide. Working in a project online with teachers and students from different locations make you widen your own and your students' perspective. You can see what other teachers do and your students get to learn about new cultures and traditions.
First, we have been provided with a good deal of information about how to set up a global collaboration project. For example, this link here gives a nice way to get you started connecting.
Second, we moved to learn about tools to achieve both asynchronous and synchronous communication. Since synchronous communication involves real-time communication participants in a collaborative learning project will probably need tools to help them schedule their planning sessions and meetings and find a time zone friendly date and time to meet. I list some of my favorite:
Then, we were shown the possibilities that using Skype -a video conferencing tool available on the web, your browser, and as a mobile app, for educational purposes- has and how to get started with it.
Finally, we focused on Blogging as one way to get students to start and keep communication with peers worldwide. By this means, they can post their thoughts, images, videos, and share their creations, challenges, goals and badges. Students in other countries will be able to see them and interact with them in a an asynchronous way. Especially interesting, Quadblogging is a system which connects 4 schools. Each week a class' blogs is featured and the other 3 schools leave comments. This helps keep the conversation going.
We were then set the challenge of Planning a lesson with a peer. Starting collaboration with another teacher was the goal seeked. Thus, planning an activity for both sets of students to accomplish was the outcome to achieve in the hope that students will be able to complete the activity at a later date.
When I started thinking about it, I envisaged a collaboration plan with a teacher and students from an English speaking country working on Spanish as a Second / Foreign Language. I tried to find a partner from the MOOC through a comment in facebook and twitter. Unfortunately, nobody answered and I decided to outline it myself. My Buncee presentation follows:
I must say that this is not my first collaboration project: some months ago I took an online INTEF course called ABP: Aprendizaje Basado en Proyectos (Secundaria Y Bachillerato) / PBL Project Based Learning (7th-12th Grades) and some peers and I produced a project which involved History, Science and Languages.
The goal of the project was to challenge students to impersonate a famous historic character and create an infographics using Piktochart. You can check the details of such project (Y tú, ¿Quién eres?) if you manage enough Spanish. (Sorry for not having an English version yet. If you are interested in it, I can try to help you turn it into English.) You may also want to read this post about another collaborative project:
Only one final post for this course is due in this learning journal. In a couple of days, at the most, I hope to have accomplished that task.
