Carla Arena and I gave a presentation called Online Circles of Learning: Your Micro-revolution for the Network of Trainers in Europe Conference. Our abstract: New and emergent technologies enable trainers all over the globe to pursue professional development out of their institutional settings. Connections are now possible in new dimensions of the online world. In this session, presenters will show some possibilities of informal learning through the participation in Communities of Practice, online sessions and spaces that can impact positively on the way trainers learn and enhance their professional development.
We had a fabulous time presenting, although the time went too fast- we had 15 minutes to present! During the 20 minute discussion that followed, we had some great questions and discussed the concept of "amplified worker" in more detail. According to The Future of Work, the amplified worker is someone who is social, improvisational, collective, and augmented - the worker for the future who uses social media for his or her own professional development. Check out our slides below and if you'd like more information, and see what online spaces and communities of practice Carla and I use during a day in our amplified lives! We also invite you to go to our wiki page where you can also join in the conversation on our Voicethread.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Poverty: Blog Action Day 2008
Poverty.
80 Ways to do something about poverty #14: "Share your skill or knowledge, so they can improve their knowledge to increase their life/prosperity."
ESL/EFL teachers can do something about poverty. for instance, i will never forget volunteering as a teacher in a rural area, teaching ESL classes for migrant farm workers. some students had very bad experiences with formal schooling and were hesitant to try. some students couldn't read or write, yet they were there. some students didn't have a babysitter, let alone extra money or reliable transportation, yet they were there. students. workers. families. they came to class each week, hoping to learn English. my mentor told me that teaching students English meant not only that they could seek better opportunities for themselves, but also that they could reach out to their community and become a part of something bigger. education truly empowers people and can lift people from extreme circumstances. it helps people not only to help themselves, but to help others.
80 Ways to do something about poverty #14: "Share your skill or knowledge, so they can improve their knowledge to increase their life/prosperity."
ESL/EFL teachers can do something about poverty. for instance, i will never forget volunteering as a teacher in a rural area, teaching ESL classes for migrant farm workers. some students had very bad experiences with formal schooling and were hesitant to try. some students couldn't read or write, yet they were there. some students didn't have a babysitter, let alone extra money or reliable transportation, yet they were there. students. workers. families. they came to class each week, hoping to learn English. my mentor told me that teaching students English meant not only that they could seek better opportunities for themselves, but also that they could reach out to their community and become a part of something bigger. education truly empowers people and can lift people from extreme circumstances. it helps people not only to help themselves, but to help others.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Getting students involved in an EFL Class blog
Participants in WebTools4Educators are really moving forward on the tasks this week about blogging. In the forum and on their blogs, participants have asked for some ideas on how to get students more involved in their class blogs.
I wanted to share some ideas that have worked in my classes. First, the blog should be an integral part of the course. Also, the posts should be interesting and use a variety of media (photos, audio, text, etc.). If possible, use the class blog as a place to make connections and start conversations with people outside of the classroom. In this flowgram, I've narrated a few examples from my class' blogs. I know that other teachers have other ideas and other examples, so please share them! Looking forward to sharing more ideas on how to get students more involved in the class blog!
I wanted to share some ideas that have worked in my classes. First, the blog should be an integral part of the course. Also, the posts should be interesting and use a variety of media (photos, audio, text, etc.). If possible, use the class blog as a place to make connections and start conversations with people outside of the classroom. In this flowgram, I've narrated a few examples from my class' blogs. I know that other teachers have other ideas and other examples, so please share them! Looking forward to sharing more ideas on how to get students more involved in the class blog!
Thursday, October 02, 2008
WebTools4Educators: Blogging
This week I am a guest in Carla Arena's WebTools4Educators online course. This week the group is exploring educational blogging, and I'm thrilled at the chance to interact with everyone.
One of the assignments for this week is for the participants to create a class blog on Blogger and to write their first post. Carla has asked everyone to make a good first impression by including a picture or embedding a video.
In fact, I am setting up a new blog titled English I Computer Lab Blog for my first year writing class that meets in the computer lab every other week for 90 minutes. Since I've been thinking a lot about the 2007 LwC Cartoon Festival, I was inspired to use the topic of friendship again and to ask students to use the dVolver movie maker. My first two posts are related to this idea.
In the Friendship post, I wanted students to discuss their definition of friendship and also to explore the ups and downs of friendship. In order to catch their interest, I included a picture of one of my best friends and me. The blog is a perfect place for me to share a more personal side of myself and to encourage students to do the same. This post not only opens up the channels of communication, but also engages learners with the material we are working on in class which just happens to be writing definitions!
In the Review a Cartoon post (inspired by Carla R) I wanted students to look at some cartoons that previous students made about friendship using dVolver movie maker. I embedded these into the post and asked students to make a comment. In the future, they will be making their own cartoon, so this preview may get them excited about the project, and will give them a chance to develop multiliteracies.
One of the assignments for this week is for the participants to create a class blog on Blogger and to write their first post. Carla has asked everyone to make a good first impression by including a picture or embedding a video.
In fact, I am setting up a new blog titled English I Computer Lab Blog for my first year writing class that meets in the computer lab every other week for 90 minutes. Since I've been thinking a lot about the 2007 LwC Cartoon Festival, I was inspired to use the topic of friendship again and to ask students to use the dVolver movie maker. My first two posts are related to this idea.
In the Friendship post, I wanted students to discuss their definition of friendship and also to explore the ups and downs of friendship. In order to catch their interest, I included a picture of one of my best friends and me. The blog is a perfect place for me to share a more personal side of myself and to encourage students to do the same. This post not only opens up the channels of communication, but also engages learners with the material we are working on in class which just happens to be writing definitions!
In the Review a Cartoon post (inspired by Carla R) I wanted students to look at some cartoons that previous students made about friendship using dVolver movie maker. I embedded these into the post and asked students to make a comment. In the future, they will be making their own cartoon, so this preview may get them excited about the project, and will give them a chance to develop multiliteracies.
Updates on summer learning!
It is hard to believe that so much time has passed since my last post. I have been on summer vacation since the end of July, but that doesn't mean that I stopped learning! I had three main goals for this summer vacation: to study Japanese, to write an article for publication, and to continue connecting with online colleagues. Here are a few of the things that I was up to during this long summer holiday!
Back in the classroom!
I took a three week summer intensive Japanese course. I decided to go on a new blogging adventure, and I started a Posterous blog, Mary's Posterous, in Japanese! I was in the beginner part 2 course, and was lucky enough to study with students from Canada, U.S., Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Spain. Even though we only had 9 members in our class, we were a diverse group, with people from many countries who were all different ages and had different reasons for learning Japanese. It was a great experience to be a language student again, and I've decided to continue my studies in preparation for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December of this year.
Writing an article for TESL-EJ
Cartoon Festival: An international collaborative digital storytelling project is an article published in the TESL-EJ and co-authored by Carla Raguseo, Jose Antonio da Silva, and me. In 2007, our students created comics to explore the theme of friendship and shared them with each other. This was a really fun project that helped explore topics of importance to young people around the globe. I hope to use dVolver again in my classes this fall! Here is one of my favorite examples of student work: No Eyebrow.
Reading with friends
Reading books is a favorite past time of mine, and so I am very pleased to be part of an online book club, called LivingLit. We are a group of educators from different parts of the world, and each member chooses a book that is somehow related to the place where he or she is currently living. Our first book was chosen by Carla Arena, who is living in Key West; she chose Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire. After reading the book, we are all posting our reflections on our book blog titled Living Lit: Using Social Networking to Travel the World with Literature. The next book we are going to read is 36 Views of Mt. Fuji which is about an American who teaches in Japan and then builds a Japanese style house in the U.S. The chapters of this book really resonated with me, and I'm looking forward to discussing it soon!
Literature and Technology
It seems that the integration of technology and literature is something really of interest to me lately. Not only the book club, but also blogging about books with my students and leading a LwC Living Lit session on Shelfari have been projects I've been working on. Last semester, my humanities students blogged as they read The Little Prince on our IES Book and Literature Circle Blog.
Guest in WebTools4Educators
In a previous post, the online tool Tagcrowd found that "blog" was one of the most frequent words here! I guess that's one of the reasons why Carla Arena invited me and Cris Costa to be special guests in her Webtools4Educators online course for teachers in Brazil. Those enrolled in the course are just setting up their blogs, learning about the technicalities, and exploring the possibilities for fostering authentic communication and conversation through blogging. I'm really honored to be a guest there.
Back in the classroom!
I took a three week summer intensive Japanese course. I decided to go on a new blogging adventure, and I started a Posterous blog, Mary's Posterous, in Japanese! I was in the beginner part 2 course, and was lucky enough to study with students from Canada, U.S., Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Spain. Even though we only had 9 members in our class, we were a diverse group, with people from many countries who were all different ages and had different reasons for learning Japanese. It was a great experience to be a language student again, and I've decided to continue my studies in preparation for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December of this year.
Writing an article for TESL-EJ
Cartoon Festival: An international collaborative digital storytelling project is an article published in the TESL-EJ and co-authored by Carla Raguseo, Jose Antonio da Silva, and me. In 2007, our students created comics to explore the theme of friendship and shared them with each other. This was a really fun project that helped explore topics of importance to young people around the globe. I hope to use dVolver again in my classes this fall! Here is one of my favorite examples of student work: No Eyebrow.
Reading with friends
Reading books is a favorite past time of mine, and so I am very pleased to be part of an online book club, called LivingLit. We are a group of educators from different parts of the world, and each member chooses a book that is somehow related to the place where he or she is currently living. Our first book was chosen by Carla Arena, who is living in Key West; she chose Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire. After reading the book, we are all posting our reflections on our book blog titled Living Lit: Using Social Networking to Travel the World with Literature. The next book we are going to read is 36 Views of Mt. Fuji which is about an American who teaches in Japan and then builds a Japanese style house in the U.S. The chapters of this book really resonated with me, and I'm looking forward to discussing it soon!
Literature and Technology
It seems that the integration of technology and literature is something really of interest to me lately. Not only the book club, but also blogging about books with my students and leading a LwC Living Lit session on Shelfari have been projects I've been working on. Last semester, my humanities students blogged as they read The Little Prince on our IES Book and Literature Circle Blog.
Guest in WebTools4Educators
In a previous post, the online tool Tagcrowd found that "blog" was one of the most frequent words here! I guess that's one of the reasons why Carla Arena invited me and Cris Costa to be special guests in her Webtools4Educators online course for teachers in Brazil. Those enrolled in the course are just setting up their blogs, learning about the technicalities, and exploring the possibilities for fostering authentic communication and conversation through blogging. I'm really honored to be a guest there.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Exploring Diigo with Learning with Computers
learningwithcomputers07 wiki / online_bookmarking3
We're exploring Diigo this month at Learning with Computers! This week we're in week three and I'm just exploring creating a blog post through Diigo. If you have the Diigo toolbar installed, you can click on the Send button to send your links elsewhere on the web, like to a blog, Twitter, or Facebook. I thought I would share this link to our Diigo week three tasks. Please join us and check out my Diigo profile to see what I've been up to!
Saturday, June 28, 2008
TagCrowd Cloud for One Teacher's Journey
After seeing TagCrowd on The Bamboo Project Blog, I just had to give it a try. All you have to do is go to TagCrowd, put in a URL, and you'll get a cloud with the words that are used most frequently. Here is the cloud for One Teacher's Journey.
blog blogger blogging4educators book carla challenge class classroom comment08 comments connections conversations discussion encourage important information inspiring interesting japan labels language learning links mary online others participants people pm post powerful practice reader reading really reflect rss smielt something started students tagged teachers things think topic week writing wrote year
created at TagCrowd.com
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
What can students learn from commenting?
One task of the Comment Challenge was to write a blog post using comments. I would like to highlight a comment and a blog post from Charles Nelson and reflect further on the issue of student commenting.
On my last post about comments, Comments on Commenting, Charles Nelson left a comment and stated,
I should explain a little more about the context in which I blog with students first. Of course, I would love to have students post well-thought out posts on their own blogs; however, so far I have only used class blogs with students. Last year, I wrote the posts and students and guests wrote comments; this year the students are writing all the posts and then interacting with each other and guests via comments.
This semester's blogging project is a Book and Literature Circle Blog. The students are reading The Little Prince and discussing it in literature circles. Because the students can't hear what has happened in the other groups' discussions, I ask the groups to collaboratively write a post for the blog after finishing their discussion. They usually highlight the most interesting aspect(s) of their discussion and ask other students for their opinions.
After the first week of the Book and Literature Circle Blog, I found that students wrote short comments, and there was no flow between contributions in the comment area. During the second week (this week), I specifically asked students to think about how they could connect their comments to previous ones and build up a conversation.
Thinking about participating in academic discussions, and synthesizing sources in academic writing assignments, I think that by challenging students to make connections between their comments and their classmates' comments, they are learning a valuable communication skill that they may be able to apply to other types of assignments. In his blog post, Charles Nelson made an excellent point:
In conclusion, even though students are interacting through blog comments, I have tried to keep the focus on student learning. Your comments on other ways to keep commenting focused on learning are most welcome!
On my last post about comments, Comments on Commenting, Charles Nelson left a comment and stated,
I concur with Kevin that it's not easy, and I agree with you that commenting is something that students need guidance on. But I would ask, Why have students commenting on each other's blog when they can post a more thoughtful response on their own blog?
I should explain a little more about the context in which I blog with students first. Of course, I would love to have students post well-thought out posts on their own blogs; however, so far I have only used class blogs with students. Last year, I wrote the posts and students and guests wrote comments; this year the students are writing all the posts and then interacting with each other and guests via comments.
This semester's blogging project is a Book and Literature Circle Blog. The students are reading The Little Prince and discussing it in literature circles. Because the students can't hear what has happened in the other groups' discussions, I ask the groups to collaboratively write a post for the blog after finishing their discussion. They usually highlight the most interesting aspect(s) of their discussion and ask other students for their opinions.
After the first week of the Book and Literature Circle Blog, I found that students wrote short comments, and there was no flow between contributions in the comment area. During the second week (this week), I specifically asked students to think about how they could connect their comments to previous ones and build up a conversation.
Thinking about participating in academic discussions, and synthesizing sources in academic writing assignments, I think that by challenging students to make connections between their comments and their classmates' comments, they are learning a valuable communication skill that they may be able to apply to other types of assignments. In his blog post, Charles Nelson made an excellent point:
"But for those of us who are educators, I would say that we need to be careful about being sidetracked by the social contagion of commenting and instead keep the goal of learning in the foreground of our blogging and of our students' blogging."
In conclusion, even though students are interacting through blog comments, I have tried to keep the focus on student learning. Your comments on other ways to keep commenting focused on learning are most welcome!
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