Cambridge University Press organized Global Schools festival from November
24th till November 26th. The talks focused on trying to give an answer to the
big questions about the future of teaching and learning in schools around the
world. If you missed the sessions you can now watch them on Global Schools festival YouTube playlist.
I would higly recommend you to watch Nik Peachey's
session on "Building rapport in the remopte classroom".
The session covers a number of issues related to building rapport with and
among remote students. This includes:
Setting up
the webcam and working with the visible space effectively.
Being aware
of how you use your voice
Building
remote teams so that students work collaboratively
Building
positive classroom dynamics
The
importance of socialisation
Empathising
with students
· Nik Peachey provides teachers with practical tips and advice as well as some suggestions for activities that
help promote a stronger interpersonal connection in the remote classroom.
Learners are very different in the ways in which they can be engaged or motivated to learn. Some students are highly engaged by spontaneity and novelty while others prefer strict routine. Some learners might like to work alone, while others prefer to work with their peers. In reality, there is not one means of engagement that will be optimal for all learners in all contexts; providing multiple options for engagement is essential.
How can we do it?
Well, it is a difficult endeavour but we can start by asking students to analyze what makes their classes more or less motivating. This is a very good article on how to motivate students.
I would also recommend reading the strategies related to this principle in depth and check the different checkpoints here.
I would like to give a very simple example of checkpoint 7.1, i.e., optimize individual choice and autonomy by providing choices regarding the type of rewards od recognition available. My two practical examples for this post are the following ones:
The first one is a tool for Geography teachers : Geoguessr. This is a web-based geographic discovery game designed by Anton Wallén, a Swedish ITconsultant, released on 9 May 2013. The game uses a semi-randomized Google Street View location for paying members and Mapillary for non-members. The game requires players to guess their location in the world using only the clues visible. The free version is obviously not so interesting as the paid version.
The second suggestion I would like to present today is a strategy called Scientific Sensory Station, a play-based learning center in which students use their senses to explorescientificconcepts.
You can sign up for a trial and see an example here.
To sum up, as you very well know, there is no magical wand to reach every student but remember the key to approaching our goal: "if they do not learn the way you teach, teach the way they learn".
All educators know that there is not only one means of action and expression that will be suitable for all learners; therefore, we should do our best to provide students with a variety of alternatives for demonstrating what they have learned.
For those of you familiar with the Guidelines within UDL, first I would like to focus on Guideline 5 and, specifically, checkpoint 5.2, i.e. "use multiple tools for construction and composition".
In other words, how can we provide students with tools that match their abilities and the demand of the task regarding creation, construction or composition? Let me give you some examples:
Language tool offers spell and grammar checking. Very useful for students who need help with their pieces of writing in any content area.
BookBuilder is the perfect tool to help students to create, share and publish their digital stories. It also contains models which are ready to use.
Scratch is available in many different languages, Basque included. Students will be able to create their interactive stories, games and animations.
Canva is the world’s easiest design tool that allows you to design anything and publish anywhere.
Principle 2 also highlights the need educators have to provide options for executive functions (Guideline 6). How can we help our students? Let's consider a couple of tools:
Worksheets to set goals : this site offers worksheets , teaching ideas and lessons for Math, Language, Science, social skills, behavioral, social emotional learning and media literacy. Besides all this, it contains a variety of worksheets for setting goals, which will be really useful to set personal goals which are challenging and realistic.
The learning Toolbox home enables students with several difficulties to be better learners. Students have a menu that covers organization, note taking, reading, writing, test taking and Maths.
Willing to know about how to make the most of principle 3 ? Keep on reading this blog because my next entry will focus on it.
Why not visit the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco? It is a good chance to travel virtually and use the resources from their amazing website to help your learners explore Coronavirus and the science of viruses, see how they affect us all and also celebrate International Museum Day (18 May). The resources vary from videos, activities and articles. There are even activities provided by science teachers. You will be impressed by how much your learners can discover about viruses.
First of all, I would like to start this first blog post in 2020 by wishing all of you a very Happy New Year loaded with love, joy and health.
A new year always makes us reflect on the importance of finding new ways to face the essential challenges in our lives, both personally and professionally. As I write this blog to try and help you on the latter, let me start by reminding you of Europeana, a wonderful platform I wrote about in a previous post you can read here.
March 2019 marked the official launch of the Teaching with Europeana blog. Since then, the Europeana Education Community has grown and
shared numerous inspirational learning scenarios and creative stories of
implementation. But are you aware of all the possibilities the blog offers?
In the video below these lines, teachers share their experiences using the blog
and explain how its resources can be very helpful for a variety of content areas.
From this blog, I would like to extend my congratulations to the people and networks behind Europeana for making cultural heritage available to a very global audience. I am looking forward to meeting you in our next seminar session on January 21st. Apart from focusing on supporting students' written and spoken output, we will enter the Europeana platform and blog to choose the most suitable resources for our CLIL contexts.
This post is a follow-up of the previous one, which I wrote to highlight our obligation to ensure that our students will be ready for the challenges they will have to face when they leave our classrooms and enter the professional world.
Today I would like to reflect on one of these "21st century skills", which has been described as creativity. We have to try hard to help students to develop this skill and we have to assess it too.
Let me start by sharing this short video that made me draw some interesting conclusions:
After seeing it, I reckon you will agree with me that we sometimes forget that our students need time to be creative. Maybe we do not forget it but we do not allow them to spend longer on creative projects because we tend to think about the number of projects /lesson plans that we still have to carry out and we are worried we will not manage to cover them all. Therefore, let us never forget that we should always choose quality over quantity.
In my view, special attention should be drawn to the fact that students also need time to share their creative outcomes with their peers. If they do this, they will learn a lot together and others' acknowledgement will help to build on their self confidence.
As I pointed out above, we have to find ways to assess creativity because assessment has a clear impact on students' motivation so you can start by explaining that you will consider creativity as part of your assessment and you can start with a simple tool they can easily understand. For example, if students have carried out a PowerPoint Presentation on a topic, you can use this assessment template.
I will continue developing this challenging topic in future seminar sessions but now I would like to share a very recent publication by University of Navarre: "Towards Creativity in CLIL", which offers very good examples of creative projects for different content areas.
My most sincere congratulations to participants in these projects: Ruth Breeze, Melinda Dooly, Alessandra Agati, Fernando Echarri, Amaia Alvarez, Maika Goya, Laura Medina, Izaskun Tomasena, Henri Eric Castleberry, Laura Giamattei, Abel Miguel-Marqués, Angela Ruotolo, Immacolata Ercolino and Daniela Amendola.
