Here are my choices for this year. I hope I will be able to make it since my school schedule prevented me from making the most of the last two sessions.
Teaching Listening: principles, techniques and technologies
In the live session at the end of week 1, our moderators proposed the following poll:
My answer would be: ALL OF THEM!
What is Flipped Learning?
Is it applicable in my classes?
I have been learning about the flipped classroom for some years and I have been trying to start changing my daily teaching practice introducing blended learning at first, but I haven’t flipped my classes completely. I still have to face many challenges, one of the biggest being the fact that in every class there are at least three or four students who have no Internet access at home. Moreover, ICT resources at school are not very good so it would be difficult for me to have these three students watch the videos during the lesson because I often have only one computer in the classroom and no interactive whiteboard.
But as I tend not to give up easily, I am here trying to learn more and find a way to make it. I appreciate the opportunities given by the self-paced learning environment offered by the flipped methodology, especially for children with learning disabilities. It could also help me engage fast finishers, who often feel neglected or bored in certain activities, by differentiating tasks or giving them a tutoring job during class period.
One of my main concerns during week 1 was: what if they can't or don't watch the videos?
When flipping, you need to produce a video. Here is an awesome list of screencasting resources curated by Katy Schrock.
If you're not a professional communicator, you may want to use a rubric to check if you're doing things right. This one is provided by Rcampus.
My exploration of tools has begun with Zaption. This is a short quiz I created using a Youtube video.
In week 2 we explored the functions of the Resouces available on Moodle. We were asked to create a presentation in order to learn how to use them. I chose Movenote and this is what my terrible cold allowed me to produce:
Book: this resource allows you to create a book with chapters. You can add texts or media. This could be also useful for students to create their own learning portfolios. File: you can add a single file, from a presentation to a pdf file, which students can download. Folder: it is possible to add a folder, containing all the materials for a course. Or you can provide an empty folder where your students can upload their assignments. IMS Content Package: this resource allows you to put together different types of files which can be displayed in the various moodle pages. The file type to be uploaded is a zip file. Label: it's a resource which is ideal to make your Moodle pages more appealing. It enables the insertion of headings, images, embedded sound files or videos on the course page.
Page: this resource helps you create a course page through a text editor. It is ideal for giving instructions.
URL: with this resource you can provide a link to an external webpage. It can be embedded or opened in a new window.
Among the tools suggested this week there is eXeLearning, an Open Source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content. Resources authored in eXeLearning can be exported in IMS Content Package, SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, IMS Common Cartridge formats, ePub3 or as simple HTML5 self-contained web pages.
The second required activity was to create a video tutorial for one of the suggested tools: MoveNote, PresentMe, Screencast-o-matic, SlideSpeech, Jing.
After some struggle (only with myself because the tool is really user-friendly), I finally managed to produce a video tutorial on MoveNote.
These are some of the most interesting and well-done tutorials made by other course participants:
- Jenny's great tutorial on SlideSpeech - Patrizia's fantastic presentation about Socrative and Nearpod.
This is year I'm trying to plan activities in advance. I don't want to end up in a messy situation like it happened last year. I know this is a very busy period of the year for me. Luckily, I have stumbled upon a tool which could help me and I decided to give it a try.
TRELLO is an online project management platform which I will use to manage the activities of the EVO courses I have enrolled in.
Each week I will make a list of the things I still have to do and eliminate them as soon as they are done, just like I always do with my paper checklists (the only difference being that I tend to lose my paper checklists).
Many things have changed since last year but one thing is always the same: I'm going to start the new year with EVO. These are the courses I have decided to take part in:
I am trying to catch up. As usual, this time of the year is the worst period for professional development, but I'm going to try anyway.
Source: http://ctl.utexas.edu/
I have taken some time to consider some of the screencasting tools suggested: Screencast-o-matic - a really useful tool but the free version doesn't allow to edit the video. Screenr- easy to use, allows you to pause during recording if you need a break but doesn't allow you to save the recording into a file. Edpuzzle - allows you to use a recorded video (yours or from youtube), crop it, add your voice and a quiz. Educanon - allows you to upload a video from Youtube, Vimeo, TeacherTube and SchoolTube and add different types of questions.
Zaption - allows you to build learning tours, putting together selected parts of videos from Youtube and adding questions.
Powerpoint - I have found the suggested presentation very useful. I think I will follow the instructions and try to record a narration for one of my old presentations.
Educreations - I used it last year to record a video lesson on a grammar topic: it is useful but you have to record the whole lesson in one session because you can't pause the recording; you can upload images or documents from your photo library, your Dropbox or Google Drive accounts or you can take a photograph and write on it.
ShowMe - it has got more or less the same features as Educreations. It is a whiteboard where you can import images or documents (photo library, Dropbox, Google Drive or the web) or choose from one of the provided backgrounds. Backgrounds are particularly useful for Maths teachers.
