Teacher Challenge: Step 10

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   Imagem: Oficina de Escrita

     What is at stake in this 10th challenge – allowing our students to connect with other students –  it’s the heart of an attitude, let us say, the heart of a way of life,  that finds a deep resonance in the inner horizon of our youth.

    In our country, the school year is about to start, so each one and all of us, teachers and educational workers in our school, are gathering and buzzing  to ultimate the last details for the great reception: kids are coming, youth is back again!

    The multiple meetings we went through in July have all been pierced by the watch word: “How to surprise our students?” In fact, the sense of urgency to keep our pace with the global movement of innovation that is transforming life in schools all over the world is deep rooted in our hearts and minds.

   In order to take some baby steps along this demanding path, small teams of teachers are organising different project works trying to cross multiple contents of the curriculum in a unified vision concerning some feature of the real world. At some moment along this process, the question to connect with other students will arise.

    For the moment, some of us have engaged in educational platforms, like Edmodo, its new partner Spiral or Socrative. Students will be invited to use their apps and easily connect to  create and share  learning experiences.  In some classes, the BYOD approach will be tried with students more than 13 years old.

    I love the suggestions Edublogs  gives us as the Twitter classroom account, the Student Blogging Challenge, the list of Class Blogs and the art of connecting classes through Skype.

    We could even stay in the comfort zone of our maternal language, as Portuguese is spoken in Brazil and Africa; we could make a step towards the Spanish speaking countries whose vocabulary and grammar are so similar to ours and where there are several private schools belonging to the same congregation.

    We could even dare a step more and merge into the international web language that English came to be, as our students are constantly in touch with it through their own digital devices, favourite video games  and daily reading routines.

    I wonder until where will we be able to go for the sake of actually “surprising our students?”

Ines P

Teacher Challenge – Step 9A

     I’m still on the same step, trying to learn how to use Animoto. I subscribed for a month just to explore its possibilities.

    Meanwhile, I’m learning how to create interactive presentations and facilitate group work in Spiral, who is now totally compatible with Edmodo. Both platforms joined their forces to enhance students and teachers enthusiasm for working more creatively.

    And here is what I came up with my Animoto pro personal account: 

 

 

Teacher Challenge – Step 9

  In Setp 9 I have to make an halt and start again, more carefully, at my own pace.
For today, just to be sure that I tried something beautiful and that I managed to created it and to embed it in my blog, I’m simply posting a 30 seconds video form Animoto about one of my favourite themes “Purposes of Writing”.

Purposes or Writing

Teacher Challenge – Step 8

   

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Imagem: Oficina de Escrita

     In Step 8, we are initiated in the art of embedding online tools. The advantages of posting articles with embeded tools are easy to grasp: it becomes attractive to engage students and to provide collaboration opportunities.

Audio Presentation Tools

     In our school, all along this year, Prof Carla, of Portuguese, has been gathering older students and special guests, once a month, to read Poems or Texts from different Portuguese authors. Since the initiative found success among students,  we are planning to record-alive and publish these sessions of Poetry and Reading in our Library Blog. So, I plan to follow the steps needed to embed these special moments called “Literary Scene” in Audacity which I downloaded in its new version in Portuguese.

     As for embedding Padlet, it didn’t work properly and although I received an e-mail form the support team, my new padlet kept saying it couldn´t be saved. There it goes:

 

Teacher Challenge – 4

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Image Author Ines Pinto Source:  flickr Commons Atribution: Creative Commons

     This picture, posted in July 2007, as a creative commons attribution share alike, in Flickr photos, belongs to an album of 20 pictures, specially created for an exercise asked by Edublogs, during the 2008 Comment Challenge.

    In Step 7, we must understand, in order to make it clear for our students, that pictures and images on the web are not just free to use no matter how.

     Usually they are published explicitly under certain rules, whether they prevent us to use them without a special permission, as is the case of copyright, or they just are apparently not related to any kind of rule, as it is the case, for instance, of pictures of a hotel posted on its site, as in Pousada dos Girassóis, whose owner is the young author’s uncle.

     In these cases, we must either ask a written permission to publish the image as kindly offered by its author and rightly linked to its source. If no copyright signs are at sight, at least we must link to its source and name it. I usually do this when copying my student texts about public places or hotels they have been during holidays. I think hotels or other public places accept this kind of use of their pictures as a sort of publicity to them. However, I assume I take some risk by doing so.

   Once I asked the Hubble Site if I could post some of their Hubble pictures in order to explain how to change the personal pronouns according to their role in the sentence. Hubble site had the kindness of answering me not only to give the permission but also to ask for a link in order to include my work in their archive of educational items.

   In Edublogs-Pro, with the free access to Compfight, we can choose among thousands of pictures licensed under Creative Commons, which means that those pictures are kindly offered for us to use. There, my students often find what they had precisely imagined.

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     I use this creative commons license badge  in our wiki of resources at pbworks so that anyone who wishes can come and pick tests, exercises, writing suggestions, inspirational quotes  or  other kind of assessment tools. I’ve found that visitors from Brazil and Portuguese Speaking Africa take benefit or this sharing, which is the main point of using CC licenses.

   When my students and I can’t find what we are looking for in Compfight  we look in this wiki page where edublogs taught us to collect links to sites that offer creative common images

 In Step 7, I’ve learned that in sites as the Getty Open Content, all the digital images are available whether the Getty holds the rights to them or they belong to the public domain, in which case one must use the simple source credit: “digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program”.

     Thanks to the Challenge Team for the very useful lesson.

Inês P

Teacher Challenge – 3

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Imagem: Oficina de Escrita

      In Step 6, I’ve sort of created a model for a business card magnet, but I will change a few details whose translation in English is a bit difficult for me.

    On the card we can see the urls of both our writing workshop blog and our wiki where we collect resources for study and curricular subjects, as well as some links to student texts prior to 2014. At the moment I’m gathering a new collection of links to some very inspiring sites about innovation in schools.

    I’ve also created an e-mail signature in G-mail, adding the link to our workshop blog,  which I think will help parents and my own students to keep track more easily of posts published as well as to comment and make the blog come alive.

    Our school is planning to have a newsletter for the coming school year, so I hope to be allowed to add our blog url to it.

     I would love to learn how to create a QR code, but I’m sure some of my older students will teach me how to do it. I also appreciated the idea of getting the students to write a letter to their parents explaining what blogging is all about and, in our case, also how we will be using our writing workshop blog.

     Thanks to the Edublogs Challenge Team and the Blogging Teachers for their inspiration.

Ines P

Teacher Challenge – 2

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Imagem: Oficina de Escrita

     In Step 4 of the Challenge, Teachers are asked to reflect upon quality commenting skills: what are they, why to practice them, how to share them with our students, helping them to improve their literacy and communication skills.

    Among several activities, I chose to create a comment guideline poster whose translation is as following:

  • Greet the Author, highlight something positive.
  • Write about the post’s subject: by adding information, building upon its line of thought, sharing a counter-argument to it.
  • Conclude with a question that enables to go on with the conversation.
  • Revise your grammatical correction; use the translation widget to communicate in a foreign language; preview before publishing.
  • Do not give any personal information.

    I’m looking forward to welcoming my students again: some of them will surely enjoy this new challenge to participate in the blog activities as authors.

    I also found out that the several steps we are invited to go trough along the Teacher Challenge are so rich of complex information that we should perhaps take it more often and at a slow pace.

Ines P

Edublogs Teacher Challenge – 1

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 Imagem :Oficina de Escrita

   I have engaged in this Teacher Challenge during  summer holidays, for several reasons; however, each one of them –  as the fact that I would like to “refresh” about web educational tools or the fact that I miss to connect  with other teachers and students  for the pleasure of sharing learning experiences – is linked to a powerful  source of motivation: my school is slowly but firmly approaching a new turning point in its history.

    Actually, there is an engaged team struggling to lead the whole educational  project and community to enter the path of innovation. That means that learning could take its right position in the centre of the process and students could be given the voice to articulate their own life project in the adventure of mutual collaboration that links knowledge to the real world .

    Right now we are following the evolution of Horitzó 2020, where  eight Jesuit schools in Barcelona are achieving a major paradigm shift on the learning process. We also translated the new Horizon Report K-12 2016– preview and several topics from Visual Learning, specially “Teach the Teacher”.

   So, I hope that our students will be empowered in order to lead their own educational quest and, in this process, they will be present online again.

Ines P