THE GOAL-MINDED TEACHER UNIT 5 PART 2 FINAL REFLECTION (post 9)

⇗What was your favorite assignment? My favourite assignment was making badges to contribute to children's motivation.


⇗Which unit do you feel helped you grow the most? All of them, and I would like to add that I found Classroom Management most interesting.

⇗Which parts of the course were the most challenging? Working collaboratively as I cannot work with other schools. 

⇗How has participating in this course helped you become a better teacher and learner? It has helped me a lot to become a better teacher. I am not alone. There are many people like me out there, eager to learn and to contribute to a better future for their pupils. Teachers who understand that technology is there to help, and serve the teaching purposes. 

It is very important to have goals in the different areas of your life. Professionally, a tip from Shelly Sanchez Terrell has come very useful to me, and it is to take little steps and thus achieving things that are achievable. 

To transform any activity that we want to present to our pupils as a learning mission (appealing to our pupils' motivation).

To make meaningful badges and to store them on a digital backpack(appealing as well to our pupils' motivation). 

To depeen my knowledge of digital citizenship, digital safety, netifquette, digital footprint and its effects. This year I was in charge of introducing these topics to Primary school and I found the international and national webs Saferinternetday of great use. Analyzing these concepts here has helped me. 

Classroom management is an area I want to broaden and deepen my knowledge of and develop further. 

Teaming up and working collaboratively with other colleagues is going to be possible on paper, in theory and present together the google doc which you have prepared a template for us, however I cannot implement it in practical life. We often work with Skype in the Classroom having periodical virtual trips but we don't do exchanges with other schools.

I found the rubrica very well laid out. The purposes were stated very clear and thus it was very easy to assess my own work, and hopefully, other colleagues' work.

THE GOAL-MINDED TEACHER UNIT 5 part 1 (post 8)

What is my global collaboration project? 

At the moment, I am looking for partners in the course to do the assignment.

The suggested examples for collaborative projects were the following ones: 

Read Aloud to the World

The Global Read Aloud

Young Clovers 

Around the World with 80 Schools by Langwitches

Write Your Story

The Monster Project

The Lunchbox Project

The Global Hello Project

Coffee Chug Wiki

The Odyssey World Trek

Glogsters From the World WikiThe collaborative web tool to plan the activity, were among others, the following collaborative tools: Padlet, Voicethread, Skype, Skype Education, Google Docs and Slides, Edmodo, PBWorks, and Schoology. 

With these tools, our students will be able to post discussions, a debate, or share resources about a topic. 

What I most use is Skype in the Classroom, which is a free tool to educators all over the world. It has different possibilities

- Virtual field trips - We have "visited" and talked about biodiversity and ecosystems with Lisbon Zoo

- Guest speakers - We talked to an IT entrepreneur business woman who founded last year her own Educational Robotics company

- We are on the waiting list to 2 more virtual field trips "the unhuggable firiends" about reptiles and spiders and another about turtles. 

- However much I would like to exchange with other classrooms in the world (mystery skype) we cannot have that in the school. 

To use skype is really easy. You only need to download skype, create a skype account, connect the laptop to the IWB and that's it. There are hundreds of guest speakers, learning activities and schools all over the world willing to connect. 

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE GOOGLE DOC- WORLD POETRY DAY

What did planning a global collaboration project with a peer in this course teach me?

You can work asynchronous (luckily) and still get things done. 

Other people 's views enrich your knowledge and experience. 

You never know enough, other colleagues can teach you from their experiences which are totally different from yours. Collaborative work gets you working double faster once you agree on the goals you want to reach and the tasks you all want to accomplish

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THE GOAL-MINDED TEACHER- REFLECTION (post 7)

In this unit I have learnt about buncee which is a very visually attractive tool that easily produces beautiful results. The rubrica has been very useful to me as I have been able to immediately see where I could have developed my presentation a little bit more by offering a translation or more clarification in some of the proposals. 

My teacher's survival kit is also going to have a speaker, so when the class is working calmly I can sometimes play some classical or relaxing jazz music. Very apt as well for brain breaks. 

The resource hub for parents is a brilliant idea as a good resource to keep parents engaged in their children's education, not only so they behave wisely and better online but also in the classroom. 

MOOC - THE GOAL MINDED TEACHER - DESIGN A DIGITAL SAFETY, CITIZENSHIP AND LEARNING RESOURCE FOR PARENTS (post 6)

MY FIRST BUNCEE

Design a digital safety, citizenship and learning resource for parents- How to help your children

MOOC - THE GOAL MINDED TEACHER - TEACHER'S SURVIVAL KIT (post 5)

My teacher's survival kit has got:

• coffe /tea/ dark chocolate, anything that will keep me going through the week. 
• my briefcase; it has markers, pens, stickers, flashcards, 5 minute games, boards, dies, counters as you never know when you can use them. If something goes wrong and you cannot continue with your class schedule because of some internal or external setbacks, you open my briefcase and find lots fo useful small things that can save your session. Flashcard games, role-plays, board games, outdoor games etc
• nature: The school is surrounded by beautiful orange groves and benches. I like as much as possible, weather permitting to take the children outdoors for their art session, or when we investigate in our science exploring sessions (the minibeast sessions, the reading and singing times etc
• my beloved ones because they keep me sane with common sense.
• love for life: It provides me with interest on continuous professional development, wanting to learn and experiment new things that life has there to offer me. To grow as a professional. 

MOOC - THE GOAL MINDED TEACHER - REFLECTION ABOUT NEW TECHNOLOGIES (post 4)

I tend to use in my classes a variety of methodologies in order to reach the widest possible amount of pupils. New technologies are here to stay, we can use them big or small. One day you can do a formative assessment with a kahoot, the next session start your lesson getting to know previous knowledge with a brainstorm, organize a flipped classroom with your pupils and change the view on homework forever!

I try to work with a variety of thinking skills as developed initially by Benjamin Bloom in his taxonomy. In his research, Bloom saw education as a way to improve human potential. He studied the educational goals and developed a classification for learning activities and objectives.

His taxonomy contains 3 learning domains:

The cognitive domain (knowledge, thinking)

The affective domain (attitude, feelings)

The psychomotor domain (skills physical)

The cognitivie domain was established with a hierachy of six thinking skills from the lowest to the highest and those thinking skills are: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating.

The three lowest skills are known as LOTS and the three highest skills are known as HOTS.  

LOTS are often learnt through passive learning and individual practising.

HOTS require active learning and collaborative effort, ideal setting working in pairs, or small gorups. . HOTS are harder to develop but these skills enable students to become better at problem solving and stay there for life, because they are able to transfer skills from one area to another area . From a familiar known situation ( ZPD) to new or different situations or under stress because of new and unknown, different sets of circumstances, making them multidisciplinary thinkers and ready for the current work situation.

• LOTS (lower order thinking skills): remembering, understanding, and applying

• HOTS (higher order thinking skills): analyzing, evaluating, and creating

We have to bear in mind that being able to recall and remember something but not being able to apply that knowledge is not true knowing and it is not that useful, and eventually it will be forgotten.

I always try to facilitate learning where a variety of learning skills are put into action.

Talking now about graphics and infographics, I have to sayt that they are very visual and my pupils seem to like them very much. Piktochart or Visme are good tools to use, and free!

Digital footprint and safety in the net are concepts that pupils need to be taught and of course, they need to acquire confidence in surfing the net. Learning to be critical users avoiding fake news and learning to differentiate good content from bad content. Their image that they project in the net is also important to be taken into account. My pupils are learning to be active creators, clever creators as opposed to passive users. They need to be very aware of what they publish, photos, opinions, etc as everything they publish stays there and potential employers can access those photos and those comments.

MOOC THE GOAL MINDED TEACHER : CHALLENGES TO TRANSFORM STUDENTS LEARNING (post 3)

#EduGoalsMooc: The Goal Minded Teacher: Challenges to Transform Student Learning. 

WEEK 3 CHALLENGE #1: 

Create a mindmap of one of the digital learning theories.

This has been a challenging and definitely eyesopener challenge.

I had read before about HOTS and LOTS and the new Bloom’s Taxonomy approach but this time I enjoyed it more as I could link it with the rest of theories that we have been shown. Approaches, such as RAT, SAMR, TPACK, Digital Blooms, Connectivism, and Peeragogy. I am going fo the RAT approach as I think we teachers have no that much free time and it is a straight forward theory to apply into our daily practice.

Effective technology integration in the classroom is Paramount.

As teachers we have to stop pretending that incorporating technology in the classroom is just watching a film in the IWB or just doing the same but with a computer as a tool. There are far too many teachers doing that.

It is why I like the RAT approach, simple to teach, simple to understand, simple to apply and very succesful when applied. Incorporating technology in the classroom is also getting closer to the way children see the world. Their world is full of technology. They connect easily with us when we use technology.

For example when we learn the solar system in year 1, we get into nasa website and investigate the solar system in a way that we can see what rotation and translation is, so we are leaving the lack of dimension that a book offers and watch the planets from an entirely different point of view. 

We printed NASA cards to play with them and we did a video where each of the pupils had a hairband with a planet, asteroid, comet, star etc and a role to perform in the universe (playground). We edited the video and published it in the class' blog. 

http://popplet.com/app/#/4575322

Families were presented a questionnaire for their children related to the age they started using technology and how many hours a day they do use it!

Results are surprising as they prove something we already thought and in fact reinforce it. They spend far too much time in front of a screen taking time from other hobbies, activities etc.