Blogged confessions

In my two posts this week on Nicenet I have tried to collate and take stock of what I have learned during these two months and a half at Webskills – and I can say that I feel  - absolutely modestly but still – triumphant. Thanks to a great course and a superb tutor and my study mates, I think I’ve learnt a lot.

This post is now to reflect on where I failed or what I did not try at all. There are 2-3 major issues that I just did not somehow come to digest. These are, rubrics, the ABCD thinking and – last but not least, properly following and commenting my study mates’ posts on Nicenet and their blogs. Now the last little failure is just bad management of time and lack of inner discipline so let that one go without more saying - but the other two:  the rubrics thing I have written about earlier when we were working on it: this is something we do not really do much in my country where we are more formative than summative anyway in our assessment– but I admit using rubrics might add goals and accuracy to our teaching learning (and my work!) – but they should definitely be supporting learner autonomy and formative assessment in general. And lo and behold: the new curricula of 2016 that we are working on with basic education as our target at the moment and high school education very soon too, are in a way rubrics or matrixes with three columns: goals, content and criteria (of good proficiency). Have to think of that, definitely – are we going the rubrics way?

The other thing I never got to grips with was the Audience – Behavior – Condition – Degree approach to tasks. Is this “alphabet” simply something that pertains much more the learning and working philosophies in the US and elsewhere in the world – than in my country? Is it typically Finnish to host an aversion against rigorous paradigms within your daily tasks? Why do I suspect there is a Tayloristic mechanism under the ABCD?

Does it not make sense that while working, you look at your tasks, regularly, from the points who you are working with and for, what they are expected to learn or perform, under what conditions, and how much they should be producing by way of learning or other outputs? Have to talk to my colleagues about this - is this just me who am hopelessly vague about my working approaches? Can I just rely on my intuition?

Be that as it may, it is intriguing. So has been this path that I have walked through in the amazing world of web learning. Now I am standing at the end of it - and already looking forward to meeting my Webskills partners again on the web, only it will be different paths. But what else would be so agile an environment as the web - to guarantee that it will even be easy for us to meet again, some sunny day.

Celebrations this week

I would like to begin with music this time, perhaps you would you care to check this youtube clip for example: Friday was Finland’s 96^th Day of Independence and today, on the 8^th of December, we are celebrating the birthday of Jean Sibelius.  I was busy working on my Final Project on Independence Day which made me feel kind of solemn and full of self-criticismJ

 

It was good to learn about the learning styles this week, in a way a good mixture of theory and praxis. To begin with, I did the test http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/mi/w1_interactive1.html, to see what my key approach to learning would be (of Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences). Well, to no surprise at all, I found that I was best at interpersonal skills and should be working as a teacher, human resource manager, cousellor:D:D  I did the test twice, same result of course. I sent the quiz to my boy, 19, too. He might find something there as regards music or maybe the spatial dimension. Anyway, fun as it was taking that little test, as I read further along our suggested list for this week, my suspicions were growing. Is this all about learning styles and personality types bringing us too close to stuff like – horoscopes?  But in the readings there was a little bit of scientific evidence also to motivate us to learning of these things – and I think the bottom line would be: you have to know your students and you have to give space to their personality as an entity plus the special talents and traits there are in each and everyone of us. Another key issue is of course that we have to know about and work on ourselves as learners and processors of information, in order to improve as teachers or “preachers” (which I sometimes think I am being a state official and with a job where informing of policies and best practices is what I do a lot!).

Some issues in our readings reminded me of the current topics in the educational discussion in my country too. To mention just two of different sort; first a detail from the multiple intelligences – a new type discovered by Prof Gardner are the naturalists, the ones who relate their learning best to the environments (learning environments). Here we found eg the tip about using geocaching to learn; quite popular already in Finland outside school and amongst geography teachers but I wonder whether it is so amongst the teachers of languages though. The whole thing is also symptomatic of our times as we should realise that the focus in learning and teaching cannot be confined within the four walls of a classroom any longer but we should encourage and recognise learning in a variety of settings, and everywhere – in our ubiquitous existence of the 21st century.

Another issue that came to my mind repeatedly while reading about learning styles: It is all about motivation (cf. the Montgomery and Groat article)! For Finnish basic education this is presently a major challenge, also reflected in our PISA 2012 decline: how do we motivate kids to study and work hard or at least in a goal-oriented way in the first place,  and then how do we motivate them to study math or Swedish which a famously problematic as subjects that cannot be learnt without some effort and which have – undeservedly  – a reputation as dull subjects. Well, tomorrow back to work which delightfully will take me again to our agency’s languages team and our work with the languages curriculum.

And alas - tomorrow will be the beginning of our last week at Webskills.

Getting the hang of it now

My second post this weekend: I am running a blog with three colleagues about the current trends in language education in Finland. It is also a new venture, even younger than my Webskills blog but already I am getting the feeling that I know what blogs can be used for. My yesterday’s post was, believe it or not, about encouraging Finnish teachers of languages to use the net and to be brave about testing the limits of what they can do as professionals: the net and the computers will not break down! It is in anticipation of the OECD PISA results for 2012, DUE TOMORROW! Finland won't  be at the top any longer and it is problems in teachers' webskills that will be blamed, among a lot of things.

 

In Webskills, I think, luckily,

I am starting to see the whole picture of it: I think this course of ours has a wonderful structure. It is a nice rather gentle incremental process, piece by piece we get the feel of selected samples of the myriads of things on the net and we start to see where these bits and pieces belong to in the architecture of the (educational) net. It is rather a comfortable way to construct webskills of our own. I just wonder how those study mates of mine see the process who are already quite experienced. It must be a very different learning path for them.

 

Off to see my doctor now, I think I may be coming down with a flu::(

PS: About the picture above, I picked it up from Clipart as you may have guessed. Clipart is just great when you need a smart(ish) picture and you do not want to worry about copyright issues. My Finnish language post was titled: "My dolphin armbands" as I wanted to show colleagues who are insecure about getting "webskilled" that you can always find ways to keep you afloat in this big ICT stream. You can lean on a more skilled colleague or just hop on a project that requires some web skills, relying on the help of more expert partners. Or, you should follow your intuition and grab the moment by the neck, like I did when I was offered the possibility of playing guineapig for an on-line course in elementary Estonian a dozen years ago.  

First time iPads

This week I have been on the move again. As internationalisation of education is my special metier, I went through the annual highseason Wednesday-Thursday in Kuopio where CIMO (www.cimo.fi) and my agency organised the 5th annual general education internationalisation conference. We had to stop registrations at 170 as there was no more space. The big ideas were: to link internationalisation firmly to the curriculum and, to learn to use more webskills in internationalisation. Bravo! I wish you could read some Finnish so you could check our hashtags for example (#kvsyyspäivät2013).
The web tools we were suggesting you will find at http://tiinsari.blogspot.fi/; you may trace (amongst the Finnish there) words like padlet, google drive, scoopit...

Over the weekend, Friday night and Saturday till lunch I was in Ruissalo (no snow yet unlike in the picture, Ruissalo is a national park with a posh hotel on an island just out of Turku),

where a language learning promo campaign was closing down; I was there to talk about the curriculum reform which I have often posted about. I was actually facilitating two adobe connect presentations on the subject which I had recorded the previous week. The facilitating business went fairly well but really, you will tire out your audience unless you intervene from time to time; that is if the presenter in the recording is not really lively or, if the recording is not quite short:) Also, I had a little presentation about the ECML which was referred to in our this week's readings i.e. Prof David Little's article about the European Language Portfolio was based on an ECML project which is still on-going by the way. See www.ecml.at and remember the Portfolio is great for autonomous learning! Our Finnish version is even better as it is more recent and it has more about intercultural skills in it - but it is easy to me to say so as you have not started studying Finnish yet I am afraid!

I posted on Nicenet about how happy I was to encounter autonomous learning as our topic for reading this week. I agree with Dimitrious Thanasoulas who is quoting great Vygotsky “Perhaps one of the principal goals of education is to alter learners' beliefs about themselves by showing them that their putative failures or shortcomings can be ascribed to a lack of effective strategies rather than to a lack of potential."  Another intriguing quotation was from Rousseau saying, the autonomous learner is obedient to a law he has prescribed to himself. Now that's pretty good, isn't it! Has to be taken with a pinch of salt though. The latter quotation I found from the edutech.wiki that Courtney referred us to and which, once again, revealed, not only targeted info for our weekly assignment, but a whole wealth of useful information for us who are generalists of education.

Almost forgot to mention this: in Ruissalo I was able to take part in a hands-on lesson where the teachers present were able to get acquainted with a tablet computer. I had an iPad in my hands for the first time believe me or not. It was very informative and quite bewildering: so many options were touched upon, the QR codes, eMaps, making films, making animations, booklets... I have never seen an auditorium full of teachers go totally wild about a gadget like what happened on Saturday. Now I understand a bit about the fad that is going on in my country's schools about tablets.

One more webskills thing that happened this very evening: now I have been a bit of a twitter enthusiast all since July when I created an account for myself. On Twitter I am sort of semi-official in my tweets and I try to be witty and informative (alas, you cannot check me on that as most of my tweets are in Finnish), I follow a big  number of interesting educators but also politicians, journalists etc. It has been fairly quiet but quite informative anyway. You know about hashtags, #, you can do alot with them can't you. For example as I mentioned in the beginning, you can tweet about an event and that's both for PR and pure communication. You can also record the dialogue in an event - and of course YOU CAN USE TWITTER IN CLASS FOR LEARNING. Anyway, that was not my main point as tonight, for the first time, I was part of a real flurry of some 100 tweets. It all started when somebody said high schools are unhappy with the too optimistic grading in basic school as this will lead to major problems with the much more demanding level of assessment in high school. Well, the exchange of thoughts took a lot of twists and turns and it ended up with most of us welcoming not only electronic portfolios for the autonomous and individual learners but also PLEs, personalised learning environments; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_learning_environment.

A very welcome day off tomorrow. I try to use part of it to look at my final project which is going to be, what else, but a webinar.

 

 

Bleak November, bright PPTs!

An interesting week. My Webskills study mates have been busy posting notions about teaching large classes and once again they have baffled me by being both clever, hardworking and creative. So many of them have genuine hands-on experience of enormous classes too. The situation in Finland is so different - we have a great number of very small schools and in basic education the class size is being kept in about 20 with the help of extra funding from the Ministry of Education.

As for myself then, I had (you've heard this before sorry) no real time for Webskills exept (in my thoughts and) late Saturday night and tonight, Sunday. A busy work week and then all of my weekend spent in a training about mediation. That is voluntary work to help the legal system in this country through what is called restorative justice.

I was glad our second assignments this week had to do with use of Powerpoint as I thought this is peanuts for me: I am pretty good with PPT in my own little ways: I have been using PPT since, say late 1990s, and little by little I’ve learnt to use a great number of the functionalities PPT has on offer. Also, as a frequent presenter in a variety of settings and a keen critique of my fellow-presenters, I have learnt, early on, not to put too much stuff in one slide (not always so with in my presentations though) and not to use a font that is hard to read; also I use animations a lot and I time my animations quite in an audience-friendly way - I think. I use a lot of pictures, including print screen snapshots and hyperlinks to pages on the internet. However, the animations that were suggested in the article about (3D ppt) were a novelty to me and I did not really get to grips with them, as yet (I will, soon…)

And then, I haven’t used videos or music at all in my presentations - and this is something I MUST DO AFTER WEEK 6 at Webskills! I haven’t shot any videos with my smart phone even if I know I could and that every kid can do that. I will – I’ll have to push myself into doing that before Webskills is over.

Anyways, what I learnt and did in a small way already (you may check my upload in our Wiki) is understand how to add interactivity to PPT presentations.  I will try to work on the presentation still as I will need it in January the latest. Thanks Courtney! The main thing is, you are providing us with great pedagogy again. A substantially new way to consider PPT as a tool to improve teaching learning.

One tiny thing still, Courtney said prezis, which are sort of a fad in presentations, can make people dizzy. Well, I am certainly one of those people and I am glad this was mentioned in our course. The techniques about prezi may be great but they should be audience-friendly too.

TV and radio talk all the time about the giant typhoon that hit the Philippines. Such unimaginable winds. The climate change calls for these monsters more and more often it seems. I wonder how things are in Sarawak where our Webskills colleague Diana lives and works.

 

As with me and Webskills, the learning process has certainly started (should have by now of course!). I am trying to constantly trace elements in my daily doings that would have a bearing on my studies. Also I managed to squeeze out two (for me) rather voluminous posts on Nicenet about the tasks on Alternative Assessment and Rubrics.

However, this past week  I was unable to study focused, being really busy with a business trip to Jyväskylä (300km from Helsinki) which took a day and a half, and even if I spent altogether 6 hrs on the train, VR, our national railway, failed me this time: the net connection just did not work. Every evening of the week, I was busy preparing Powerpoint presentations, including an hour’s webinar to Joensuu on Thursday, another city some 400 km away from Helsinki. The webinar went great, I am learning! I had my first webinar some two years ago and I am close to knowing already how to be interactive in an Adobe Connect event. The simple thing is, your audience and you have to have access to a camera and the audio contact has to be good. In Joensuu, when my audience wanted to pose me questions, they came right in front of the laptop camera, presented themselves and then we discussed the question they had in mind. Of course you have to be even more careful with what slides you show than if you are in a classroom or an auditorium as you cannot really hop on and off a set of slides and you cannot necessarily use animations as such in a webinar (I cannot, of course a skilled person can).  Do you know that you can also record your webinars, edit them a little and later share them in any way you find meaningful. This reminds me of flipped classrooms which we haven’t discussed as yet in Webskills. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_teaching. I wonder if I could do a flipped webinar in my role as an education administrator – why not!

By the way, I was talking to Joensuu about our curriculum process with focus on language education. What language education is in Europe pls see for example http://www.ecml.at/Resources/ECMLPublications/tabid/277/language/en-GB/Default.aspx (and check this excellent Centre’s website anyway!). Now language education means a major paradigm shift in learning and teaching languages as it introduces serious student-centeredness, plurilingualism, intercultural communication for cultural diversity, and an outlook on languages as something you can play with, including making mistakes in order to test your skills and to learn more.

As the next step this week in my microscopic share of Finland’s efforts towards better language education, Thursday night, I was drawing up a presentation for our Chinese and Japanese languages projects who had a joint seminar on Friday. As a Webskiller, I reminded them of how important it is to build a solid and versatile presence on the net to serve their audiences. Anyways, with these projects, we are in small steps preparing our foreign languages curricula to observe the needs of these major non-European languages, or rather, their learners and teachers! (Next project: Arabic?)  You might care to have a look at these projects’ websites, the ones who can read Chinese or Japanese may find something digestible there http://yanzu.fi/ and http://www.rajamaenlukio.fi/ippo-hanke/in+english/. (I don't know how to insert images so the following looks a bit tilted. The red bird at the bottom may look familiar; it is the logo of Yanzu they have a famous sponsor.)

This is IPPO’s logo and motto, good for all learning too, aren’t they?

千里の道も一歩から。

Senri no michi mo ippo kara.

Even a long journey is begun by taking one step. 

Pheew! It is such hard work trying to keep up with our weekly program. Luckily, it is inspiring and instructive all along.

I am recording here some comments about our TASK this week, which had to do with planning a technology enhanced lesson plan. I tried to study the background material suggested by Courtney with some care. I recognized with some pang the gentle word of warning by the Webskills team in their article, that you should not get carried away by just being excited about the ICTs and some cute tools and sites you have found on the net (or learnt from a colleague) but that planning your lessons should always bear a meaningful link to the syllabus and the standards. The use of ICTs should be a value added to what is being learnt. Moreover, as suggested further in the reading, the assignments you compose should be clear and concise to your students so that they can grasp  why you are providing just those tools and exercises to support their learning.

I liked the suggested reading about writing integrated lesson plans a lot. This is as we in Finland firmly believe that kids will benefit if teachers collaborate with their colleagues all through the students’ learning paths (this is not necessarily what is happening in all schools and all the time – of course not; in Finland we are notorious for wanting to get by all obstacles on our own).

The benefits of integrated teaching learning assignments are obvious as the learners (and teachers, mind you) will come to look at the topics from more angles than one - which is how topics are composed in the real world anyway, are they not. Also as a teaching professional you may be lucky in getting help from a colleague in your own learning as a user of the ICTs and  of the resources available on the Net.

There was another significant tip further on in the reading which was about extending the learning experiences through field trips, research, and art. In Finland we talk all the time about extending the schools’ learning environments, there are even heaps of state discretionary funds going to providers of education in order to enhance the environments, especially through clever use of the ICTs. The latest fad is now providing as many kids at school as possible with tablets. The kids are then – hopefully – taking the tablets to all kinds of learning sites where they can use them for taking notes, taking pictures and videos, consulting the web for more information on what they are studying, also, they can use the tablets also for geo-caching (a fad within a fad), and of course, for asking for help from teachers etc etc. But it is a fad so far, I am afraid the pedagogy that would help make sense of all this tablet learning is evolving only incrementally. (You may not remember but earlier on I was referring to a massive EU survey on the use of ICTs in European schools. The results showed that Finnish schools are well equipped but the teachers do not always know how to put the technology into proper use. The highly enlightening survey report is here http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/KK-31-13-401-EN-N.pdf.)

One or two notes still: as the Webskills colleagues suggested, ICTs can make learning quite fun and exciting if you find the right help through them. I tried the games at the suggested site https://elt.oup.com/student/englishfile/elementary/c_pronunciation/ef_stressgame?cc=us&selLanguage=en.) Now for some reason I could not really make the games work (I refuse to admit that I would not know where the stress is in elementary or intermediate level words;-) but was able to get thrilled anyway!

Thanks Courtney for the extra pages with ‘multi-skills’ to look at, I was happy to find a useful list of slang words http://www.manythings.org/slang/slang6.html  and a pronunciation site to practise with minimal difference pairs at http://www.manythings.org/mp/m30.html, two neat little needles out of a haystackJ By the way, I’ve learnt to use Delicious, these links are of course now secured there for further disposal.