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.
Just to remind myself of a thought which I think was pretty good but I forgot to mention it in my post yesterday: Are we autonomous learners at Webskills? How is our autonomy being developed by the structure and content of the course and by Courtney's interventions and through the discussions on Nicenet? Pretty well, I should say but this is something I need someone to converse on with. Reflections please!
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