Another amazing week in our Web-skills course! First, I read the project report by Nadina , a teacher from Romania, who works in
a similar type of school and it was somehow obvious to me that the
teaching problems we have to solve might be similar.
Nadina
noticed that the basic needs of her students are related to reading.
She found a study in Romania which proved that more than 50%of the
teenagers who read a text are not able to understand it, or to say what
the text is about. At the same time, her students' vocabulary, both in
English and Romanian was poor and they were not able to express what
they wanted to say.She decided to use the technology to
motivate her students to do more reading and writing and thus to improve
their reading and writing skills. Students found them more
interesting than a traditional text-book and participated in them with a
lot of enthusiasm.
Our next task was to create our "Delicious" account and use it to store our favorite resources, which we find during the web-search. Excellent tool; it makes your professional life so much easier! I can't believe that I've never used it before! It's a must!
Finally, this week's web-search was so inspiring! We were guided to the sites which not only use the latest state-of-the-art technology but also contain a lot of useful ideas and exercises to use in the classroom. Amazing again! Right now my head is so full of ideas that it looks like I'm going to have a headache from this before I go to school on Monday!
This week was full of surprises. The first surprise was a new discovery of the potential of the web search. It was the first time when I've learned that I can target completely different things by choosing one search engine or another. The task we did opened my eyes to new possibilities and also the recommendations from my mates helped me see that from now on the web is going to be more resourceful and I can use more of it for my work. Also, my mates gave lots of good recommendations on what can be found through these searches and how useful those resources can be for our work. My favorite so far is: uk.ask.com. The site not only gives you Top Answer to your query but also a number
of related searches which may guide you to do some further research on
the topic of interest to you. Also, the site is very easy to navigate
and only the first words of my query produced immediately a serious of
hits, again many of them strongly related to the topic under
investigation. I am convinced I'll be using this site a lot for any
academic reading I'd like to do in the future. We can't go wrong now!
The second surprise was the task we did on learning objectives. When analyzing the reading materials and preparing the task I suddenly discovered how precisely all the proceedings in teaching are regulated and described. For example, the descriptions I found in one of the sources on Bloom's taxonomy determine all the necessary steps that need to be taken for effective teaching situations and they are not necessarily the most attractive tasks. "A lesson plan objective is a clear statement of purpose for the whole
lesson that spells out what you want the students to be able to do after
the lesson is completed and determines the activities the students
engage in. The objective can be either a behavioral objective, which
defines what the student can do at the end of the lesson, or a knowledge
objective that defines what the student should know at the end of the
lesson." The objectives are usually put in a sequence from the easier ones to the more difficult one in order to facilitate the teaching and learning. I'm not sure what my mates feelings are about this, but at this point I get the impression that teaching is one of the crafts.
The third surprise came from the description of my students and the IT media which we have at school. Never before did I realize that the school is so well equipped with IT equipment and that we could organize in it fantastic IT resources based lessons. Here are some places we could use for this:
http://zsb1.poznan.pl/icim/archiwum.html#
Webskills e-Teacher Course has been a fantastic experience so far! I met a lot of new friends from different parts of the world and I learned a bit about who they are and what they believe in. It was quite an experience because many of them come from the culturally different regions. I followed some discussions which were provoked by some of the posts just to find out how polite and respectful these people are and how they praise professionalism in all matters. That was very encouraging because it is clear now that we are a group of ambitious people who are prepared to study a lot in order to achieve better results.
I also loved the language and quotations my mates used in their posts and among my favorites are "the mosaic of students" , "to pave the way to knowledge" or "the glass is half-empty or half-full". In my culture we don't use metaphors to describe our thoughts so it was a pleasant surprise to read those things. Thank you for that dear friends! However, the best part this week was when Juan Carlos posted this amusing article:
http://edudemic.com/2013/01/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-connected-educator/
It was a laugh to read about the future of teaching and what the life of a teacher may look like in the next 20 or 30 years.
On the whole, I must admit it was a very interesting, a bit challenging and quite an inspiring week of new encounters with new people and cultures. A very promising beginning to exploring the dilemma I posted earlier here: whether teaching is an art and also whether technology can become a useful tool in this creative process.
Is teaching an art? I know a number of people who would tell me that teaching is just one of the crafts or trades. First you go through the apprenticeship program which includes classroom teaching of theories, methods and techniques, supervised training and later you continue to master your profession during on-the-job training. Over the years you gain more and more experience and acquire new skills, which finally help you become Master of your career domain.
Yet, my feeling about teaching is still a bit different from the picture I drew in the first paragraph. The years of working as a teacher in various and often completely different environments have taught me that it's never enough to just have the knowledge of theories, methods or techniques in order to create a meaningful learning environment. In fact every class is unlike the other and the teacher, similarly to an artist, is shaping this new reality with the tools he/she possesses, the resources and the material (or the students if you will) he/she has to work with. The outcome of this work is never the same, which brings me to the conclusion that teaching is a kind of art.
