eduPLEmooc course Entornos Personales de Aprendizaje (PLE) para el desarrollo personal docente

I have just finished my work at the eduPLEmooc course Entornos Personales de Aprendizaje (PLE) para el desarrollo personal docente. It was a unique learning experience. It was a Massive Open Online Course so anyone interested in education with enough command of Spanish could have joined in. There was a large number of participants from many different countries and various education fields and this fact made the course even more interesting.

The main goals of the course were to give  participants an experience of interconnected learning that will allow them to:

• build or redesign their PLE (personal learning environment)
• reflect on issues such as digital identity and personal learning processes
• contact education professionals through the numerous virtual communities created during the course. 

The course journey was exciting and very informative. I enjoyed being challenged learning how to use new tools to accomplish new tasks. Another plus was that we had to work with our peers in different projects and to share all our works through social media.  The chart below shows my personal experience during the course:

Going into the details of the chart:

• One of the main goals of this course was to reflect on the new role of education in the 21st century.
• New challenges arise after this process, mainly trying to integrate everything I learned in my classes and using media and ICT tools to enhance students' Spanish learning.
• One of the projects I´d like to work on is the design of an option subject for the Spanish bilingual program where students learn to create their own PLE.

I highly recommend the course for teachers working in the Spanish bilingual programs. I assume the same course will be offered in the near future. To get updated information visit the website of INTEF.

More sites for good books in eduPLEmooc

I'd like to continue showcasing websites and blogs which provide information and reviews about books that can be used in a Spanish bilingual or IB program in Alberta. I came across these three resources from the eduPLEmooc course that I am taking. 

Last week we started our group research projects. It was actually very difficult to narrow it down to one topic but eventually, I chose digital storytelling. The working group has over 30 members who come from several countries. They all work in different educational settings and thus, this makes group work more challenging and enriching at the same time. The reasons why I chose the group are these:

• I want to learn about the  tools to create digital stories, something I have not had the opportunity to do before.
• I am really interesting in sharing pedagogical approaches on how to better introduce storytelling in a classroom
• I want to hear about other teachers' experiences, especially in second languages teaching and how they use storytelling to improve  the students' writing outcome.

As the course is a mooc, an open course,  we are also showcasing all of our projects to each other. I have been regularly reading what other groups have uploaded and I came across some very interesting links to get information and reviews about books for our Spanish bilingual or IB programs. These are trhe three resources I would like to share today.

A board in Pinterest kept by teacher, Toni Solano, who gives us lots of tips and suggestions for good books to use in a secondary school in Spain. I find it very intresting it because there are many references to books for young adults that can be useful for our classes and school libraries. The board is open and anyone is welcome to join and share.

Some of the educators who have been including suggestions in the Pinterest group also share a Google group about books and reading. It is open and the information that everyone supplies is also very interesting. A must-follow for all of us working with bilingual programs in Alberta.

Some of the many resources shared by the Google Group is the magazine La pagina escrita, published by the foundation Jordi Sierra i Fabra. I have already spoken about this foundation when I introduced the Jordi Sierra i Fabra awards for young writers. In the magazine there are interviews and conversations with writers, famous for their books for young adults, many of them have been already introduced in this blog. We can also find book reviews and reading suggestions. However, the section that includes short stories by young writers can be very useful for us as teachers. Every number includes 3 or 4 short stories plus around the same number of poems written by writers no older than 23. Because of the closeness in age, our students will no doubt find these stories very relevant to their lives. These may even inspire them to write Spanish stories of their own!

eduPLEmooc has proved to be a great tool to learn form each other and share resources and information. I hope that we will have lots of interesting resources to share very soon about digital storytelling.

#eduPLEmooc, learning about Information overload and new Literacy

The best aspect of participating in an open course like #eduPLEmooc is being able to interact and share information and knowledge with other educators who are working in similar programs. Unit 3 of the course focused on the concept of information overload (also known as infoxication). We are constantly bombarded with information. We may become increasingly frustrated when we cannot retrieve the relevant information we want amongst the sea of whirling data.

The concept of information overload is not new (it was first used by Alvin Toffler in 1970) but the problem became more widespread with the launch of web 2.0. The attached link provides an accurate picture of the problem as well as tips to cope with it: Understanding information overload.

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I have been trying to deal with the information overload in different ways but to no avail. In unit 3 we were introduced to new tools that help us filter and organize incoming information. Naturally, these tools may be helpful but the most practical strategies may be to exercise our common sense and be consistent when we use the web. These are some of the recommended resources that I will be using: 

• Pinterest to store together videos, short films, songs that I have been introducing in the blog
• The social bookmarking Diigo to keep track of blogs, websites etc. which are useful and inspiring for work.
• Take advantage of filing host services like Dropbox and Google drive. I am getting rid of the USBs (I have around 10)
• #hagstags and lists in Twitter to follow groups which are meaningful to our work.
• The last tool I would like to start using is the dashboard personalized platform Netvives. It has been recomended in the course and it seems like a powerful tool to organize content and resources. 

As I said before, one of the key benefits  in participating in a Mooc course is the chance to interact with other educators. I have been thinking extensely about the concepts of PLE (personal learning environment), web literacy and ethics on the web and how to introduce these concepts in the classroom. Aitor Alazpita a teacher at IES in Salobreña, Spain, shared with the members of the course a very inspiring post in which he makes an analysis of the importance of filtering and organizing information from the web and how we need to give these tools to students to organize their own information. The concept of literacy has changed and he introduces the concept of modern literacy developed by David Warlick, which is based on 4 main ideas:

• Exposing Knowledge
• Employing information 
• Expressing ideas compellinglly 
• Ethical use

Warlick, D.F. (2004). Redefining literacy for the 21st century. Worthington, OH: Linworth.

To read more on the the topic of new literacy visit this link and/or this presentation.

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How can we integrate all this in our daily work?  In Aitor Alazpita's school a new subject area, Comunicacion y Redes, was designed in which students  learn the concept of new literacy. They are taught the skills to filter, organize and put together all the information they reach using the web.2, something that will help them to design their PLE. At first I thought that it would be wise to introduce all this content in the SLA class, as part of the daily work. However, to develop a CTS course in Spanish for the students in the bilingual program could help them to improve their literacy skills and  create their own PLE.  At the same time they improve their Spanish and realize that Spanish can be a tool to acquire skills that can be used for all their learning processes. The course developed at IES Nazarí can be a great source of inspiration to do our own version.

#eduPLEmooc, working on the course

I have enrolled on the open course #eduPLEmooc and I have tried to catch up with the activities in this busy period of the year. So far, I find very interesting two ideas that have been discussed in the course:

• Learning never ends and we are responsible for organizing our own learning in a time of  dramatic changes in education. Learning has changed and thanks to ICT we can and should be in contact with other teachers to share our expertise and knowledge and learn from their experience. Learning collaboratively is essential to build up our PLE, our Personal Learning Environment, which will enrich us professionally and personally.
• Building our PLE is essential but we need to be aware of the image we project online and how this image is going to be used by others. 

These are the main two ideas so far in the course. Another important aspect of the course is the fact that there is an incredible number of teachers from various backgrounds, countries and areas of expertise who have been actively working together since the course started. To me this has been incredibly valuable since I am taking advantage of  my peers' expertise to improve my digital competence and to learn, first hand, about numerous tools which are available online both for improving our PLE as well as for working in the classroom.

In the next weeks I'd like to start contacting some of the teachers in the course who are currently working on language programs so that we can exchange ideas and, hopefully, come out with some projects to use in our classrooms and continue our personal development.

From the very beginning of the course I have been considering how the concept of PLE can be used with our students and by our students. Although our students use ICT every day, every single moment, it is surprising that they are unaware of the possibilities the web offers them to improve their knowledge, and help them with their learning especially if they work collaboratively. On the other hand, most students also may not realize the importance of creating a consistent self-image online and also its implications this image may have to them. Naturally, my first thought was try to build awareness about our personal image with students in the Internet and also help them create their PLE.  And to do all this in Spanish, as part of the Spanish courses in high school. How can we integrate this? This is what I would like to start discussing.