#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.

Newspaper Article about Bilingual Programs in Spain

On September 30th, 2013 the article "Bilingües a la Carrera, ("Bilingual schools boom") was published in the Spanish newspaper El País. In the article we learn about the plans of two Spanish Autonomous Communities, Murcia and Castilla-La Mancha to offer bilingual programs in all the K-12 schools in both provinces. Most schools will likely select English as their second language of instruction in various subject areas. According to the article, 70% of the schools in Castilla La Mancha don't offer bilingual programs yet. In the case of Murcia 30% of secondary schools and 70% of elementary schools still need to start offering the program. The task ahead is very ambitious considering they are to complete this in just 5 years.

I find it very positive that the educational authorities try to offer the same educational opportunities to all students no matter where they live. It also seems that even though students have studied a second language from K-12, many are failing to demonstrate sufficient fluency in these target languages - something needs to be done. Parents expect their children at least to finish high school with a high command of more than one language. In addition, today's society demands citizens to have deep multicultural understanding. Needless to say that it is the educational authorities' duty to meet these demands and promote good educational programs for students.

 

Having said that, reading the article doesn't give you a very clear plan ahead for the expansion of the bilingual programs. University professors, experts and teachers unions in the article warn about the negative effects of implementing bilingual programs too quickly while sacrificing quality and without sufficient resources. I would like to point out four elements that appear in the article that need to be clarified to offer quality bilingual programs in most settings.

• Resources. Spain has been suffering a severe economic crisis in the last 6 years of which we have not seen the end.. According to the article, Murcia has reduced the number of teachers in 7% and Castilla-La Mancha 15% in the last 2 years. To develop an ambitious bilingual program like this with overworked teachers in large classes is probably not ideal. On the other hand, the article is not specific about funding and plans for program sustainability. The provisions made do not seem very realistic. This is a long distance race that will require a permanent influx of money for teacher training. 

• Linguistic capacity. The different provinces in Spain should reach an agreement about the level of proficiency that teachers who are working in bilingual programs should have. On the other hand, teachers will need to continuously work to improve their command in the target language.

• According to the article, there is not a consistent bilingual program model in Spain and the differences among programs in the 17 Spanish provinces can be enormous. Bilingual programs should have a consistent framework all through the country. Students should have similar amount of time exposure for the subjects taught in the target language. The expectations for the students of reaching a level of achievement at the end of the program should also be similar. All students should be assessed using a same set of benchmarks created by the government or from a unified source.

• Change in pedagogical principles. This is a key element that it is not considered very often in Spain. Pilar Garcés, a professor at the University of Valladolid, mentions it in the article: "we cannot teach a subject area in the target language the same way we used to in Spanish". Lecture style classes will not give students the skills they need for a globalized world. Unless meaningful changes are made in the bilingual programs, our students will fail. Students have to use the language in context, learn to do research and collaborate with peers using the target language.

I would also suggest a discussion about the expansion of bilingual programs in Spain. A bilingual program needs to emphasize the development of students' cultural awareness. Bilingual programs can be the trigger to encourage students to participate in international programs, work with other schools and take advantage the ICT in a globalized world. Students are more likely to continue in the bilingual programs, if they are able to make meaningful connections between the language they are learning and the culture from which it was derived.

It is encouraging that educational authorities in Spain are trying to expand bilingual programs so every student has the chance of enrolling in a bilingual program. Unfortunately, without a long time plan we won't offer quality programs and students won't acquire the command in the target language, nor the cultural awareness necessary in our globalized world. To rush the implementation of these programs can be counterproductive in the long run.

III International Conference on Bilingual Teaching in Educational Institutions

There has been an exponential growth of bilingual schools in Spain in the last ten years. It  is generally agreed that getting an education in two languages is highly beneficial for students not only for professional  but also for cognitive reasons. It has not been an easy task, despite the enthusiastic interest of parents, students, teachers and educational authorities. The challenge has been very important. Teachers needed training not only to improve their fluency on the target language but also on innovative pedagogics that involve to teach content along with a second language. Resources had to be developed from scratch since a direct translation of the existing resources was not the right answer to the challenge. 

Most provincial governments developed  training or support programs so schools could offer quality bilingual teaching. Schools had the opportunity of hiring language assistants to work with teachers in their classes and help develop resources in the target languages. Teachers have also been offered summer courses to continue improving their command in the target language. Working groups, sometimes at the international level, were created to allow for the sharing of resources and experiences. I have already blogged about some of these groups who have been sponsored by a European institution or developed by between schools in two countries.

The Department of Education in Madrid in partnership with the Rey Juan Carlos University hosted the International Conference on Bilingual Teaching in Educational Institutions in 2010 and 2011. The goal of these two sessions was "[to establish] a theoretical and practical framework" for bilingual programs. Experts and researchers in bilingual settings were present at the conferences but also "a large number of teachers from every educational level interested in sharing their experiences and knowledge." Fortunately for us, the keynote speakers' presentations from both conferences are available online.  We have access to the rest of the sessions only of the 2010 conference.  I was specially interested in learning about the experiences in secondary education and some of them are extremely inspiring and give us a good insight of how teachers are teaching subject areas in the target language.

The third conference will be held in Madrid on the 18th and 19th of October, 2013. This year's title is: "Bilingual Education: Consolidation and Perspectives for the XXI Century" and it "aims to go deeper into and move forward in the analysis of bilingual education". The key themes of the conference are intriguing, as the list provided on the conference website reveals.

• CLIL and good practice
• CLIL assessment in different subjects
• Bilingual education: teacher training and updating
• Activities and resources to support CLIL methodology
• Technological tools for bilingual education in the XXI Century
• The importance of literacy in the bilingual classroom
• Bilingual teaching in secondary education
• Future challenges in bilingual programs
• Academic language in different subjects
• Bilingual teaching in higher education

Sadly, I won't be able to attend the conference but I look forward to having a look at the presentations once they are available online.  I just hope that all the sessions will be posted online and not only the keynote speakers' sessions. All the information above and the presentations from the previous conferences are available on this website: http://www.cieb.es

Approaches to bilingual education in European countries

The blog mantained by Pilar Torres is a great source of information about second language acquisition, bilingual programs, CLI, cooperative projects and much more. Her posts have been featured on my blog before and it won't be the last!

The Centro de Profesores in Cordoba, Spain, where Pilar is an advisor, has recently organized a Study Visit called "The ABC of Plurilingualism in Andalusia". The Study Visits programme, for education and vocational training specialists and decision makers, "is an initiative of the European Commision's Directorate-General for Education and Culture. Its objective is to support policy development and cooperation at European level in lifelong learning, notably in the context of the Lisbon process and the education and training agenda 2020 (E&T2020), as well as the Bologna and Copenhagen processes and their successors." (Source: Directorate-General for Education and Culture's website)

 

Experts involved in bilingual programs from 11 European countries took part in the Study Visit and learnt first hand about the bilingual programs in Andalusia, Spain. They also introduced the language and bilingual programs in their respective countries. Twelve presentations are available online that portray different realities and ways of implementing bilingual programs. Ireland's experiences are particularly interesting, efforts are aimed at increasing the knowledge and daily use of their native language, Gaelic Irish, in the battle against the dominance of English. Another interesting case is Hungary and their goal to preserve Hungarian minority cultures in such as Romania or Slovakia.  The twelve presentations show a different scenario but with in many cases similar challenges ahead.

A report by Pilar Torres about the rationale behind bilingual programs and their implementation in Andalusia is available in the same post. I have mentioned in previous posts that the approach to bilingual programs in that Spanish province is very thorough. I highly recommend you to read the whole report to fully understand the work that they've done in the last 20 years. Some of the strong points of the bilingual programs in Andalusia are the following:

• The existence of a log term program that goes from kindergarten to the last year of secondary education.
• It is a program open to all students and there are not prerequisites to start the program.
• The concept of multilingualism : students are encouraged to take another language outside the two working languages in the bilingual program. This concept of multilingualism is even more obvious with the launching of bilingual programs in not so popular languages in Spain such as Chinese or Portuguese.
• Collaboration with other countries is encouraged so students can get a dual diploma at the end of the some of the bilingual programs (French and soon Chinese).
• The use of language assistants as key resource for students and teachers.
• The compromise of initial and continuous training for the teachers working in the bilingual programs.
• The establishment of an international teacher network to create quality resources available online.
• The placement of a bilingual program coordinator in every school.
• Schools normally use a CLIL approach when implementing bilingual programs.

The program's strengths are obvious but there are also challenges ahead such as how to integrate students with learning disabilities in a bilingual program, or how to create attainable, rigorous benchmarks for all the students. And we should not forget the effects of the crisis in programs like the language assistants or the in-service programs for teachers.

All the participants in the Study Visit agreed to present closing remarks with proposal and ideas to better face the challenges for the future. We can certainly learn a lot from their challenges because we face many similar ones too. We should continue to build the foundation of this kind of international collaboration to improve the quality of our bilingual programs.

Videos to better understand CLIL

Any time I talk about CLIL it comes to my mind my experience as a second language learner, and particularly as an English learner. English was not the first language I took at school, French was. I started English in high school but I have to admit that I always wanted to learn. Probably some famous rock bands have to be blamed for this interest. It was a long time ago and  the communicative approach to teaching had not reached my school. I learnt a lot but I always had the feeling that something was missing.

At the time I had not heard of bilingual education nor CLIL but I remember very well  one of the first things I did when I went to England for the first time as a student. I went to every second hand book store I found and I bought textbooks in almost every single subject area in the curriculum. Why? Because I felt that I lacked the language of science or history, let alone maths. So I bought textbooks on the sciences, socials studies and even home economics. This was the age before the Internet so reading lots of books in the target language was one of the cheapest and most available way to learn. Other than that, I would have had to enrol in a school in an English speaking country.

My experience has made me think about the importance of acquiring second languages in bilingual programs using a CLIL approach. And this is why I try to introduce resources that can help build a consistent bilingual program in our school. The short clips in today's post are from three different professors who have been researching on CLIL in the last years and advising the European Union on language policies. The clips introduce very interesting topics and issues that we encounter in our daily practice.

In the first clip, David Marsh explains how he ended up in CLIL after different experiences working with languages in Asia and Europe. There are some hot themes in the clip that I think deserve especial attention:

• The need of creating a significant part of our resources for a CLIL approach. Transferring the resources from the country where the language is spoken is not going to work. We have experienced this so often!
• That is why it is so important the support from the education authorities and the concept of work group among the teachers, language arts and subject teachers.
• The need of combine language, content and "fun". Languages can open up many oppurtunities for students to participate and enjoy cultural activities. 
• CLIL will not end with language teaching, it will enhance it.
• CLIL is much more than teaching through a subject.

The other two short clips are part of a group of videos produced by a Think Tank on CLIL that took place in 2009. Professor Do Coyle speaks about two very important ideas when implementing CLIL:

• CLIL helps to explore how language can be used to support the learning of a subject. Language is a learning tool. Using a second language to teach a subject will enhance this pedagogical value because teachers will need to be more conscious about how they use and model the language so that students interact and move forward in their subject.
• The concept of Pluri-Literacy: how the use of different languages affect literacy.

Sue Hughes talks about obvious issues in education, that we tend to forget:

•  Every teacher is a language teacher
• Students come with different knowledge of language if we have to use to our benefit, no matter if it is a language from another country or the specific language of, let's say, science or history.
  

We all know how important it is that we have access to CLIL research to better understand how to implement a bilingual program. We don't need to forget though, that what makes a consistent bilingual program is our daily practice in school. This and how we can work as a team in the school and how we can learn from other schools' experiences and share our knowledge with them.



Using Portfolios in the classes taught in Spanish

I would like to share my reflections on Roy Lyster's very interesting presentation in Calgary that I spoke about on January 13th . The two main ideas I got out of that day are:

• It is essential that teachers working in bilingual program are integrating both language and content when teaching.
• It is important for teachers to collaborate though, in my experience,  it is always a challenge in a senior high school.

During his presentation, Mr Lyster introduced very inspiring examples of best practices by some teachers working in French Immersion schools in Quebec. They used different techniques to target the improvement of language skills while teaching content.

After reading his article and the notes I took from his presentation, a question rose in my mind: do we have to assess language in the subject areas taught in the target language? If so, are there any examples available that can inspire our teaching practice?

 My experience in this matter is limited because I have never taught any other subject than language arts. However,  from talking with teachers, their answer is usually that they don't consider language in the final grades for students. I am not pointing fingers at anyone; on the contrary, I know the work load teachers have and it is not easy to collaborate with the others because of different timetables and so on. But as we can see in the example below, there are many possibilities worth exploring.

I was very fortunate to meet the team leader of languages and coordinator of the bilingual program at the IES Llanes in Seville, Spain., Lola Aceituno. It is a Gr. 7-12 school but the bilingual program goes from grade 7 to grade 10. There are several aspects I liked about their project:

• The team leader works hand in hand with the teachers in the bilingual program to identify and create resources together.
• Teachers work in collaborative projects integrating different subject areas and different languages.
• They use ICT to work together and make all the resources more accessible.
• They have adapted the frame of the European Portfolio of Languages so that students can assess their improvements in the target language in the subject areas taught in English.

I'd like to introduce some of their interdisciplinary projects which I find particularly inspiring.  Students work on a project called "Unequal population distribution" and they focus on different aspects according the subject area from which they work. After completing the assignment in all the subject areas, students complete a final task in which all the learnt skills are applied. All of the resources are online are accessible to students, parents and teachers. Click on the image to get more information:

 

 

Another very interesting feature is the self-assessment sheet that students complete after the final task. The sheet follows the structure of the European Portfolio of Languages, so they use the "I can.." statements to be aware of how much "language"they have learnt working in the project. This is a great example of how to integrate language and content and how to assess the language piece in a subject area taught in the target language.

 



A second example of multidisciplinary task is this one on Fables. Students worked on fables from different perspectives and integrating different artistic means: literature, art, music, drama. To make things a bit more complex, students work the same topic in three different languages .

Portfolios are flexible and can be used for any subject area taught in the target language. Here is another example developed at the same school for Maths.

This is a very inspiring bilingual school project which shows that working collaboratively, being aware that language is as important as content and assessing this knowledge is essential to have in a successful bilingual program . Portfolios can be a useful tool to make students aware of their progress in the target language. I hope you have some time to check it out!

Books for reading about mathematics and physics

Today I'd like to introduce two books which can be helpful to build up the linguistic competence of students taking mathematics in Spanish.

It is not easy to find novels which are related to specific subject areas in a school, introduce scientific topics in a realistic way and/or use problem solving as the leading engine in the development of the story. I've been reading different books and my choice so far is the following: El asesinato del profesor de matemáticas (Anaya) de Jordi Sierra i Fabra y La puerta de los tres cerrojos (La Galera) de Sonia Fernández-Vidal.

Jordi Sierra is probably the most prolific Spanish writer for children and young adults, he has published hundreds of titles and has numerous awards, among them the National Award for children´s literature in 2007 and some of the most prestigious awards in children´s literature (Edebé, Barco de Vapor, Gran Angular...). The story is simple: 3 students, the only ones in the class who have failed mathematics, are challenged by their teacher to find who is responsible for his own death. To solve the mystery they must resolve different math problems until they find who is guilty. At the end, we discover everything was a bet between the math teacher and the principal so the 3 main characters could pass their exam. From this moment the students embarked in a frantic trip to solve the problems and find their teacher's murderer.

 

La Puerta de los tres Cerrojos was published in 2011 by Sofía Fernández-Vidal, a doctor physicist who has worked for different technological companies all over the world. Her aim is to show young people the depths of the quantic physics. The main character in the book, fourteen-year-old Niko, opens the door with the three lockers and will encounter a parallel world inhabited by scientist elves and fairies who will explain to him the origins and the development of the universe.

 

 

 



Both books are easy to read and are related to the subjects areas taught in Spanish. Both have been best sellers and have been translated to various languages. They can be one more tool to make  Maths, in Spanish, a bit more accessible. 



Dr. Cummins' Plenary in Madrid

In the last two years the CIEB, Congreso Internacional de Educación y Bilingüismo, has been celebrated in Madrid. All the presentations and plenaries from 2010 are available online and all are interesting. Only the plenaries from 2011, not the rest of presentations, are available online.

Experts in Bilingual Education, CLIL and Immersion Programs have taken part in both editions. I would like to recommend the plenary "Teaching for Transfer in Bilingual Education: Promoting Language Awareness and Literacy Engagement through Identity Texts" by Jim Cummins. He is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto and his main areas of research are: language development and literacy development of learners of English as an additional language.

Mr. Cummins points out 3  elements which are key to improve the outcomes of a CLIL or a Bilingual Program:

•  Understanding the Nature of English language and its links to Spanish (the plenary took place in Spain where English is the target language).
• Promoting literacy engagement actively (and this idea links with improving our students' reading habits)
• Showcasing students' creative work in both languages with a special interest in conjoint projects between schools.

I truly believe that all teachers and administrators involved in an ISA program can get very interesting ideas from this presentation to implement in their schools. Mr. Cummins speaks about some of the challenges ISAs have encountered in the last years. And he offers solutions.