INTEF, Best Practices 2.0

INTEF, Instituto Nacional de Tecnologías Educativas y Formación del Profesorado, is the branch of the Ministry of Education of Spain responsible for encouraging and integrating the use of the ICT in the K12 programs.

INTEF offers a wealth of resources on its website. There are sections on resources for teachers, families and students as well as a very interesting online teacher training program. In addition, there is a repository of didactic units created by teachers that were entered into the annual competition organized by INTEF. The competition winners to the best teaching units publish them on this website.

I will speak about these sections in the future but today I am going to introduce the section that deals with examples of best practices using web 2.0 technology. The examples are organized by levels. For those who are not familiar with the Education System in Spain please notice that:

• Educación Infantil, students are 3 to 6 years old.
• Primaria is basically the same model as in Alberta, grades 1 to 6.
• ESO, stands for enseñanza secundaria obligatoria,  (1 to 4) goes from grade 7 to 10.
• Bachillerato (1-2) is the last two years of secondary education, grades 11 and 12.
• EOI, stands for escuela oficial de idiomas and it is second language programs for adults. They follow a national curriculum and are aligned to the CFER.
• Formación Profesional are vocational courses.
• Programa de cualificación profesional inicial are courses for students who have not the required credits in high school.
• Educación de Adultos is Education for adults who for whatever reason did not finish their secondary education.

We have a lot of examples of blogs and other web 2.0 tools and how teachers have used them as a pedagogical tool. I will highlight three resources amongst the many useful ones that exist on the site.

The first blog is Take the Pen, a blog created by Belén Monreal for her English class in the elementary school Parque Colegio Santa Ana in Valencia. The teacher explains in this video the reasons that moved her to start her blog. She also explains the different sections and the rationale behind the classes and the different parts. Two ideas stand out in her presentation:

• One of the reasons to launch the blog was the lack of appropriate resources for her class and we have seen this so often in our bilingual programs.
• The blog is not something isolated but something integrated with the rest of the subjects and a new approach to teaching in the school.

The second blog is used in a quite different way. It is used as the working tool of a class project for grades 7-9. Una ruta lingüística y solidaria a la tierra de los mayas by José Luis Lomas at Colegio Pedro Poveda uses the blog frame to showcase a web quest project. I found goals of this project particularly attractive:

• Students have to become aware of the different varieties of Spanish through this project that will take them to Mexico.
• And they will become familiar with the native languages spoken in Mexico.
• They will need to use ICT to create their final materials
• The project is done in partnership with a non profit organization and the main goal of it is to bring water to a small community in Mexico.
• Students have to combine resources and knowledge from several subject areas to complete the assignment.

The results are outstanding and as important is the fact that the process requires students to apply skills and techniques and to use resources from several subject areas.

The third blog I would like to introduce is produced by two students on the subject of Spanish Language Arts. They are students in Bachillerato at INS Castellar and coordinated by the teacher Ester Falip Ibarz . The students had to read 3 literary works, a novel, a play and a short story. They are set in three different periods of Spanish History:  the years prior to the Spanish Civil War, the Civil War and the years after it. This explains the project title.

Besides the reading and analysis of the 3 works, students conducted interviews, visited exhibitions and compared the works with the feature films based on them. The result of the project is the blog, a time line project using Dipity and a digital book using Calaméo. The final product is great as it is the level of satisfaction for the students.

This website is a great source of information about best practices of web 2.0 that teachers are using in their daily work. The suggested blogs are just three examples but we can find many other inspiring experiences in the INTEF website. These blogs can give us lots of ideas if we want to start a blog or improve the one that we already have.

A TV program about the Educational System in Spain

Salvados is one of my favourite TV programs in Spain. Furthermore, its director and presenter, Jordi Évole, has created a new style of doing television and  dealing with controversial issues, which I find particularly interesting. If I am not mistaken, the program has just started its sixth season. And the first program boldly attempts to address a controversial "education" issue in Spain.

To give you some figures about the educational system in Spain:

• The government is preparing its seventh Education Law since 1978. Any new government  has promulgated a new General Education Policy. In most cases,  these policies were never implemented properly.
• The results in the PISA report for Spain are mediocre at best.
• Spain has one of the highest rates in Europe of students abandoning the school system before graduation (over 30%).
• About 32% of students attend private schools or  publicly funded private schools, the second highest percentage in Europe, according to the TV program.
• Due to the crisis, in the last year's the cuts in education have meant, among other things, that teachers have increased instructional hours and obviously, larger classes (as many as 30 in elementary education and 35 in secondary).

The presenter talks to a university professor and visits a school in Barcelona to offer a vision of education in Spain. Unfortunately, everyone involved in the documentary has a negative opinion on how things have gone in the last years. It seems that the education system in Spain has not been able to keep pace with the last pedagogical and technological advances. The perception you get after watching the program is theres is a disjoint between society and schools and that something must be done about it.

 

To complete his vision on education and find answers, the presenter visits a school in Finland, which traditionally has occupied the top positions in the PISA reports. We learn that most schools are publicly funded and that society support their educational system overall, because they feel proud of it. A career in teaching is highly valued so spots in the faculties of education are in very high demand. There were things that I particularly liked about the way they organize schools and some others that surprised me: 

• The timetable - a short break period after every class in elementary schools.
• Resources, books and meals are included in schooling paid through taxes.
• Students are taught about responsibility since they are very young. They even walk to school at a very early age. Yes, it is a safe country.
• Their success lie in the fact that schools are not detached from society but is one of its foundations.

The nice surprise? Naturally, the Spanish bilingual programs in Finland. I have never heard that there were Spanish bilingual programs in Finland and that they wereso popular. And the reason to explain their popularity, according to the teacher in the program? Apparently some Spanish soap operas have been very successful in Finland and TV programs are never dubbed.

 

It is not the first time that I have spoken about education in Finland in this blog but I find their approach to education serious and professional, a matter of state. I still remember, some years ago, when I took part in one E-Twinning project with a school in Finland.The teacher I worked with once mentioned to me: "I am a grandmother already but I still want to explore new things with my students." An incredible declaration of principles. To watch the program, click below and enjoy!

 

CLIL II, CLIL Lesson Plans Samples

I have spoken about CLIL, its foundations, where to get theoretical background about CLIL education. We need to start to see some examples of activities, resources created by teachers in their daily practice. Examples which can, I hope, help us to better understand the theory but also to inspire our own production of activities.

I find  the approach to bilingual education that Andalusia in Spain is taking particularly attractive. Every new teacher in a bilingual program takes an intense course that includes theoretical instruction, presentations by researchers and work sessions with teachers with experience in the program. The teachers also spend time during their introduction to the program creating activities that can be used in a class following a CLIL approach.  It doesn´t finish here, teachers keep on working together and producing activities that are normally placed online, using either a blog or a wiki. The best part of all this? All these resources are online available for us to look at, explore and reuse for our purposes and needs. And I honestly think that some are really inspiring.

First, we can have a look at the several templates they have created to create a CLIL lesson plan. The first one elaborated by Isabel Pérez, whose website I have already introduced, is very thorough and has all the components we need to include in a CLIL lesson plan. It also includes links to clarify some of the sections and links to pedagogical background behind CLIL.

 

 

All these resources can be found in the wiki created by the CEP (Centro de profesores) in Granada. The wiki is for teachers to have a common space to work together, share resources and learn form each other. It was created after one of the professional development sessions for teachers in bilingual programs and has been used as a meeting point for everyone interested in developing bilingual programs under a CLIL approach in the province.

Another template is available in the blog of Pilar Torres who is the Language Advisor in another CEP, in Córdoba. I will spend more time talking about this blog which offers a lot of useful and valuable information on CLIL and many other subjects. Today, let me just introduce a different proposal of template to create a CLIL activity. This one is more simplified but it can also be useful for our needs in Alberta.

I find it essential to  have a consistent approach to the way we organize our lessons plans making sure that the key linguistic, pedagogical and cultural components are included. It will help our work to a great extent and it will be the only way we can work collaboratively with other teachers in a bilingual program. In my next posts, I will talk about the CEFR (common European framework of reference, MCER in Spanish) and I will introduce some of the activities from the blogs we talked about today.

Ravitch: Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t)

A very interesting article by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post about education in Finland. Finland always gets "high marks" in the PISA reports in the three core subject tested: mathematics, reading and science. The article shows light about the way education is organized in Finland and gives answers to explain their excellent results. To me a key statement in the article is: Finnish students can get a good education in virtually any school in the nation. If this is true, and apparently it is, it speaks loudly about the quality and consistency of the educational system in Finland. By the way, an educational system which is almost trilingual, Finnish, Swedish, English and this fact doesn't lower students' achievement levels in the core subjects, on the contrary.

The article: Click

More information about the PISA, Program for International Student Assessment, exams.