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Hi!!! I´m teacher and journalist. With this Learning Diary I want to share some texts, tips, good practices and reflexions to improve student learning. I´m especially dedicated to Media Literacy.
The reflexions here were shared with some colleagues in the course "Yes, I Can - Empowering Student Learning", from European Schoolnet Academy.

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Some ideas to improve it!
#ThinkAboutIt

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#ThinkAboutIt How to establish a trusting relationship with your students if you do not show up?

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#Tips
I want to share a wonderful experience I had with my young students. I set aside 5 minutes at the end of the class so that each student could presenting himself. Not just telling his name and age, as usually happens, but carrying books, songs, teaching the class something he knew. It is a wonderful experience. One day, a student who likes Metal explains what this type of music means to him. On another day, a student who likes Gospel takes that music into the classroom and tells how much he feels in peace with that sound. The next day we have a student playing guitar for the group, another reciting poems, etc. Day after day we know each other better. This intimacy allows us to agree a series of dealings that relate to behavior, faults, tests, and achieve a general commitment of the class in order to have a collective learning.
And it all happens because we are able to hear and understand each other, even if we do not like the same things.
This dialogical stance I learned with the great educator Paulo Freire and his incredible books, which I strongly recommend to everyone.

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#GoodPractices

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Diana Rhoten on Sparking Student Interests with Informal Learning (Big Thinkers Series)

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I seek to encourage students on their formative path to be more critical, autonomous and creative in their relationship with the media, for example. I believe that today Media Literacy is urgent at all levels of education, in all countries and can be worked through by all disciplines, and in a formal, non-formal and informal way. Learning how to deal with the media, understandin that communication is a human right, better selecting information and knowing what to do with it is critical in a context with so many fake news and where social media and technologies influence our view of the world and change the relationship we have with others.

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By Profº Y.N.Mhaske (https://www.slideshare.net/yogeshmhaske1/types-of-education-66292303)

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Places and situations to get education!

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The Shift from Engaging Students to Empowering Learnersrom

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The Shift from Engaging Students to Empowering Learnersrom

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The Shift from Engaging Students to Empowering Learners

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Problem-based learning and actives methodologies 

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Problem-based learning and actives methodologies 

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I think that the problem-based learning method can be an interesting idea to make students more participatory, as well as other active methodologies and design thinking. I will always try to use these methods of dialogue and listening.
This also recalls the proposal of educator Paulo Freire, who encouraged the student (in his literacy process) to appropriate writing and word (speaking), so that he could better understand the world and conquer autonomy to transform the environment in which he lives. He started from the concept of generating words, words that made sense to students. In addition, we must use technology to bring students, teachers and the community closer together.

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What kind of strategy do you use in the classroom?

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Some goals in my process of learning and transformation. Which one are yours? 

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Some goals in my process of learning and transformation. Which one are yours? 

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* To know new experiences of teaching and learning;
* Improve my fluency with the English language;
* Learn from colleagues in other countries to what extent culture influences actions in the classroom.

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"Every kid has an interest. Sometimes he doesn’t know what it is, sometimes he can’t articulate it. But every kid has an interest and that is a fundamental belief. It is not only about helping that kid identifying the interest but progress through that interest". (Diana Rhoten, Social Science Research Council)

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The term personalised learning does not really make sense, because really all learning is personal. Personalised instruction is trying to imagine the greatest amount of ways that you can customise a curriculum to the abilities and the interests of the individual student. – Randy Bass, GeorgeTown University

You want the student to reach for more. You want to excite him or her to go home and go on the Internet and search for more information about XYZ. That to me is personalised learning. – Tahnja Wilson, Arizona State University

Personalised learning is learning that promotes and encourages both students and faculty to own and express their agency, to have more control and be more engaged in the decision-making processes. – David Wiley, Lumen Learning

One of the ways is actually paying attention to individual learners, to their knowledge, to their abilities, to their course through life, and that is what personalised learning is, really the entire enterprise of education on the individual learners. – Bryan Alexander, Bryan Alexander Consulting

It is about first identifying what a student needs – it could be academically, it could be in support services – and then being able to provide those kind of key interventions or outreach to that student. – Shannon Mccarty, Rio Salado College |

Personalised learning is that we can really tailor that learning experience to each individual learner. – Tristan Denley, Tenesse Board of Regents

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Personalized Learning: Teaching to the Students in the Back Row

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Personalized Learning: Teaching to the Students in the Back Row

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Personalized Learning: Teaching to the Students in the Back Row

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This is a two-minute explainer animation describing the value of personalized learning approaches.

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Personalized Learning Tied to Student Passion

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Personalized Learning Tied to Student Passion

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Personalized Learning Tied to Student Passion

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Formative Assessment To Initiate Personalized Learning

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Formative Assessment To Initiate Personalized Learning

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How do I meet the unique needs of each individual student? How do I provide the exact lesson at just the right time for a class full of students whose knowledge varies greatly? Read the text bellow and think about some tips.

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"Meeting all of the different needs is tricky." This quote from 2nd grade teacher Brooke Johnston could be the understatement of the year! When Ms. Johnston returned to her Alpine Elementary Classroom in Grand Rapids, Michigan after taking leave to start a family, she was faced with a challenge that rings true for most educators across the country: How do I meet the unique needs of each individual student? How do I provide the exact lesson at just the right time for a class full of students whose knowledge varies greatly? How do I both support and challenge simultaneously?

In order to truly personalize the learning environment for students, teachers need to have a genuine and comprehensive understanding of their students. This means knowing their academic strengths and weakness as part of a complete learner profile that gives a holistic view of each student. However, the academic strengths and weaknesses is not something that can be monitored a couple times of year. The assessment process should be embedded within each lesson and used as tool for immediate and consistent feedback.

The Difference Between Formative Assessment and Summative Assessment

When it comes to assessing student knowledge, we have traditionally followed a model in which we teach and then assess. In this situation, teachers, students, and parents identify what has been learned only after the assessment has been completed ( and graded). An example this type of summative assessment would be an end of unit exam. As we move towards more student centered and personalized learning environments, it is essential that we go beyond assessing to determine knowledge and move into assessing as part of the learning process. This formative assessment is embedded within the lesson and gives teachers and students an immediate feedback loop that enhances learning.

Formative Assessment in the Classroom

Formative assessment may look different in different classrooms, but the purpose remains the same. Formative assessment should:

Inform knowledge

Inform and redirect practice

Provide immediate feedback for teachers and students

Occur frequently

Provide useful data

Be ongoing and embedded

Include formal and informal assessments of knowledge

Whether a class has high or limited access to technology, frequently checking for understanding allows students to practice in low risk environments and gives teachers the information needed to adjust lessons to ensure that each student is given the support needed to succeed.

5 Ways to Quickly Check for Student Understanding

Thumbs up/Thumbs Down (or 1, 2, 3)

Wondering if your class is ready to move on? Just ask. It doesn't have to be complicated, show a thumbs up for solid understanding and a thumbs down for additional support.

Colored Cups

A variety of tools can be used here, but Solo cups or post it notes work great. Each student should have a red, yellow, and green cup. Throughout the lesson, students can use the cups to let you know where they are in their understanding. Green, ready to move on or needs a challenge, yellow indicates a level of confusion, and red tells you the student is struggling.

Mid Lesson "exit slips" with Mini Whiteboards

Traditional exit slips wait until the end of the class to ask a couple questions that will tell teachers what material sunk in and what needed to be reviewed. Why wait until the end of the class? Pick a question that will be easy for you to review quickly and assess understanding on the spot. Determine and prepare these questions ahead of time.
If you don't have mini white boards you can even just use a blank piece of paper. Ask a question, and have students show your answer. Adjust your game plan based on what you see.

Polling

If you are in a 1:1 classroom, use polling software, such as polleverywhere or todaysmeet to ask classwide information.

Auto-graded Assessments

Use a tool like OpenEd to assign students independent assessments. The platform will autograde and provide results as well as recommendations support. The advantage to an auto-graded assessment is the personalized recommended next steps for students based on formative assessment results.

In order for these informal assessments to be valuable, the learning environment is essential. Students and teachers should embrace a growth mindset, and the classroom should be a place where mistakes are valued as part of the learning experience.

Technology as a Tool for Efficient Formative Assessment

General checks for understanding are extremely helpful, however in a personalized environment, these students will most likely be working on a variety of material in a variety of ways. Technology offers the opportunity to utilize formative assessment in a more personalized manner, while increasing teacher efficiency.

Tools like OpenEd help teachers to link assessment directly to instruction. As the world's largest online library of standards-aligned resources for K-12 teachers, they house more than a million assessments, videos, games, and lesson plans for every Common Core Math and English/Language Arts Standards as well as Next Generation Science Standards. With OpenEd, teachers can assign unique assessments to each student. These assessments are automatically graded, and then provide the student with instant feedback and accompanying recommendations (individualized videos and additional resources for support); making the process of quiz to instruction practical, powerful AND supportive of an environment that tailors the experience for each student and their unique learning gaps.

In Ms. Johnston's classroom, the typical 2nd grader has an NWEA MAP assessment score of 190, with students ranging from 150 - 223. She has 15 iPads, but the students do not have internet access at home. Johnston uses OpenEd to help differentiate formative assessment. "Having quick, automatically graded formative assessments on our iPads has been tremendously helpful. I can easily tell who is ready to move on to the next standard and who needs additional instruction."

We are at an interesting time in history, in which the way students learn is drastically shifting. The combination of powerful technology with passionate teachers is creating a new path for personalization. Formative assessment is one of the first steps to personalizing the learning experience for students. In order to provide a personalized path, we have to first understand students' strengths and weakness. Whether in a traditional classrooms or a next gen environment, understanding where your students are at academically, allows you to navigate the tricky path of meeting each students where they are at and excelling their learning path forward.
This is the first in a three part blog series on how personalization powers competency-based learning and is sponsored by OpenEd, the world's largest resource library.
For more on formative assessment, check out:

Megan Mead is an education advocate and blog contributor at Getting Smart. Follow her on Twitter @MegMarMe.

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Formative Assessment To Initiate Personalized Learning

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"Meeting all of the different needs is tricky." This quote from 2nd grade teacher Brooke Johnston could be the understatement of the year! When Ms. Johnston returned to her Alpine Elementary Classroom in Grand Rapids, Michigan after taking leave to start a family, she was faced with a challenge that rings true for most educators across the country: How do I meet the unique needs of each individual student?

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"A lot of the things that the teachers do as culminating activities at the end of the units are: just: "Show me what you learned", or, "Show me what I want you to know". But...Would not it be better if we did differently? As: "This is what I knew before we started, and this is what I´ve learned since then, nad this is how I can apply it to real life"
By: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5QT5EeyFsU

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Why Personalize? Personalized Learning at CPS

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Seven principles of personalized learning

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Seven principles of personalized learning

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A quick overview of how flipped classroom, learning analytics, and adaptive learning can help teachers help their students. (e-Literate TV)

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Personalized Learning: Three Ideas for Your Class

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Active approaches and flexible learning spaces - An example from Lisbon

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Active approaches and flexible learning spaces - An example from Lisbon

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Rui Lima, a Portuguese teacher, uses active approaches to personalised learning with his pupils. (European Schoolnet)

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Active approaches and flexible learning spaces | Personalised Learning

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A research made by Center for Digital Education - CDE (2013)

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Main objectives of collaborative learning

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Main objectives of collaborative learning

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1. Promote the cognitive development of a group of learners through collaborative interaction;
2. To stimulate the development of students' expression, allowing them to better express their ideas, to justify their opinions, to argue and to debate;
3. Stimulate students' social development through the development of self-esteem and positive relationships with individuals who have different social and cultural backgrounds;
4. Stimulating problem solving, critical thinking and analysis, as well as facilitating the understanding of abstract concepts;
5. Enable learning through active experimentation, constructivist actions, and reflective group discourses;
6. Adopt the idea of ​​learning as a lifelong activity and not the acquisition of a fixed set of knowledge. The student should be able to learn collaboratively and learn to learn;
7. Increase student motivation by contextualizing the learning process in real-world tasks.
By: http://www.virtual.ufc.br/
solar/aula_link/SOLAR_2/Curso_de_Extensao/formacao_inicial_de_tutores_em_ead/LLING/aula_03/03.html#retratil

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Do you know the difference between group work and collaborative learning?

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Do you know the difference between group work and collaborative learning?

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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Five years ago, I transitioned from a totally lecture-based classroom to a more student-centered, engaging one. Initially, I found that when students were placed in groups, they didn't necessarily work together. What I discovered was that the activities needed to be structured collaboratively to promote learning.
Group work vs. collaborative learning
Definitions of group work and collaborative learning abound, and they are not exclusive of each other. One of the most useful explanations I have found of collaborative learning comes from Smith and MacGregor (1992): "Activities may differ considerably, but focus on students' exploration or application of the course material, not simply the teacher's presentation or explication of it." Group work is often described as a good way to improve productivity by delegating tasks. However, this gives rise to what I refer to as the "divide and conquer" mentality (students who complete only a portion of the workload and then share answers with their group). Group work is also reported to be a way to incorporate different perspectives, experiences, knowledge, and skill sets, but in my experience, the same could be said for collaborative learning.

A major difference between group work and collaborative learning is accountability. I do not give group grades. Activities are used to teach the competencies of the course, and students assume responsibility for their learning, and they earn their own grades based on their performances on an assessment of the competencies. The key is to structure the activities collaboratively so that learners are mutually dependent on each other yet are held individually accountable. This eliminates the free-riders (students who try to coast based on the group's performance).

Creating or converting activities to a collaborative format takes some preplanning on the instructor's part. I develop one to three collaborative activities per competency, not all of which are used during a given semester. Some may consider this time commitment a drawback to using collaborative learning; however, if a collaborative activity is designed well, it can be reused or tweaked for a future semester, which is a time-saver in the long term.

Comparison of collaborative learning vs. group work

Collaborative Learning

Group Work

Group effort required

"Divide and Conquer" mentality

Learners accountable to each other

More free-riders

Social skills are improved

Minimal interaction required

Helping and sharing is expected

Helping and sharing is minimal

Emphasis on process and product

Emphasis on product only

Evidence of benefits of collaborative learning
There is a plethora of research stating the benefits of collaborative learning, but I felt it necessary to collect my own data to determine whether it was working in my classroom. Fortunately, I reuse exams from semester to semester, and I still had class averages on each of my four-unit exams from when I strictly lectured. I then compared those averages to the averages after I implemented collaboratively structured activities and found the average scores improved 3-8 percent over lecture alone.

In addition, I have had several students who have retaken the course with me, once when it was in a lecture format and again after I implemented v activities. All experienced an increase of at least two full letter grades the subsequent time. Clearly, their improvement cannot be solely attributed to the addition of collaborative activities. Although subjective, two of those former students gave me very strong positive feedback about the collaborative style.

I share the data and anecdotal evidence at the start of the semester with incoming students because there are always a few who are nonbelievers or think collaborative learning is childish, and I have found it necessary to sell it to them. I strongly encourage instructors who implement collaborative learning to collect their own data and share it with their students.
Creating a collaborative culture in your classroom
I offer these tips to faculty wanting to implement collaborative learning in their classrooms:

Set the expectations. Students appreciate knowing what is expected of them, and most will rise to the occasion to meet (and often exceed) the bar that you have set.

Sell it! Tell students early on why you have chosen to use collaborative learning (based on research) and then start collecting your own data to back it up.

Create or modify activities to ensure collaboration. Be sure to structure the activities foster mutual dependence, match them to the course outcomes, and ensure that learning can be individually assessed. Some of my favorites include:

After careful consideration, implement them! Try one or two and gradually build your repertoire. I would advise against doing what I did, which was to convert an entire semester course at once.

Conduct continuous quality improvement. Immediately after an activity, jot down notes on how long it took, what worked, and what could be improved on for the next time.

All collaborative learning is done in a group (of at least two people), but not all group work is inherently collaborative! The trick is to structure the activity in a way that makes students work together to be successful.

References:
Smith, B. L., & MacGregor, J. T. (1992). What is collaborative learning? In A. Goodsell, M. Maher, V. Tinto, B. L. Smith, & J. T. MacGregor (Eds.), Collaborative learning: A sourcebook for higher education. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment.
Jane A. Scheuermann is an instructor at Chippewa Valley Technical College.
This article is featured in the Best of the Teaching Professor Conference, a collection of articles from some of the top-rated presenters and sessions at the 2017 conference. Download the full report "

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Group vs. Collaborative Learning: Knowing the Difference Makes a Difference

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Five years ago, I transitioned from a totally lecture-based classroom to a more student-centered, engaging one. Initially, I found that when students were placed in groups, they didn't necessarily work together. What I discovered was that the activities needed to be structured collaboratively to promote learning. Group work vs.