This year I'm responsible for a Science School Project in the environment area and should work with students from all grades who want to be volunteers.

My classes are:

- 7th Grade - Natural Sciences. I'm also the headteacher for this class;

- VET (Vocational Teaching) - to obtain the 9th grade diploma - Environmental Sciences - I'm responsible for the curriculum of this class;

- VET (Professional Teaching) - to obtain the highschool diploma, currently 11th grade - Communication and Interpersonal Relashionships.

This is the view from the teachers room balcony. You can see part of the school buildings on the left. LIsbon can be seen on the horizont.

- Managing information;

- Communicating;

-Transacting;

-Problem-solving;

-Creating.

I think the most important digital skills from the students point of view must be to manage information and beeing able to communicate and interact with others. Students should be able to increase their independence and confidence so they can communicate what they learn with others and not be dependent on someone else to solve their problems.

The set of knowledge, skills and attitudes required when using ICT and digital media to perform tasks, solve problems, communicate, manage information, collaborate, create and share content effectively.

More digital skills should increase one's levels of digital competence.

Mashable 10 of 40 digital skills students shouldn't leave college without are:

1. Setting up a wi-fi framework;
2. Backing up to th cloud;
3. Basic photo editing;
4. Basic video editing;
5. Google docs and microsoft office;
6. HTML and basic coding;
7. Setting up a website and domain;
8. Converting file formats;
9. Online banking;
10. Branding yourself.

- Transparent;

- Flat;

- Competitive;

- On demand.

Work will be based on individuals with merit, not diplomas.

I agree with all the ideas presented. Because knowledge is widely spread and everybody can access to it, the future of work will not be based on company hierarchy or location but instead, on workers with formal or informal education that provides them with the skills to achieve a task/ project.

For example: 3D printing engineer, robot engineer or urban agriculturalist.

Because branding oneself will be more important to sell one's skills, I think in a near future we will have Online Branding Yourself Advisers.

A have a linkedln profile but it isn't updated (Have to work on that).

I haven't talked to my students about how to access jobs in the 21st century but we have done some work about digital footprints. This year, however, I'll be working these themes with the professional students and hopefully, by the end of the school year, all of them will know what are the digital skills they have to improve for their future.

Principles teachers should follow in the classroom:

Values;

Resilience;

Embracing change;

Innovation;

Remaining positive.

We have to change the way we teach if we want our students to be prepared for the future but to do so, schools shouln't be afraid of change.

Some thoughts to remind: "... technology is not going to make teaching easier, it's going to make it different." Chris Kennedy

Anyway, my digital skills are:

My best skills:

- Creating brochures, flyers, scientific posters and powerpoint presentations.

If my students don't have these basic skills, they have to learn it with me because I always ask them to produce some work using it. Over the years I've noticed that when they come to the 7th grade, they don't have any of these skills. Some of the 10th grader students don't have them as well. It depends of the teachers they had before. Unfortunately there are still many of us who are so afraid of the digital world.

Other skills I have:

- Searching for information - Mostly from educational or scientific sites and from online newspapers (as I want to use updated information about geological events while teaching them);

- Creating websites

- Uploading in web pages

- Communication online with colleagues and students - Mostly to avoid long unproductive meeting extra hours of work, sharing materials and asking and answering questions.

I have no skills on video editing and have to do something about it. Have to learn it real quick.

- Google - www.google.com or www.google.pt - The search engine I use more often. Mainly because I'm used to it but also because I don't know most of the others presented on the video.

- Sapo - www.sapo.pt - The word means toad. It was chosen because it's an acronym of the service (Servidor de Apontadores Portugueses meaning Portuguese Pointing Servers) It was created in 1995 by the Computer Science Center of the University of Aveiro. Great for searching in portuguese or related to issues from portuguese language countrys.

- Baidu - www.baidu.com.hk - Chinese search engine. Probably I'm not going to use it.

- Bing - www.bing.com - Similar to google but more agressive with ads. Don't like it too much.

- Ask - www.ask.com - Specializes in answering questions.

- Duck duck go - www.duckduckgo.com - To ensure privacy. I like it a lot.

- Dogpile - www.dogpile.com - Uses metadata.

- Instagrok - www.instagrok.com - For project work. This is really awesome. I'm sure I'll be using it from now on. My students are going to love it.

- Quora - www.quora.com - Answers questions by specializes people. It's better for older students. Another one I'll be using from now on.

- The library of congress - www.loc.gov

- Academic google - www.scholar.google.co.uk

- Archive - www.archive.org - Search for websites that no longer exist.

- List of search engines - www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

- Advantages and disadvantages of different search engines - www.searchengineland.com

I would recommend InstaGrok and Duck duck go. Unfortunately I can't recommend any new one because i don't know any other.

Anna Laghigna shared this amazing interactive online Google tutorial: www.googleguide.com and she also shared 15 lesson plans for making students better online researchers: https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/blog

Before our students start to searching the internet for some topic, we must see that they have selected the correct key search terms.

Here are some tips:

- Use tabs;

- Important words;

- OR;

- Gradually add search terms;

- Use words that websites would use;

- Spelling doesn't necessarily matters;

- Use descriptive words;

- https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/134479?hl=en

- Bing - Videos and Maps are great. I've tried to do a quick search for videos about recycling and it is fabulous what we can get. We can narrow the search by duration of the video, language or origin. Real amazing. The maps are similar to google maps.

- Way Back Machine - It gives us websites that still exist or that no longer exist, back in time. And we can scroll and explore it. Great tool

Just created my first alerts.

Here are some tips they can follow:

- Is it a personal page?

We must look for a personal name following a tilde (~) and words like: "users", "members" or "people";

- Does the publisher of the website make sense?

This can be seen on the first portion of the URL. For example: http://ed.ac.uk/, where ed stands for Edimbourough and ac for academic.

- Is the domain reliable?

.edu or .ac - extention for college or university

.org - organization

.gov - government entity

.com - commercial enterprise.

- Also check for:

- Author's credentials on the subject;

- Date of the last update;

- Dates of all the pages of the site;

- Other things on the "privacy and cookies", "terms of use" or "trademarks" that can bring credibility to the website/author, such as what's the philosophy, background or biography ;

- Contact information/ email.

- Quality of the information:

- Are the sources documented with footnotes or links?

- Are there links to other resources on the topic?

- Are the links well chosen?

- Do the links work?

- Do the links represent other viewspoints?

- Do the links indicate a bias?

- What is the purpose of the website?

About the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website, it can't be reliable because the URL is not well known and the suffix is .net. Also the information for the author is incomplete and has no credentials on the subject. The sources cited aren't academic.

- Accurate;

- Up-to-date;

- Useful tabs;

- In 282 different languages;

- Easy to reference;

- Can be a book;

- Lots of sisters - WIKIMEDIA, where we can find lots of copyright free information.

Wikipedia is the first source my students normaly use. They have to be critical about the things they read and must always get another source (academic source) to validate their findings. I find it a very good way to teach them to search online.

Here are some easy steps we can take to make our students understand about Creative Commons:

- Discuss ownership in a digital environment;

- Introduce student to creative commons;

- Use creative commons search engines such as:

www.flickr.com

www.commons.wikimedia.org

www.soundcloud.com/nasa

www.vimeo.com/creativecommons

www.archive.org

www.comicbookplus.com

www.opencontenttoolkit.wikispaces.com

We can also show some videos available here: www.creativecommons.org/videos

www.smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker

www.plagium.com It also aloows deep search

www.plagiarism.net

www.tineye.com

www.alerts.google.com

How can we improve our students communication skills?

How can we improve communication across our education systems through Europe?

By improving ours and our students digital communication skills.

- Focuses on student-centered learning;
- Increases student engagement;
- Improves communication skills;
- Removes barriers;
- Establishes classroom community.

My digital skills weaknesses are:

- Creating and editing audio and video.

- Games design.

- Also feel I should know more about websites design.

To think about:

It's easy to create online content but it's harder to create good online design.

Online discussions have an effective structure if we make sure that there is:

- An effective prompt;

- Preparation;

- Practice;

- Facilitation, both for peers and teachers.

The beneficts are:

- People watching and then being able to

- Think about it, which makes them able to

- Contribute to the discussion.

As we facilitate online discussions, we have to make sure that students take part on these three parts.

We can create with the students our community guidelines and everyone will know the rules to participate.

There are several ways to create online discussions:

- Open conversation by using #tags:

www.neatchat.com

www.twitter.com

- Back channeling, where the conversation goes on the background that is talking about the main leaarning task:

www.todaysmeet.com

www.scribblar.com

- Foruns.

For online publishing we must know that the power of it is in the audience and that we learn by telling stories both physically and digitally. We can do it by creating:

- Website/ ePortfolio

using goole sites

creating wikis

www.weebly.com

www.wix.com

- Website/ Blog

www.blogspot.com

www.worldpress.org

- eBook

www.zooburst.com

Key principles of publishing:

- Purpose of the work;

- Audience for whom the work is intended;

- Features of the tool that students and teachers are going to use;

- Application that it's going to be used and how can we improve it.

Remember: It's not all about digital, it is all about audience!

- Office 365

- Google Apps

Here we can find Google docs which permits:

- 15 people at a time writting and editing on a document;

- comments;

- has a research tab that allows to see only creative commons material;

- to get add.ons (Kaizena draftback is a Chrome extention that can be applied to Google docs and permits to go back and see who contributed with what. Also allows to see who has been doing copy/ paste what makes it a great built-in plagiarism checker);

There's also:

- Google sheets, where students can add simultaniously work from all the class and then use everyone's data. It also can be shared between schools, etc.

- Google slides, where students could do collaborative work from different places by adding their contribution and being able to see everyone else's contribution, which gives them instantanious feedback from both teacher and peers.

- Google online forms, that can be used to substitute the students credentials we use to create on paper everytime we get a new class. The best of this feature is using flubaroo that allows students to submit answers and get an immediate graduation. (I've never used it but think it must be similar to hot potato tests we can do on moodle platforms);

- www.zeemaps.com

Collaborating online facilitates parent and community collaboration and allows to:

- Built relationships;

- Overcome geographical isolation;

- Cross culture barriers;

- Increase student achievement;

- Connect learning to the real world.

And then

I've just realized I don't know a thing about collaborating online using Google docs. My experience is about sharing documents with students and/or colleagues but we edit the documents and then send it back for the other to give feedback. Have to explore it because it is amazing. Really enjoyed learning about flubaroo.

Sound recording /podcast

crazytalk

Blabberize

vod or video cast

animation clubs

Video conference - All happens in real time. Allows working in two places/ schools at the same time.

Skype

https://education.skype.com

google hangouts

www.wevideo.com

www.youtube.com/editor

www.mix.office.com - It´s a pluggin to powerpoints

Flipped classroom

screencastomatic (look it up too)

- Layout

- Pages

- Content

http://worldpress.com or http://worldpress.org - All school websites

http://weebly.com

http://moonfruit.com

http://sites.google.com

http://wix.com

http://blogger.com - (David Rogers has a school blog for 10 years - Worth seeing)

http://google.com/webdesigner - Mais sofisticado que os anteriores.

http://facebook.com

And then we can go and explore all those google tools we learned about.

Whatever we decide, we should optimize our websites for mobiles and tablets.

Two features we should know about:

- http://mailchimp.com

Creates a webpage that can go online quickly. It's good to send news to parents or to show a specific event.

http://issuu.com

Allows to upload documents and upload them online. It increases the audience in our own work or in the students work.

http://scratch.mit.edu/explore/projects/all - Where we can explore about what others are doing.

http://scratch.mit.edu/help - If we need some help in our projects.

Remember May 17th - Scratch Day - (It's marked on my calendar) We should all be doing something with our students and participate all around the world.

www.royalsoced.org.uk - The Royal Society of Edinburgh - It has a lot of resources made using scratch. Two publications we should look for:

- Starting from scratch - https://www.royalsoced.org.uk/cms/files/education/computing_materials/Starting_from_Scratch_LEARNER.pdf

- Itching for more - https://www.royalsoced.org.uk/cms/files/education/computing_materials/Itching%20for%20More%20LEARNER.pdf - Where we can built our own blocks.

(Yet to finish.)

http://kondigitalskills.blogspot.gr/ - by Konstantina Chryssanthopoulou from Greece

http://padlet.com/mattielloannamaria/jeiotvk5kij7 - by Anna Maria Mattielo from Italy

http://padlet.com/luisasgaspar67/e4nc4y6xawh5 - by Luísa Gaspar from Madeira island, Portugal

http://padlet.com/timgayton/learningdiary - by Tim Gayton from Sweden

For 3D apps: http://www.3dvia.com/products/3dvia-shape/ Heres Adobe 123 site - for simple tools online (webbased and works great and again - ready for 3d printing): http://www.123dapp.com/

Here are the guidelines we had to follow to submit our work until October 4th:

"An important element of this activity is also about practise for the final peer review activity (which is not optional) where you have to submit a digital lesson plan and review the lesson plans of your peers on the course.  - So the first step of this activity is for you to produce (or select) some self-produced digital content and submit this in the interface below. The content can be anything from a video, podcast, website, blog, ebook, etc. that you have produced yourself. We would recommend that in the text box below you briefly describe your work and the context in which it is produced and submit a link to the resource.

- The second step is to provide some feedback to someone else's work. You will be automatically assigned the submission of someone else on the course and should then provide them some feedback. There are no specific guidelines for the review as the submission criteria are very general but please follow these general guidelines for good peer feedback: Provide constructive feedback that helps the person you are reviewing to further develop their work. Feedback that is only negative without suggestions how to improve is not helpful for anyone.

Use a positive and encouraging tone and language.

Be specific and provide examples of what you mean.

Be comprehensive. You do not have to write many paragraphs but your feedback should cover all key parts of the work submitted. Receiving only one sentence as feedback after having spent hours working on the submission can be very frustrating.

Be fair and realistic and take into account the context of the work that has been submitted. For example it is unreasonable to expect someone with limited equipment and time to produce a high definition audio and video project. 

You can see feedback provided to you in the third section of the interface below."

The module is about Digital Exploration:

- Coding;

- App development;

- Education robotics;

- Internet of things.

About one thing I specially like about my school.

One of the things I really like in my school is the way we work, sharing ideas and planning together our classes and activities. All the teachers who share the same discipline plan everything together. Although the classes may be slightly different because we all are "one of a kind", the planning for the subjects to teach, experiences to make and quizzes or final tests are all decided together with everybody feedback. I know it should be like this all the time but it isn't, so I feel I'm really a lucky one to be able to work in such a great environment.

The Design Studio is a developing toolkit which draws together a range of existing and emergent Jisc resources which support technology-enhanced teaching and learning practice. The Design Studio will provide access to project outcomes and outputs from a range of Jisc programmes as they are developed through an open sharing and synthesis approach.

She used Canva. It's so easy and great to use with students.

Be respectful

Talk to one another about the work

Explain what you are doing

Think ahead and make suggestions

Switch roles often.

Don't:

Be a bossy navigator

Grab the drivers mouse/ keyboard.

Tradicional (vir acabar depois)

Falta actualizar com link importantes

My personal learning network also can be divided in those 3 parts:

-Face-to-face is the most important of them because it's about my daily work and all the interactions I make with students, other teachers and other school staff.

-My Digital closed communities- European Schoolnet Academy, Facebook Portuguese Biology and Geology Teachers page, it's private and we share documents, news about science research, ideas, about how to teach different subjects or ask or give help to others.

Universidade do Porto, where I'm doing another MOOC on environment issues

Stanford University - Learning differnt subjects in their MOOCs

-My Digital open communities: Flickr, Facebook, Blogspot, Slideshare...

#eSkillsCourse

1. Read the Criteria for a good lesson plan:

Here is a list of criteria you should consider when creating your lesson plan and to use for your peer review of the lesson plans of two other people on the course:

1. The lesson plan explicitly addresses the development of students’ digital skills (directly or indirectly): for example, as part of a classroom project students have to produce a short video or website, run a social media campaign or construct a robot. Importantly, it is not necessary that the digital skills development is the main goal of the lesson, however, it is essential that a clear reference to this is provided in the lesson plan and it is explained which digital skills and how these are developed.
2. The lesson plan incorporates good practices of digital skills development: for example, the lesson plan raises students’ digital awareness by addressing digital copyright or plagiarism issues. Or the lesson plan has students use their digital skills in a real-world context with a real audience.
3. The lesson plan is well aligned with its learning outcomes: activities and assessment clearly link with the defined learning outcomes and allow the teacher to determine by the end of the lesson(s) if the objectives have been achieved.
4. The lesson plan is balanced: there is a good mix of activities with at least four different Teaching & Learning Activities used (TLAs in the Learning Designer) and none of the Activities taking up more than 35% of the time (see the pie chart for this).

3. Submit our lesson plan.

4. Review two lesson plans.

5. Read the feedback of our own lesson plan and reflect on how we can improve from there.

Thanks again, Vanja

This lesson plan explicitly adresses the development of digital skills of students and has clear reference provided throughout the 4 TLA's previewed. The students are asked to use different digital tools in different moments of the lesson and they also are working  in different schools at the same time to achieve the outcomes set by the teacher.

The lesson plan is very well aligned with the learning outcomes as it starts with a video where students are introduced to the theme of the class (and that is made with other students previous work, which seems to work even better amongst them), goes to discussion and collaborative work and then finishes with a final project where it's supposed to have feedback from students from all the different schools. By the end of the lesson it becomes easy for to teacher to understand if the objectives of the class were achieved and with Plickers (which I didn't know and seems to be a fabulous tool) he/she can easily assess the students. I feel, though, that Nijole could have saved some last minutes to give feedback to the class, I'm not sure if that is done when brainstorming with Plickers.

Although the lesson plan is well balanced, with 5 different Learning Types (none of them with more than 35% of the total time), I think that collaboration should have been used, maybe changing it in Practice to Collaboration and in the end, Investigate to Practice. Also, the teacher could be off for the discussion and produce moments and the size f the smaller groups could have been previoulsy defined.

Overall, it's a great lesson plan and I thank Nijole for allowing me to assess it.

- The development of students digital skills should have a clear reference provided. - The development of students digital skills should incorporate a clear reference to good practices by raising awareness to issues like  safety online, plagiarism or copyright, for example. But, on the other hand, the lesson plan does incorporate good practices in the main subject which is becoming aware of our role on environmental issues, so some of the 21st century skills are achieved within this lesson plan. - The lesson plan clearly needs to be better well aligned with its learning objectives because Maria Teresa just gaves a draft as she didn't have the time to work on it. - The lesson plan isn't balanced. It gives only 2 TLA's and should have 4 different TLA's. Also it has only 3 Learning Types and these should also be more.

Although my assessment has found a lot of negative issues, Maria Teresa previously explained the reason for this lesson to be incomplete. I find the topic of this lesson plan very interesting and full of topics where we can be creative and make it very interesting to our students. Also, younger kids should change and become more aware of environmental issues and learn that we all count and we all can do something about it to change for the better.

Thanks for allowing me to review your lesson, hope you'll find the time to explore the Learning Designer because it is a fabulous tool.