WE ARE PREPARING OUR STUDENTS FOR A FUTURE WE CANNOT IMAGINE BASED ON COMPETENCES FOR JOBS THAT DO NOT EXIST YET!!

For that reason, I needed to change my way of thinking and start preparing myself to work with technology anytime, anywhere... because the future is here!

http://tinyurl.com/firsteurekamoment

The main objective of telecollaboration is to work collaborating with people from other country online in order to solve different problems and assignments sharing opinions and building knowledge.

In general, what can I say about telecollaboration? Here you can read some of the most important things that I have learnt during telecollaboration:

• To interact with people I don’t know and with people from a different culture and a different language.
• To speak spontaneously in a relax way using English all the time for a real purpose (there was a real need to use English).
• To develop critical thinking when sharing different ideas and to respect.
• To build and expand our knowledge.
• To observe similarities and differences between cultures.
• To develop our social and intercultural competence.
• To improve our communicative skills.

Beyond all these aspects I think that the most important think during telecollaboration was that we were learning how to plan a TEPBLL project through it.

Here you can see a sample of our first work together: our introductory video. We really enjoyed doing this video because we prepared it in our first meeting and we needed to talk about a lot of thing of our own lives. In that moment, we realized we had started a good friendship and we were doing a good teamwork. We also could speak about cultural differences and features about the place we are living.

Usually when people read this title is thinking about schools without resources, I mean without money.... but in the video you will see that there are a lot of factors that increase this poor environment not related with money. I was really impressed!

TEPBLL is a methodology based on Vygotski’s educational theories which involves students in a technology environment in order to engage language learning through real situations that require real communication. All this is achieved though the curriculum and the students’ interests and needs. The main aim of using technology enhancement in language learning is to connect our students to other ones from other countries so as to share their knowledge and reach a common objective. In other words, TEPBLL promotes interdependence and collaboration in the same classroom and beyond it while practicing English with a real purpose. Formative assessment is another important feature of TEPBLL present in the whole learning process and it letsstudents be aware of their own learning. Taking into consideration all these features, this teaching approach makes students be part of deep leaning through linguistic, digital, intrapersonal and interpersonal competences that are at least very important for their professional future.

Once we have seen what is telecollaboration, I read something in the attachment below that made me feel very identified with the different beliefs and cathegories of collaboration in school. I have never though about different ways of collaborating because all in all, there is only one of them that let a real collaboration. The other ones are hidden by this enormous word: COLLABORATION. I am taliking about the task-taxonomy. It also reminds me to the collaborometer... very interesting tool to assess our project (see in the next post).

Here know you can read my reflection and all the nowledge about planning that the video gave me:

Before planning a TEPBLL project one of the most important things is to find your partner and know each other.

Once you know you your partner it’s time to work hard planning carefully a TEPBLL. We have to bear in mind a lot of relevant aspects about our students, our audience. Therefore, we have to ask what they want to learn and to think about a motivation for them in order to teach students and not the plan. In other words, how can we know our students better? The first thing is to understand students’ differences, each student has different necessities, etc. For this reason, we have to take into account the different learning styles because the topic we focus our project should include all these kind of activities.

When we have all this information we have to bear in mind other factors about the planning task.Regarding to the school bus metaphor, as teachers we have to ask ourselves several questions:

Where are our students coming from?

Here in these questions we have to take into account the previous knowledge in order to adapt the level of the project and to work in a horizontal direction. You also can ask yourself more questions such as:

• What do the students already know?
• What are they interested in?
• What are their strengths and weaknesses?
• How can I use the previous knowledge and interests to introduce the project?
• How can I use their previous knowledge and interests in the activities related to the project?

Where are your students going?

In these questions we have to think in the objectives of the project, what we want our students learn after finishing the whole program.

• What will the children learn?
• What competences should they assimilate?
• What will they be able to do upon completing each of the activities?
• What will they be able to do when the project ends?
• Why is this important?
• How does this fit into longer-term learning objectives?

How are they going to get there?

These questions are referring to the content and the procedure the project is going to contain. It is very important to take into account because students should be aware of what are they going to learn and how.

• What will be included in each activity?
• What is the focus of each activity?
• How are these related to the curricular competences?
• What materials are needed?
• (...)

How will you know when they.ve arrived?

This questions is referring to the assessment, how are we going to assess them? What kind of feedback? What will be the final output? etc.

Finally, we have to take into account that this process mentioned is absolutely flexible and you can go back in order to improve the practice and answer the students’ needs.

Here you can see this comic that I did just to play the different learning styles and their features! They roles are really different! As teachers, we can plan everything with the same materials, each student will learn better with their appropriate material.

How many peer assessments? Buff.. I don't know, it's crazy! but at least they are very useful to see how I have worked, what I am learning, in other words, to regulate my own knowledge. I really like it, and I'm sure I'm going to use it in the future as a teacher because you can collect a lot of relevant information.

Here you can see some tips for formative assessment and below you will see a good reference to learn more about it. It was very useful for me.

For more information click here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-iqg8W5YTNmWFZlUTJYSmhucjQ/edit

But to finish with this tool one more question:

Why I really enjoyed learning it? Because I was learning a process through the same process and it makes a meaningful learning. The best way to learn is to do it yourself!

Here you can see a table with some of the main features of each one:

Why do I love English? Because I love communication and I thing that nowadays English is the most globalized language in the world. Therefore, if I go anywhere I personally believe that I would be able to communicate with someone in English. It is a fact that communication doesn’t require accuracy because communication means being able of understanding a message or producing another one and being understood. Anyway, I’m an English lover.

What about my feelings about the subject? 

In the first moment I felt confused, it was too much work, too much information, I have never done flipped classes, what were flipped classes? It was the first time I listened these words. Nevertheless, in the following classes I started to understand the importance of a flipped class. Oh sorry, I didn’t explain what it is. According to FLN’s board members Flipped Learning is “a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter”. In other words, Flipped Learning means that students learn by their own, collaborating and interacting with other people and working on online materials (videos, interactive texts, etc.), definitely, students are responsible of their learning among the class with the guidance of the instructor. For all these reasons, I can say that I really leant a lot and I start appreciating flipped classes just in the first lesson. It was amazing how the teacher involved all the knowledge and blended it in a collaborating class. At least, I can say that this subject has been the only one that demonstrated me how important is its essence through it.

http://flippedlearning.org/cms/lib07/va01923112/centricity/domain/46/flip_handout_fnl_web.pdf

Here you can see my introductory video where I explain some relevant thing about my life. We were asked to prepare this video in order to let our classmates know better each other and also because we were being involved in a telecollaboration project with people from Illinois.