Using Technology in F2F is possible too

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmQW3CJIRiI

I am glad I did not post my week 22 before after all. It all comes for a reason, they say J

I must admit I did not have an opinion formed about “sharing” in general. But, something happened this weekend in San Francisco that made me learn and understand much more about open education and sharing knowledge.

As an associate faculty representative of my college I had the opportunity to attend the Spring Plenary Session of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. The keynote presentations were both about MOOCs, one given by the Co-founder of Coursera, Daphne Koller, and the other by the Academic Director of the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education, Armando Fox. For about two hours I heard them explain passionately how MOOCs benefit education. Mr. Fox talked about how much more contact he can have with students on his large online classes. Large face to face classes never permitted him to detect and guide students with special talents or special needs. TAs did most of the job. Now, he says, he can see any work presented online, and the TAs have less pressure. According to Dr Fox, everyone has the opportunity to hear his lectures a lot “closer” than F2F and he has no problem sharing his knowledge with the entire world. Both speakers talked about wanting to make an impact in education and affirmed that that impact will be make in community colleges and public universities. I felt like I was living in the future.

I must admit that the idea of taking an art history class from the University of Florence, or a Roman architecture course imparted by a Roman professor right there in Rome sounds very attractive. However, wouldn’t my students prefer to take a class from a university in Spain or Mexico for free and then pay the cheap community college credit?  Should I be concerned since my college gives credit by exam for Spanish?

Like everything, I guess, these new classes are going to develop into something that society will regulate and control. So we’ll see what happens.

I am not sure if “sharing education” is a moral imperative, but sounds like it is the future. How we share and respect one another will be an education experience for all of us.

Twenty years ago, far away from here my children started elementary school and I started as a teaching assistant on a very prestigious private university in Buenos Aires. Everything was new to me; I was learning how to teach adults and at the same time I was learning how my children were learning.

On the first parent conference at my oldest daughter’s preschool, the teacher started to talk about learning theories and how our kids were going to “discover” the letters and end up writing soon. She was a passionate teacher; I remember that meeting very well. She went on and on about how these kids were going to “build” their knowledge based on what they saw and what they had around. She had tagged every object in the classroom with the first letter of the piece only; a huge “V” for ventana, for example, was glued on the window. She told us that children will follow their natural curiosity and soon they will figure the sound of those letters out and will want to “put together” letter by letter for their sound. A few months later, my daughter knew all the letters in the room and before I knew, she was able to write her name and most of our family’s names. She and the entire grade was writing before the end of the school year; but what is most important, is that they were very happy doing it.

Argentina was finishing a long decade of oppressive military coup that involved everything and more than anything education. We were not allowed to “think” or “discover”; we were supposed to follow directions and that was it. This teacher introduced me to a completely new way of thinking. I went back to talk to her about all this and she gave me a book. Small book I remember; but big words indeed. The book was “Psychology of the Child” by Jean Piaget. I devoured that book and a couple more about Piaget and then Maria Montesori and then Paulo Freire. They all talked about freedom and democracy in education; something completely new for me at that time. For more than twenty years, constructivism was more than a theory for me; it was a way of life. And it still is.

Well, if you got to here and you are still awake, I will tell you now why this introduction and what this has to do with week 21. When I watched Lisa and Jim’s video something similar to the story of the preschool teacher happened to me. Lisa and Jim constantly talked about the importance of not marry one theory, but use them all. In every workshop, conference or meeting I attended for foreign languages I have never heard this. It was always “this way” or you are a bad teacher. This always confused me because most of the instructors that affirmed this were not teaching us the same way. So whenever I give a wonderful presentation about a subject that is very difficult to my students I feel terribly guilty. I have to admit that I do not use 100% constructivism in my classes. I am a constructivist but I am a teacher first, so whatever technique I feel is better for my students I use it. This week made me a better teacher. I can’t wait to start putting together theories, practices and technology.

Even though I might have not “taught” anything on this posting, I feel great for writing it and sharing a very important part of my life.

Muchas gracias!

Laura

After reading and watching the presentations, I was a little lost this week. Everything was super interesting but I had no idea what to talk about. My colleagues had already done perfect synthesis and I did not want to do the same. I recently finished my second master’s in Education Administration and all this material was familiar to me. So, after a lot of research and thinking, I decided to talk about something that will be very useful for me and my online class design: Bloom’s Taxonomy for Foreign Language Instruction. I found two excellent resources and made a Power Point with the most important points.

I decided to make an audio describing the PP; you will have to listen to it if you want to know why 🙂

It is easier to read the words if you view it with fullscreen. Do not forget to click “play” first on the audio file.
http://www.slideshare.net/lauracarlsson/week20?utm_source=ss&utm_medium=upload&utm_campaign=quick-view

Here is the audio recording explaining the PowerPoint for week 20

https://soundcloud.com/lcarlsson/week20potcert

Thank you!

Laura Carlsson