Week 10 - Community of Practice (CoP)

Technology has helped the world become a global village. We can attend a course in the States sitting at our desks thousands of miles away; we can post a query and get a reply from a colleague in another hemisphere. This flexibility has opened the door to global communities of practices, where professionals can keep in touch and learn from a more able peer, as Vygotsky announced.



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Students are showing a new blend of cognitive skills (Prensky, 2001) in our classrooms, and teachers are figuring out the way to cater for new learning styles. OLPC programmes are starting to spread around in South America and a new challenge is facing the teachers.

We need to keep in touch for support and professional growth so we can help our students to enhance their ICT skills they will use in jobs not yet invented.

It was a pleasure to have shared this learning event with all you.

Let's keep in touch and start an international CoP.

Cheers,
Gonzalo :-)

Week 9 - Learning Styles in the 21st Century

'I don't know what to do with my learners'
'I walked into the classroom, and all my students had their laptops opened" ... what did they want me to do with the machines?'

Ever since, teachers and students in Argentine state-run schools started to receive their laptops (as part of a government social programme), the chat in the staff room seems to have changed a little. It is not about this or that troublesome student, but it is about the poor Internet connection, what to do with the machines, how kids are on their laptops and do not pay attention in class.

Now when many experienced teachers are becoming aware of learning styles and decentering in their classrooms, students seem to learn in different ways; and whatever effort teachers do to keep them on track seems not to work as they had planned.

And these teachers might be right. Marc Prensky explains that kids in the 21st century are not a different species, but they may have developed a new blend of cognitive skills. (See my presentation on his ideas here). Therefore, students can learn quite differently from the way their teachers are teaching.

Teaching styles vs learning styles results in an unfruitful combination in any learning environment. Teachers have worked to learn and identify VAK learners, or Visual/Verbal learners, or Active/Reflective (etc) learners and designed lesson plans to match their preferred learning styles in order to create more effective learning environments. However, new kinds of clash between teachers' styles and learners' styles are occuring in classrooms nowadays.

Students are recognising how they prefer to learn with the new ICT tools available to them; and teachers are starting to learn to use them. And when they succeed adopting them, they will have to evaluate how to incorporate them in their classes. In Prensky's words, teachers are learning the language their students acquire as their mother tongue. I am certain that many teachers will adapt to the change in time to help students learn in their preferred (and prefer-to-be) style.

Cheers,
Gonzalo :-)

Week 8 - Using ICT in Class

Ever since last year when the Argentine government launched an OLPC programme, teachers, students, families have been talking about laptops, internet, possibilities, iquality; and no internet access yet, students know more than teachers, laptops are really distractors in class, teachers don't know what to do with the machines.

After some thousands computers had got to their new owners' hands in these last 9 months, the government launched some teacher education programmes to provide the teachers with the tools and skills to use ICT in class. The laptops are far from being the panacea of all educational ills; however, this new technology used in education has set many people to think.



Teachers need to reflect on their new role in the 21st century classroom, in which they are no longer the source of information. And teachers need to learn the skills they have to teach the students in their classes. And teachers need to become, in Carol Chapelle's words, critical technologically-informed pragmatists to cope in this new technology´-enhanced learning environments.

Cheers,
Gonzalo :-)

Week 7 - Learn, Unlearn & Relearn

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” - Alvin Toffler

The implementation of ICT in education is bringing not only a pedagogical challenge for teachers, but a new role for them. Teachers are not longer the source of information in the 21st century classrooms since information can be at a click length in many cases. Many students are having access to personal laptops, smatphones, and other hi-tech devices from which they can keep in touch with classmates, teachers, school staff, educational resources, and information of all kind.

Learning can occur anytime and anywhere, many educators and writers are referring to that possibility as ubiquitous learning or u-learning. However, this new mediation in learning should necessarily be accompanied by, in Vygotsky's words, a more able peer. Therefore, technology can provide us with the tools, but the new role of teachers in the 21st century as filters in this process of teaching and learning is fundamental.

Teachers have new skills to teach; and autonomy is one of them. We should equip our learners with strategies and skills to help them live in this new high-tech world in which a key element for success seems to be flexibility to learn, unlearn and relearn.

Cheers,
Gonzalo :-)

Week 6 - Large Classes: An Endangered Species?

When I imagine a large class, the first picture that comes to my mind's eye is that of the 19thC. classroom, either big or small, but all desks screwed down onto the floor facing the black chalkboard; and all learners doing the same thing at the same time following the teacher's steps. The more demand of workforce at the factories, the more need of skilled people. So, schools came into the scene to favour that social need.

No doubt, technology has changed since those days; and no doubt, technology makes culture change, and culture makes people change. People do not communicate as they used to in the 19C, or many do not even need to go to work as they used to because work can be done ubiquitously. So, why do we still see at school many students doing the same thing and following the teacher's steps?

Although, a 21st C classroom might look unchanged for some people because desks still face a board, either wooden or digital; and classes follow the teacher's steps towards a single product; nowadays classrooms are adopting new educational tecnologies in an attempt not to become extinct. Classrooms are slowly becoming networked with other faraway classrooms, with distance audiences that work cooperatively and collaborativelly in this new globalised world.

We can see that large classes will continue to exist because new educational technologies are paving the way for that. However, these large classes are very different from those in the last century. It is not a question of size then, but a question of manner that will guarante their survival. Schools need to adopt and adapt to the change before they and not the large classes become obsolete.

Week 5 - Change of Paradigm

Constructivist and social constructivist approaches to teaching and learning imply accepting there are other ways to teach and learn.

The behaviourist model, most of us in Argentina have been educated in, has helped some and mistreated others. No doubt, ideas from behaviourism proved to be useful and, thus, are still alive today, such as lesson units and learning objectives. However, with more humanistic and social approaches in recent decades, new things came up and soon proved to be as effective or more than the ones accepted as the norm.

New insights from neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics broadened the horizon of educators. However, many years of behaviourism have resulted in strong beliefs among thousands of teachers and politicians whose educational beliefs reflect the old paradigm.

Therefore, it is not simple enough by starting to use this or another approach; or strategies alternative to what has been used for years. It is a new paradigm that has to build upon another, looking at the bright sides and the dark sides of both.

Change is starting to occur in Argentina from novice teachers, who encouraged by the possibilities of ICT, are starting to work more collaboratively. Language learning is designed in sequences of communicative, problem-solving tasks, which offer different levels of complexity to match the cognitive development of the students.

Cheers,
Gonzalo :-)

Week 4 - Reading and Writing with My Students

Reading and Writing with My Students is the name of my Reading and Writing Workshop for EFL teachers.

When I was told, at my first job interview, that I had to teach Reading and Writing to a group of teenagers, I thought I would never do it. My students were all boys at an all-boy school. Therefore, keeping those kids at their desks reading in English and writing both fiction and non-fiction seemed impossible to me.

It was then that I, desperately, started to look for help. And it wss then that I came across with Nancy Atwell's IN THE MIDDLE. I learned a lot about reading and writing myself; and I learned a lot about teaching reading and writing. The problem was that Nancy's ideas seemed to work well among native speakers, so I had to adapt Nancy's ideas before adopting them.

As time went by, I did; and my reading and writing workshops, in time, changed the way I saw teaching EFL! So, even though Ms Atwell never heard about this, she was a lot of inspiration to me.

Meet Nancy Atwell


Cheers,
Gonzalo :-)