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 :-)