An eventful year

This wonderful and demanding year has not made easy the process of learning to blog and to apply web2.0 tools in the context of the classroom; the main reasons were that I have been walking with crutches since November and that I have been dealing with serious illness in my family along the last months.

The pace of my daily life slowed down  to the point I had the continuous feeling to be always late with my work. Finally, I could be operated to my left knee and I’m starting physiotherapy soon, but this means I’m away from school now, and thus can’t support my students with their blogging engagements.

My blogging journey started on the 2nd May, a year ago, when I agreed to accept the warm invitation from Sue Waters to join the 31th Comment Challenge and learn how to become a better blog citizen. This participation has been the most motivating and thrilling experience I’ve lived on line until now; I met wonderful educators, discovered highly inspiring blogs, and  felt welcomed in a live community.

As an Educator, I was beginning this adventure looking forward to sharing whatever I could learn with my young students, as they were and remain the real motive for my engagements on line. However, our school system is not yet prepared to integrate technology in the daily practice of teaching and learning: thus, in my school, we  only could explore the web world during lunch break along the third term of last year; this school year I set up a class blog and a few student blogs, but students were soon limited to learn new digital skills on a voluntary basis, as a sort of home work and following instructions  through Msn messenger.

During summer holidays I found WikiEducator and its project to share the treasure of culture with all the developing countries; I took a basic course about wiki editing and, in return, I’m still looking forward to  contributing with a translation which won’t require to create templates;  Phil Bartle has recently invited me to collaborate in his project for Portuguese speaking Africa, which seems to be a precious opportunity.

Along the present school year, from September to December, the Students Blogging Competition, brilliantly runned by Sue Wyatt, has been a unique chance to launch my 6th grades in the blogging adventure; as a happy fruit of this experience, the new blog Bringing Us Together was born and our team was in charge for the first half of February. Since March, until Easter holidays, when I had to leave school to undergo my surgery, a small group of students has been participating in the Students Blogging Challenge that Sue Wyatt is inspiringly running. What I find most wonderful about this experience is the fact that, all of a sudden, you feel as if you have been given thousands of new friendly students spread all over the world.

These 12 months brought multiple chances of working with or just trying web 2.0 tools, social networking and bookmarking sites, but I’ll give just a few examples: we shared our lessons in our pb.works to build the classroom work with others; I enjoyed meeting people on Twine, for a semantic bookmarking experience; I appreciated Zemanta, to get inspiring tips while blogging; and finally Twitter, the best tool to get precious information and to stay in touch with some great educators.

As an aim for next year, I would love to

1. Participate in the Webinars that Edublogs and Elluminate are running right now, and hopefully to learn how to use video and audio tools in the classroom.
2. Honour my engagement with WikiEducator by participating in the project of Phil Bartle about Community Empowerment for Portuguese speaking African countries.
3. Relaunch the project of students blogging with the future generation of 6th grades, knowing that our technological limitations are supposed to decrease progressively at school.
4. Intensifying my participation in the Ning Apprendre 2.0, where Florence Meichel excells in the art of enhancing conversations and sharing learning experiences.

My Answer to S. Wyatts

     As a contribution to the  topic  Blogging safely in the big wide world  that will be presented by Sue Wyatts at an English and Literacy teachers’ conference, in Hobart, next July, I’ll try to answer some of the questions she suggests.

• Why did you choose the blogging platform you are using?

• What have you found most easy or difficult in blogging with students?

• What have you done to make sure your students are blogging safely?

• What do you think students get out of blogging?

1. I think we can’t exaggerate its relevance to enhance students’ digital, writing and other essential skills, as the art of maintaining a conversation and of relating to others in a global perspective.
2. I can’t resist to mention The Personal Web and Twenty reasons why students should blog as examples of posts where I keep both learning and checking out my own intuition about the importance of  what is at stake.
3. I believe young bloggers are actively contributing to the rising of a new way of communicating and sharing ideas, feelings, human values, that may change society as we know it.

• How do you find ways for students to get their global audience?

• What recommendations would you give to new teachers to blogging?

Answering A Meme

     I’ve been tagged both by S. Wyatt and Bookjewel to answer this meme!  Until now it has been a pretext to so many pleasant and even fascinating readings. I think it is worthwhile to know each other better in such an informal way, where we feel  totally free about the subjects we talk about, yet we choose them with the care that special readers deserve.

1.       My grand father was a Brazilian consul always moving from a country to another; thus my father – who is Portuguese –  found my mother living  in Spain;  as soon as they got married they emigrated to Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, where I was born. While we lived on Bahía da Guanabara border, he used to take the plane, every Sunday night, to spend the whole week  working in S. Paulo. As soon as my mother would hear the plane roaring over the bay, she would quickly switch on and off the lights of the  living room and he could distinguish the twinkling spots of light as if she was waving at the terrace.

2.       My two favourite authors are: Hans Urs Von Balthasar, a Swiss theologian and Christian Bobin, a French Poet. I would recommend “Love alone is Believable” and “The Very Lowly“, respectively. My most unforgettable readings are those related to theology and poetry.

3.      As my next point is going to be long, I’ll make this one short: I’m very sorry, but I can’t ride a bike.

4.       Now I feel really embarrassed to explain this to my network: I created my class blog in September, so that my kids could participate in the blogging competition; then, I started talking with them, mainly in comments – as for the posts, the translations of Miss W.’s posts were perfect to keep them going – . However, I was confronted with the fact that I should sign my name with a previous “title”, and not just the “bare” name, as it is usual for students to address their adult teachers using a “title”.

But Portuguese students don’t say just “Miss Ines”; they use a slang word, a sort of nickname issued from the abbreviation of the “honorific title” we have been given after University. So, “stora” isn’t even a proper word in Portuguese, it literally means “Miss Doctor” which sounds totally silly and is never pronounced aloud. Me too, I have always called my teachers as “stor” and “stora”, it’s a very old “tradition”, I can’t figure out when it has started. Real doctors – I mean those people who have studied medicine – along with vets and some other professions are also called as “stores” even by grownups.

So, I started to sign “stora Ines” whenever I commented on young people’s blogs, and now both words represent my name on the Bringing Us Together front page. Thus I felt that I owned this explanation to our visitors and friends, as “stora” is not my name at all.

5.       Since my young days I deeply love the French language and I have been, as an amateur translator, to several youth international meetings in Fatima and in Paray-le-Monial, France, as well as to a youth world day in Paris. These are privileged moments where we always make new friends and nurture our common, invincible hope that all peoples, cultures and races will come together in peace.

6.        I’ll share three precious memories of travelling abroad: crossing the Holy Lake to reach the small town of Dunoon, in Scotland; watch the sun rise on the snowy peaks , at the French village of Saint Monêtier les Bains at the High Alps; sleeping under the stars in the fields of Umbria, near Assisi, in Italy.

7. I lived in South America, North America and Europe, in three countries and five different towns. But these were all by the sea, so my favourite walk remains to follow the coast line, in a calm or in a speedy pace. Unhapily, I can’t do it now, for I broke the external meniscus of my left knee.

I took so long to answer this meme, I’m afraid there is no one left to tag in all the blogosphere…but I’ll try:

 Mrs Cunningham, my young friends Nadine, Madalena, Cameron, my ex-students Duarte, Frederico, and Britt Watwood

Nominations for Edublogs Awards

Here are my nominations to the Edublogs Awards:

1. Best Individual blog – Nadine
2. Best new blog – Cameron
3. Best Educational Tech Support – The Edublogger
4. Best Classblog – Technology in our Classroom
5. Best Librarian blog – (No Longer) Alone in a Library

Visit us at our Class Blog: Web.Cad.6abc

     Lately my red dots have been suddenly growing although I’m not writting for a while in my personal blog. I came to knew it by my student Filipa: “- Hey teacher, red dots are spreading all over your clustr map!”

     Of course, students participating in Student Blogging Competition are looking for our Class Blog and, instead of cliking on the Url I gave them the first time I visited them, they just click on my avatar!

     Second week is about to begin, so it’s still time to join;  if you wish you can register here; there is plenty of students coming in along the next weeks, so don’t hesitate or fear to be late. There are 7 countries participating, around 500 students from Australia, Canada, Thailand, India, Indonesia, New Zeland, Portugal and USA.

     The competition has been launched the 22th September, by S. Wyatt in her class blog Technology in our Classroom, it will extend up to the end of November, along ten weeks of activities and great conversations. Different languages are no more a barrier to communicate as students are using the translation google site as well as several blog widgets. 

     So far students have started to introduce themselves, to post riddles and challenges and to ask irresistible questions. Comments are pouring in and new friendly ties are connecting young people all over the world.

     As a Portuguese teacher engaged for the first time in such an  adventurous competition with my three 6th grade classes, I would like to express here my gratitude for the great work and generous support of both S. Wyatt and Sue Waters.

     Just two weeks ago I had registered for the massive on line course about Connectivism, although I already knew I wouldn’t be able to follow it simultaneously with our competition. But now I realize that, in some way, I’m doing a sort of “practical stage” on connectivism: the experience of this last week is all about making connections, identifying nodes, not controlling information, relying on others to keep our information safe, outsourcing our data and data processing, recognizing new patterns and learning to swim in a deluge of posts, comments, translations and unforgettable faces.

Enjoying a Halt

In the quietness of the Benedictin Monastery of Santa Maria do Mar, we can find that “fine pitch” of silence that enables us to listen the otherwise easily imperceptible voice of our inner thoughts. As if a sort of healing power, concealed in silence, could restore our bruised soul.

Too often merged in a turmoil of action we come to loose contact with ourselves up to the point where words sound meaningless and acts feel deprived of purpose.

We just aren’t genuinely present to what we say and do, as if our true self had migrated to a deeper layer of being, thus forcing us to beg for a higher truth and surrender to a more demanding love.

After five days of Teachers’work, we still can feel the strong vibration of holidays reverberating through the joy of being together again and the attractive look of fresh new projects. But this short preparation time is winding down already and in five days a new inspiring and demanding school year will be born again.

I wish we can all enjoy the opportunities, offered along the way, of stopping for a halt, and be restored in depth.

I would also like to list here my summer readings, for I was glad to finally  have been given time to read; in the end, most of these readings relate to our new digital era and the globalization process, and, in a certain sense, play a part in my initiation to “web2.0 philosophy of life”.

1. The World is Flat , by Thomas Friedman

Only while reading it I realized it was a “classic” already; fortunately I’ve found the 2007 edition at our British bookshop.  I will only underline the similarity between the crisis in school both in America and Europe: students from abroad – among us, mainly from Eastern Europe -  consider our studies level too low, while our parents complain that kids don’t have time to enjoy their infancy.

Other chapters in the book led me to think that perhaps both are right. I feel that, twenty years ago, it was much easier to keep students interested and working, even if the curriculum was heavier. We can’t go back, we just have to adapt to the new features of knowing and learning that are emerging in a new world. Web2.0 may conquer the hearts and minds of our students that refuse to learn in traditional ways and don’t know how to replace them yet.

2. Coming of age,  by several authors invited by Terry Freedman

These are wonderful testimonies that I try to spread around me by printing and binding the free download booklet. It shows web2.0 potential to revolutionize school life whenever teachers aren’t afraid of “thinking outside the box” and are eager to support their students along their first steps dealing with technology. I would like to translate these chapters with some friends, but we totally ignore the meaning of so diverse and complex English names for professions and jobs!

3. Horizon Report 08

I’m still reading it: how will “key emerging technologies, critical challenges and significant trends” identified in the Report impact in “teaching, learning and creative expression”? The subject is very clearly explained and the core elements unfold within a sort of epic atmosphere that takes your breath away.

4. Their Space Report

It is about our youth and the new ways they relate to the web. I just began reading it, but I leave it here, for the link may be useful to someone. I received it via Twitter, from nstone

5. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb : I’m reading  it in Portuguese. It’s a piece of Literature; the central thesis is powerfully liberating, yet, sometimes one seems to feel abandoned, at the mercy of the foreign god of Ramdonness. It has something similar to the other books in that it keeps moving forward into a new direction, dragging us deep into the unknown. As our world is changing, we can’t possibly pretend to capture the meaning of this change by trying to encapsulate it in an ancient and uncritical frame of mind.

6. Notes from my Travels by Angelina Jolie

As a ONCR  Goodwill Ambassador, she reports about Refugees hard conditions of life and outstanding courage to go ahead as well as how she highly prizes the new connnections made in those distant lands where she wasn’t known as an actress to her new friends.

7. The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod a. Backstrom

I’ve read it in Portuguese. The emphasis is placed on the unparalleled success of decentralized organizations even under persecution of more traditional ones. Once again, the central thesis may be applied  to structural changes in our ways of  learning that are rapidly taking shape and pressing schools to become aware and adapt to it.

Now, I would be glad if you share with me one of your holidays readings. Will you?

Creating a Poll

As I returned home from a few days of holidays, I found that Michele Martin was asking us to vote for a web2.0 wednesday logo and to create a poll

Actually, I had been visiting The Edublogger and had found a very useful article about creating polls. I had immediatly tried to create one, intended to my young students, thus written in Portuguese. In this poll, I asked them to choose up to three, among 8 possible group activities, related to web2.0 tools, and meant to enhance their reading and writing skills.

I didn’t post it, though, mainly because kids are still on holidays, but also because I’ve been busy starting a new blog in Portuguese where I would like to “migrate” all the content directly related to school daily work

I have started to translate Miss W. posts about Students Blogging Competition, but when trying to embed a google documents questionaire, it just didn’t work. Now Sue Waters herself is helping me through Twitter;Edublogs is a great Community!

10 minutes later: She did it! How wonderful!

Now,  my poll from Vizu for this Wednesday activity  is not willing to be published either…But here he goes:

Summer Holidays begin today and they will last a whole month, it’s even hard to believe!

I have set up a plan to enjoy my free time and, simultaneously, to engage deeper in this new world of “web-school”.

Thus, I’m participating in a Wiki Educator workshop called L4C – Learning for Content – where newbies may develop basic wiki skills, such us basic editing, text formating, but also different ways to make internal and external links from a wiki page.

We  will also learn the syntax for adding images and formatting them; later we shall be introduced to Wiki Ethics with a special stress on collaboration and interaction between participants; we will then work with pedagogical templates and, finally, we will be enabled to structure educational content.

I didn’t know Media Wiki before, nor the rigourous laws of Coppa – Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act -. I only hope it will be allowed to work in such a wiki with students under 13; this could turn into  a problem if  our  pbwiki – now nicely upgraded to 2.0 – were to be closed as the pbwiki team changed the way users must log in; now a different password is required from each user, thus maybe excluding young students to enter the wiki sharing a single password, as we did before. I tried Wetpaint Wiki too, for my new 5th grade class,  but they remain under the scope of the same law.

Wiki Educator is a Community whose main purpose consists in “planning  education projects” related with “free content” and  building “open education resources“. I understood the Community is deeply engaged with projects that aim to help students from countries in need to have free access to knowledge and education.

This made me think about AJU the institution of social solidarity linked to my school; it is inspired in the founder of our Sisters Congregation . As it also aims to “facilitate children and young people’s learning ” I thought that maybe our wikis could be open to those students, thus sharing  resources and collaboration.

Up till now, Zemanta kept giving me tips about everything I wrote, but along this last paragraph, it sent me to a somehow philosophical article in Wikipedia. However, I’m perfectly aware the web is full of successful intitiaves and dynamic projects concerning  social solidarity. Perhaps the expression I choosed is unusual in English and that’s why  Zemanta couldn’t “grasp its meaning”.

Invitation to Twine

As Michele Martin has clearly explained, in our third  Web2.0 Wednesday we were supposed to invite someone that is totally new to the both fascinating and  somewhat demanding new world of web2.0. We should take in consideration that, often, newbies feel hesitant about “randomly joining online conversations”. Although this hesitation is familiar to me, I’ve tried to join an online conversation in the attempt of making it look confortable enough for a “different kind” of newbie.

Thus, I will adress this invitation to join Twine, first, to someone I admire and consider as a young friend: my ex-student Julia, that is just finishing her master’s degree for  Organizational Behavior master program at Portugal. Her interests are adult’s training, e-learning and b-learning; as for her web2.0 practice, she joined twitter some days ago.

Twine presents it self as a service issued from the semantic web as it is explained in the overview, were the key words are: Organize, Share and Discover , while Twine gets to know you trough your preferences and goes on making recommendations.

Its creator, Nova Spivack, calls it an “interest network” that synthesizes what we were aiming at with blogs, rss and social networks.

Which is the main difference Twine’s creator finds between “twinning” on one hand and blogging and social networking, on the other?

According to him, by interacting in Twine, he can better “participate in many different specific groups … around particular interests and relationships…” Not all different interest communities  can be blended together in a unique network. Or, in Twine, the author says it’s “very easy to create microblogs and microcommunities…”

Commenting this article inside Twine, Javed Alam adds:

“I think Social bookmarking/networking/media is an evolutionary phase of the “new Media” development. It will be very interesting to see who wins. The social networks like facebook, myspace where the members are the focus or the social bookmarking networks where interest brings people together.”

Howard Shippin says that Twine should also include blog features if it aspires to stand free above all the other interest networks:

“If Twine is to be more than a more clever and updated version of services like Ma.gnolia and StumbleUpon, I think that it would be sensible to place an equal emphasis on creating a satisfying interface for original authorship, since this is what would give the service vibrancy and genuine interest value.”

What do you think? The “new Media” development will give advantage to the services that both allow blogging and are interest centered? Do interest centered services bring more people together or, at least, in a more deeply way than member centered services?

Although it is still in beta under invitation version, the actual members have been asked to invite new friends to enrich the experience. I happen to be there by simple chance, I hardly knew where I was entering to when I first subscribed, but I’m enjoying it.

Thus, I feel encouraged  to extend this invitation to all the participants in Web2.0 Wednesdays as well as to all the members of edublogs and still far away, whenever there is someone feeling concerned by what is at stake. Just leave an email.

You could  come to Twine, have a look and judge by yourself. I hope you will come, Julia.