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”.

Father Stan Came to Town

Every year - for more than 13 years now - a Franciscan friar from South Bronx, New York, keeps coming to Portugal, to visit and preach a retreat to his youth group - “Jovens de S. Francisco”.

Father Stan is a musician, he composes all sort of different kinds of music, such as Jazz, Folk or Rap; he sings and sells his songs all over the world to get some money in order to help his friends in Bronx, where he lives with other friars and friends that were homeless once.

He also goes all over the world to preach, sing and visit friends, specially young ones, as this time he did with us, giving his concert in our school, in June. He came earlier than usual as he was heading to Australia, to collaborate in the organization of the youth world meeting that will be held next July, in Sydney, Australia

Webilus, Understanding the Web trough Visual Metaphors

As Michele Martin says in “If you behave like a disease…“:

“…using metaphors to think about concepts is one of the more powerful ways for me to both learn and to get creative.”

I would add to that the surprising power of visual metaphors to show, simultaneously, a whole set of implications and co-implications that may lay hidden within a complex concept.

I will try to embed Webilus gadget in this post so that anyone who doesn’t know it yet may visit it: it is a French site where we can find the best illustrations and images circulating in internet and whose common subject is the web in general.

These images, duly quoted and linked to their source, may be useful for several different purposes, from marketing ones to educational, and it seems to me that knowing not only how to use them but also how to make them becomes part of 21st century digital literacy.

A lesson with Hubble

Today we were going to visit our blogs during lesson time, but our net connection failed; as I had a new brand lesson prepared in my pen, students weren’t disappointed. I must remember that it is not enough to prepare a lesson in our wiki or in one of our blogs or in our Moodle platform; I must carry with me several lessons prepared, just in case.

For the technical set up of the lesson, as usual, my students did everything: to connect the laptop, the net connection, the projector and the pen; next, Filipa opened the power point and monitored the whole presentation; the other students read, asked and answered questions; I just stood at the back of the class commenting and provoking questions.

I’ve tried to present the role of conjunctions as linking words connecting ideas according to logical relations; I’ve downloaded photos from Hubble’s site and I’ve wrote all the sentences as legends or commentaries to these photos. They were enthusiastic about the amazing galaxy we live in and conjunctions didn’t seem so abstract after all.

Empowering Students

If I spent some free time with a small group at a time, I know they will be able to present the lessons themselves; and that is our ultimate goal, as says Sheryl Nussbaum Beach in her wonderful post Letter to my Colleagues where we can read:

“Want to know how a 21st Century learner learns? Ask them. You will be amazed at what you hear and if you are smart- you’ll act upon it. (…) Turn your classrooms into learning ecologies- learn with and from your students. Get rid of top down, expert driven instruction methods and nurture self-directed discovery- both your own and theirs. Turn your passions into classroom curriculum. Get excited and mentor your kids integrating your passions with core content and foundational knowledge. Help them develop a love and understanding for culture and our rich heritage.”

I agree with these words; it’s a question of time and passion, for us, to empower our young students and they soon will break free. We may verify it by visiting the beautiful blog of Laura

Building Community

Alberto asked me how to embed music files in his posts; I’ve suggested that, if he wants, I could write all the practical instructions about using web tools in his Blog; he would cooperate and ask other colleagues to collaborate; everyone looking for a particular practical information would go to his Blog and look for it.

Tomorrow I’ll ask two other students if they are willing to take in charge the work related with our library, including book reviews and so on; any other student looking for a book or wishing to post a review would go to their blog.

We may distribute by all the students’ blogs several different tasks at the service of our small new born community. Thus students would be progressively strengthened in responsibility, autonomy and initiative. Moreover, It would give them a motive to not stop blogging when the personal inspiration would seem to them to be “absent”, as they would feel that they are also in a mission, at the service of others.

Experiments On My Own

As nobody is looking now, I’ll profit to do some trials here: let us see…

It worked!

I’ll try a few ones more:

It looks fine too! I’ll go on…