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.

     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?

     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

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?

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”.

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

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.

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.

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…

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