Archive for the ‘My Learning Journey’ Category

EU funded ICT course for teachers

June 11th, 2013 by Cristina Costa

This year I taught again on the Comenius / Grundtvig funded course called TACCLE . It is a week long course for teachers who want to learn more about technology.  Teachers can now apply for a grant  to participate in the course with their National Agency. Deadline for grant applications is September 17th. Jens Veermersch just sent me details and I though I would share them here in case you would like to participate in it.

Urbino, Italy

Urbino, Italy

 

 Registrations are now open for the 6th edition of the TACCLE course in April 2014.

You might be interested to learn that we are organising a new edition of our TACCLE course in April 2014 in Italy.

With this fifth in-service training, which will run from 6 until 13 April 2013 in Urbino, Italy (reference number: BE-2013-268-001 Session 2 Comenius or BE-2013-267-001 Session 2 Grundtvig) our aim is to help teachers to develop state of the art content for e-learning in general and for learning environments in particular. We try to achieve this by training teachers to create e-learning materials and raising their awareness of e-learning in general. TACCLE will help to establish a culture of innovation in the schools in which they work. The training is geared to the needs of the classroom teachers but teacher trainers, ICT support staff and resource centre staff may find it useful too!

 This course is not aimed at advanced users of ICT.

 The course is organised by GO!, the state education network in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium

 

Participation fee and how to get a grant to pay it all

1335 Euro (700 Euro for full board en-suite accomodation in single rooms in Hotel**** Mamiani + 635 Euro for tuition and course materials). For both participation fee and travel expenses to Italy you can request a grant from the LLP National Agency in your country, which will cover all costs. You can find the address of your LLP national agency here.

Only participants living in one of the 28 EU member states, a country in the European Economic Area (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway) or FYROMacedonia, Switzerland or Turkey can register for the sixth TACCLE course and apply for a grant. Unfortunately Italian participants are not entitled to receive a grant since the course will be organised in Italy.

 

Deadline for grant applications with your LLP national agency is September 17th 2013!

Pre-registration are possible on-line: http://tinyurl.com/taccle14

 

Here is one of the slide decks I used this year:

Maybe I’ll see you there! ;-)

How I manage to keep active in so many networks

June 5th, 2013 by Cristina Costa

I was asked this question the other day and I thought it was a good one to explore in a blogpost.

For some people my constant tweeting, facebooking, skyping, emailing…. must be a bit overwhelming! And I know for a fact that the colleagues with whom I share an office think I’m a bit mad and waste all my time in these social networks. Well, (maybe) true – I’m a bit hyperactive, but I don’t see my activity online as “wasting” time. It’s actually really valuable to me, and it is only a reflection of how it has progressed. It was not always like that … it rather evolved to become what it is today!

At first it’s unfamiliar, then it strikes root – Fernando Pessoa about Coca-cola

As many people I know, I didn’t immediately see the value of twitter, I resisted to get on to facebook, and I only signed up to skype because I needed to join a group meeting online. For me these things need to make sense, add something to what I am already doing, and be easy to use. But ultimately, I need to try it for myself to see how it makes a difference in my work flow. Hence,  I had to stick to it for sometime until it started to make sense. Needless to say, it took me a long time (Internet  time, that is) to get to the super active stage I am currently at.

… OK, enough rambling… how do I do it?

First, I think it’s important to remember that working and participating online requires you to change the way you work… or at least, to acknowledge that the way you work is not the way your mother imagines you work. Working from 9 to 5 in academia is just unrealistic. Concentrating for long periods of time just doesn’t work for me. [To be honest, it never has, but, you see, now these networks “betray me” in that way as they make it visible though my participation. Do I care? Not really!]

When I am at my desk I work in 20-30 minutes chunks. That’s how much I can handle. In between those sometimes rather productive sessions I check my networks. If there is something I think it is worth a mention, I’ll re-tweet it, re-post it or like it. And then I go back to what I was doing. And I repeat this as many times as I lose my concentration. It helps me re-focus [strangely enough!]

I also try to share things I read – like newspaper articles. And sometimes I engage in conversation. I answer people’s questions, make a comment on someone’s tweet/post or try to crack a joke [not really great at it, but there you go!] The chatting is important. It’s the glue of any networked experience. It brings people together. And sometimes I also tweet/ post silly stuff cause life ain’t always serious. I give you access to a more social me in that way. [If you like it, it’s altogether another story; I enjoy it!]

* I don’t distinguish between professional and private networks. They are all socio-professional to me. If I don’t want people to know something about me/ what I am doing, I just don’t publish it online. That is my rule of thumb, but that would be another post.

Build your networks
Building your personal learning network doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to build confidence to post “your own stuff”. And it takes equal effort to build your network. It’s important to choose the people you follow because they will be the ones providing critical content. Collective intelligence is the hook to your participation and existence in these networks [in my humble opinion, that is]; the social interaction what brings it all together.

My network is very important to me because it provides me with an alternative platform to test my ideas, to build new ideas, and to learn from other people’s ideas. And their distributed location just means that they travel well … anywhere I go! Having recently moved to a new institution, new city, and for that matter, a new country, has meant that my then local professional and social networks are no longer within my reach. Being active online has somehow given me a sense of continuity  that has eased my settling in.  Moreover, as it often happens, I work in a section of the Institution that deals with a variety of knowledge areas, not all of them technological minded. This is great because it challenges my perceptions and balances my views. Yet, the online networks keep me updated about my own field and enable me to feed that back into my work.

Anyway, in short:

  • Acknowledge that people’s working patterns are different and that their use of social networks during working hours is not merely a form of distraction. For me, it’s a form of breaking up a working routine, especially when I reach a point where “I am stuck”. Then I need a network break!
  • Build up your network with people who can contribute to your knowledge from different perspectives. You can also follow people who you don’t know face to face. You’ll be surprised at how much they can contribute to your knowledge.
  • Don’t judge it before you try it. Allow some time for it to start making sense.
  • Have fun. Don’t take yourself too seriously, because no one else will. So post whatever, whenever  it’s important to you. Sharing is a way to show you care!

Anything else you would like to add re: how you manage your networks and how important they are for you?

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    This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.


    Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years

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    The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).

    Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.

    The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.


    Quality Training

    From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.


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