Today I say hello to you all but also a goodbye...
I want to do a 3x1 review, that is, adding 3 things you have absolutely loved about the Master's Degree Module and 1 thing which should be improved, in your opinion. So that, I have created a poster with Canva.
Knowledge of new tools and ideas: I really like that I have enjoyed a lot using a lot of new apps, learning how to use them and discovering new ways of doing tasks.
Partner search: this activity seemed me very interesting because I was visiting and reading a lot of blogs with lots of brilliant ideas.
Turn activities into super learning missions: I liked doing this challenge because I could see my ideas came true.
Time: I think the time of challenges is well distributed but we have a lot of work during this quarter so, from my point of view, this subject should be on the first quarter because this is a subject to enjoy and to learn deeply and these things take time.
As I said in my last post, this is a goodbye of the master's posts but I want to be connected in order to keep learning all the time!
And before my goodbye I want to say thanks for the help of my mates and my teacher, I have no doubts if I would not have their help I wouldn't achieve all of these posts!
I have created two memes with Memegenerator that define myself at the beginning of the subject:
Hello!!!
Here I am again to tell you all about my first online conference! I really want to tell you everything about this experience so I hope not to forget any detail!
First of all I am going to say that the conference was called Moodle MOOC 10; if you want a great explanation about it just click on the name, or if you search for an extended explanation you can click here.
As you can see here in my blog or as you already know, all along these months I have been creating this learning diary in order to create an open educational digital project and to improve different skills to be a prepared teacher. So, the aim of this conference I am talking about was to present this open educational digital project in a live online class.
What did we need?
To prepare our slide to support our presentation on Google Drive.
To be connected on WizIQ.
Hearphones with microphone.
How did we prepare the Online Conference?
One week before the official date of the Online Conference (4th May) our teacher give us the chance of practising our presentation so we had to do our slides , as a support for our speech, in a presentation from Google Drive designed by our teacher. If you want to take a look of these slides you can visit our teacher blog. Here I leave you my slide. It was so simple because I did not want to write a lot of things in order to make it more visual.
That day (27th April) I was not ready to tell all about my project but this practice gave me more confidence and knowledge of how to do my presentation on 4th May, so I think it was useful and helpful.
How did we do the Online Conference?
First of all we had to connect on WizIQ in order to enter to the classroom, once connected, there was our teacher Mª Jesús García and Nellie Deutsch. Our teacher Mª Jesús García was presenting my mates and me in order to explain our project. The order for the presentations was the same of our slides, so we knew our turn and also our teacher called us (like in a real class but online). Our presentations had to last around 5 minutes and we had to tell all about our open educational digital project. I am very happy to say that all our presentations were recorded and you can see them on this video posted in YouTube! (I'm in 2:05:00)
Here I leave you also the speech I did for the conference. I made it with Microsoft Word and later I uploaded it in issuu.
How was my experience?
I have to say that at the beginning I was a little frightened because I was thinking all the time if my computer does not work? If the wifi does not run well that day? And so on, but it is truth that all of them are little problems because nowadays we have more than one device and it is extrange if the wifi does not work, so I tried to think about this.
The practice day I only checked my hearphones, my webcam and my microphone because I was not ready to talk about my open educational project. All of them was good so from that day I was more confident to do my online presentation. Also that day I prepared the slide you have seen above to support my presentation.
The practice day was on 27th April and the Online Conference was on 4th May, so I had a week to prepare what I wanted to talk about. I was taking a look and reading again and again my posts in order to do a good summary, I did not want to forget anything to say!
And the big day arrived and I was ready to do my presentation, I was calm during the first presentations but when my turn was arriving I was more and more nervous (I'm always nervous on presentations) and finally was my turn (I was almost the last one on presenting) I started to talk and to explain my open educational project and when I finished my teacher remember me an anecdote during my first days on ICT class. This fact and the comments of my mates helped me to feel more confident and secure of myself, so I thank all of them a lot!
And this is my experience of my first live online conference, I hope it can help you to make an idea of what this is.
CONCLUSION
The first thing I have to say is: what a great idea! With this conference (even it seems I'm lying), I have realized how great are ICT. I mean, we were presenting (apart from my teacher and mates) to people on Canada and I was at home. This fact makes me to think about a lot of ideas to bring to a class because it is not complicated, is useful and this can have a lot of benefits to our students.
It is also a very responsible way of using a chat and a webcam, I think is the first time in my life I use them with an educational aim. Of course I use chats to talk with friends and family, but never to do something like this.
I am very happy with the opportunity our teacher has given us. It has been a very interesting conference, there were more than 20 people talking about their projects so we had the opportunity of taking ideas and feeling inspired by our own mates. So, at the same time we are learning doing our own open educational project, we are doing things that all class should have: collaboration, communication, cooperation and so on! How could we teach us something to our pupils if we don't have tried it first?
REFLECTION
This is almost my last post of my learning diary so I want to write a reflection about what I think about these months, what I have learnt in this subject and more ideas I have in my head.
I started the subject with a lot of fear, I did not know anything, I only used facebook and instagram and still I don't know how to use them in a proper way so you can imagine what my feelings were when the teacher said: you have to create a blog! And not only that (only doing it was difficult for me) but to put different buttons on the left such as a license or the twitter button (this was such an experience for me and my patient teacher). Little by little and through doing challenges I was discovering a new world for me. The first day I started the subject doing the twitter and the blog I said myself "I am going to hate this subject" but, for my surprise, it has been just the opposite! I have enjoyed creating images, doing comics, posters and so on. I have known a lot of new apps and I have to say my favourites: Canva and also WeVideo (even I downloaded Canva on my iPad because I am really in love with it).
And appart from myself and related to education I have to say that this subject has discovered a new world of ideas to carry out in a class. All the apps we have used, our own open educational projects or other projects I have been reading... with all of them we can make great session for our pupils, and not only related with contents, but also with other skills such as communication, collaboration or autonomy. And I say that because I have lived it by myself. This subjects has taught me that, as my teacher says me when I created the twitter button on my blog, is when you fail when you learn the most (I've recorded this sentence and I have been remembering it a lot during the challenges). And I think this is one of the most important things a child, and every person, should know. Maybe it can seem impossible and I though this before starting the subject, but ICT can learn you things like that. I cannot forget other thing ICT can teach us and this is autonomy, because you, as a teacher, can give instructions or doing demonstrations but at the end, is the pupil who is behind the computer screen so is the pupil who has to develop skills in order to achieve a task.
Nowadays I can say that apart from Facebook and Instagram I use Twitter (it is great for the latest news and more serious than Instagram), where I follow a lot of accounts about education with lots of interesting information. I have discovered thanks my teacher blogs with lots of resources where we can find great ideas to carry out in a class. I discovered apps that children can use too; to sum up, I discovered a fantastic world where I can do great things and I really want to have the opportunity in a future to teach all of these things to my pupils.
Lastly, I want to say you that I was a girl who thought that the smart board with the contents proyected on the screen was the most technological thing that we could use in a class but now I realized that with this kind of instruments we can do much more than proyect the lesson, we can do almost infinite things. So, I've been thinking about it and this is not my last entry on the blog, this is only my last master's entry, because I want to stay connected, I want to learn more because I discovered that I like this world!
I hope this post inspire you and at least make you think about the great opportunities ICT can bring to our life, and what is more important, to our children!