Classroom Nine

In recent years, a new form of education is on the rise, MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. These courses were created for unlimited participants using the internet as their platform. In addition of more traditional tools like filmed lectures or readings, MOOCs provide ways for the teachers and students to interact with each other, like forums and online communities.

Their name was coined by Dave Cormier, a university professor, who saw the necessity of naming an emergent reality. Three years later, these courses are common.

Most prestigious universities use this education tool for diverse areas of knowledge, from Harvard to Princeton, from Computer Sciences to English Literature.

As they are open, everyone from any part of the world can join them, and this is great for the less fortunate, as just with a computer and internet access they can access a world of knowledge, and universities that they couldn’t have dreamed of before.

https://es.coursera.org

In a Gas Station you can take your car, and fill it up with fuel so as to get as far as you want. Or you can take your pupils there and teach them as far as you wish. Catching the example that Agustin showed us in Procesos lesson, we can talk about Project Works.

The holistic view states that lessons should tackle every matter of life, at the same time. The division of subjects puts limits to a satisfactoty comprehension of the real world, so that it would be better to show all its aspects interconnected, as forming a whole entity and not as separate fields of knowledge. Because real knowledge is about having a complete, interdisciplinary vision of the world.

From this standpoint, Project Work -as we translate “Trabajo por Proyectos”-, leads to an all-embracing task. That is, setting a particular starting point, in this case, a gas station, the class has the possibility of choosing different paths of investigation. For example, we can trace back the travel of petrol from the exploration of a piece of land to the tanks of the station, so that we can learn about geography, chemical transformations, engineering, etc. Besides, we can calculate the cost of all the process and the benefits of the industry, studying maths and economics. There is also the possibility of diving into the history of petrol and all its surrounding events…

Nevertheless, we are interested in language teaching. For this purpose, the class could practice a foreign language by imagining a situation in the gas-station. That is, performing a dialogue between the customer and the seller where the former asks the latter to fill up the tank of the car, or to check the pressure of the tyres, etc. The idea is to work on real life situations, focusing on the instrumental, communicative side of the language, although we even have the opportunity to look at sentence structure, if you wish.

After all the aspects have been investigated and exposed, the class joins all the information collected, creating the project and allowing the students to grasp, not an isolated point of a given subject, but a complete picture of a little piece of life.

http://bie.org/about/what_pbl

European Language Portfolio (ELP )is a tool developed by the Council of Europe, key to the development of the common linguistic policy in the European Union. It is always very interesting to know how it works.  In the elia journal written by Rosa María Romero Migueles we could realize how it worked in a public secondary education school located in the Community of Madrid, during the months from September to December of the school year 2009-2010.

It was enjoyable to read and to see how this experiment of the first implementation of ELP in one of disadvantaged areas of Madrid has got amazing results.  100% of students passed English exams. ELP made them think about the importance of the foreign languages, communication with other people of other countries and it actually gave the students the reason and motivation to learn. Once again when the subject in this case English is related to students´s everyday life it is much more interesting to learn. ELP made the students feel important just because they could choose the topic to work on. The studens learned to express themselves with less fair to be wrong. In the other hand the teachers applaying  ELP are left alone by the education institutions. They have to prepare every single class and they are not sure if their planning is going to work. It is really sad. All students have passed the exam but it seems that it is not enough to get interested in.. Why? Maybe because is too much work.. And even nowadays the majority of the teacherS prefer traditional teaching. Read, write and translate.. Are we going to do the same??

http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/elp/

This blog aims at portraying some of the most salient moments of our teacher training. Though we are not here to give definite answers about controversial educative questions, we hope to be able to explore and understand some pedagogical paths that could improve our situation as docents. For this reason, we intend this blog to be a fruitful exposition of our most significant views and questions.

Greetings!