Learning Journals

Journals, logs, diaries, portfolios are containers for writing that is recorded over a period of time (Moon, 2010).

Writing a journal can serve different purposes. In this case, my objective is to use this blog in order to reflect upon the material we read in Eco II. Personally, keeping a journal helps me to order the information collected in the subject and while doing this, I can take what I consider best to my learning.

What I like most of writing a journal in the form of a blog is that I can choose the format of each entrance, the themes, the colours and the font. In this way, every time I write I feel eager to express my thoughts and ideas since the design of the blog is attractive.  In an article I have read called “Assessment-Learning, Journals and Logs” written by Moon, J., the author talks about the importance of writing journals on a regular basis. After reading it, I found interesting a quote that goes: “Journals allow a reticent student to establish an opinion about a topic before being asked to speak about it publicly (…)”. In my case, keeping a record of the most relevant pieces of information help me put in my own words someone else’s ideas. I hope you can try it out and start writing your own journal, log, diary or portfolio according to your own objectives.

Blended Learning

It can be said that this type of learning is a combination of different approaches to teaching. It combines the use of e-learning resources and also educational ones. So, it is a mixture of new tools with traditional methods. Blended learning is not a new concept, since teachers have always combined different resources for the sake of teaching. But this kind of learning combines face-to-face to on-line elements. The success or failure of this implementation will depend on the preparation of the teacher. Teachers need to be updated and need to know in deep every element they decide to include whether it is new or traditional. In conclusion, teachers shoud have at hand a variety of resources to use them when appropriate, taking into account the particular group and students' needs. 

If you want to clarify this concept, watch the following video:

Dolors Reig in conference: Technologies and Learning

Today I will comment on the conference we attended on October 7th, at UNL (Universidad Nacional del Litoral) in Santa Fe. It was Dolors Reig’s conference “Tecnologías del aprendizaje y el conocimiento en la agenda de las instituciones educativas”. Dolors Reig is a Spanish social psychologist, director of the academy “El caparazón” (an online academy for vocational training). She is specialized in psychology, media and social networks. 
She spoke about the relationship between learning, teaching and knowledge. For her, students subjectivities are constructed in close relation to the digital media and social networks widely available nowadays. That is why it is necessary to consider a new paradigm for reflecting on the effect that technologies have on students' lives. Following this, she resignified the most general conception of the TIC (Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación). Instead of it, she explained the importance of introducing the TAC (Tecnologías del Aprendizaje y del Conocimiento) nowadays in schools. Its implementation is extremely relevant for students to learn in a significant way, using the digital tools they use everyday everywhere outside school. Finally, she talked of the TEP (Tecnologías del Empoderamiento y la Participación). This term refers to the role we need to play as citizens and as teachers. What we need is to participate and also let others participate. These technologies will help us make it possible; consequently, I suggest including them into your daily teaching planning.

Some Web 2.0 tools

Wordle and Voki:

In a lesson of Eco II, we learned that Wordle is a tool in which you can generate "world clouds" from texts that you provide. I think that it can be useful for teaching and for entertaining students. Both teachers and students can create eye-catching visuals based on different topics using font, colour and arrangement strategies to appropriately represent content. I consider that the best use of this tool could be that of analysing texts, teachers could select and put the main ideas of a text in a word cloud and their students can read them and also think about them. Follow this link

 http://www.wordle.net/ and try to create your own word cloud, I will show you mine, let's see if you can guess what I am talking about:

Another thing that we learned was that Voki is a free service that lets you create customized avatars, add voices to them and post them to any blog, website, or profile. Using this, teachers or students can communicate a message in a diffent way, for example they can take a role of a character in a book. Have some fun creating your own avatar! Follow this link: http://www.voki.com/

This is my voki, listen to what she says!:

Web 2.0

I found and read a report by Paul Anderson in which he goes through the history behind Web 2.0. According to him, this term was coined in 2004 by Dale Daougherty, the vice-president of O'Reilly Media Inc. Web 2.0 makes reference to a group of technologies which have become popular nowadays, such as blogs or wikis. All these increase and facilitate the socially connected web in which everyone is able to add or edit information they want to share.

The inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in an interview for a podcast was asked whether Web 2.0 was different to what might be called Web 1.0 he replied:

"Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If web 2.0 is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this 'Web 2.0', it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on 'Web 1.0'"

Laningham (ed.) developersWeb Interview, 22nd August, 2006.

If you want to read the whole report, you can follow this link:

http://21stcenturywalton.pbworks.com/f/What+is+Web+2.0.pdf 

The following video shows with images the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:

What is Prezi?

Hi, everyone! I want to share with you another application that we can use to prepare a presentation. It is called "Prezi". "Prezi (or Prezi.com) was created by the support of Kitchen Budapest and Magyar Telekom in 2008 in order to replace the ordinary slide based presentations. Today the project is assisted by Sunstone Capital. The actual development was done by Lui Labs led by its three Hungarian founders Péter Árvai, Szabolcs Somlai-Fischer and Péter Halácsy. The word prezi is the Hungarian short form of presentation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prezi#History

If you want to get the attention of your audience through innovative ways, try making your presentations using Prezi. Watch the following videos, you will know more about Prezi:

Click on 'Prezi' and you will see Prezi's webpage, you can create an account there: Prezi

Power Point Presentations

Today I am going to talk about a basic but a powerful tool used to prepare presentations. Power Point is considered to be the most useful and approachable way to create and present visual aids in colorful and attractive designs. It is an easy tool, accessible to everyone but we should be careful, the wrong use of it could make our final work look boring or unintelligible. There are some advantages and disadvantages that we should bear in mind before creating a presentation. For example, the duration it will have, the contents to be introduced. All these forces the presenter to reduce complex subjects. Also there is a basic equipment required to give a presentation, a computer and a projector.

Watch the following video and you will learn more about Power Point Presentations, it gives you some tips about how to use it in the best way:

  

I want to share with you our Practical Work number II, I did it with my partner Yanina Figueroa, we had to create a Power Point Presentation including the contents we wanted to teach our students in a certain lesson, I uploaded it in Slideshare, click on the link to see our presentation:

http://es.slideshare.net/tamaramp/eco-2-ppp-pw-2