Thessaloniki August 2023 This week I will be presenting at the 20th Biennial EARLI Conference, hosted by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Macedonia, Greece. The conference theme is “Education as a Hope in Uncertain Times”. I will be presenting a 90-minute ICT demonstration and sharing my work with Nearpod interactive presentations. I will share all of the materials relevant to the presentation here and will share this post with the audience at the conference. My session is on Friday, August 25th, from 8:00 – 9:30. ICT DEMONSTRATION Meet Nearpod: A game-changing tool for student engagement Abstract In this hands-on, interactive techno-pedagogical demonstration, we will explore Nearpod, a…
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- activities, Digital tools, Diversity, International collaboration, pre-service teachers, relational education, teacher-education
GatherEd: Learning and Creating Global Teacher Education
What does GatherEd mean to me? For the second time, GatherEd has provided an opportunity to halt the everyday race, always loaded with local worries, administration, tasks and surroundings, to zoom out of routine and into crucial issues from a different perspective. GatherEd means a chance to grapple with the complexity of education in a changing global reality, collaboratively unpacking terms like multiculturalism and multilingualism. GatherEd has given me the space to think about global teacher education, digital responsibility, inclusion, accessibility and democratic competencies alongside dedicated colleagues from Norway, Iceland, Greece, Spain and Israel. I am grateful for the invitation to attend my second GatherEd workshop at the University of…
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Stay on top of online learning: A game
Here is a game I made for my undergraduate students during the pandemic. As we moved rapidly to online teaching and learning, we spoke explicitly about independent learning strategies. I feel a need to return to this game now in my online courses. I made the game on the free LearningApps.org site. You can access the game here with the QR code. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you play or share the game with students.
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Can you break the code? A quiet warm-up
Two of my didactics courses opened last week with the beginning of the 2022-2023 academic year. I began both lessons with a quiet activity which allowed the students to get seated, calm down, look around the room and get ready for the class in an easygoing fashion.I presented a message in code and asked the students to translate it into their notebooks. In the “Teaching English to Young Learners” course, they read a note from me in English, and in the “Literacy: Didactics for Hebrew Teaching” course, they read a quotation about language in Hebrew. While the students were reading the message, working alone or with a neighbour, I had…
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“More than the calf wants to suck the cow wants to suckle”
It’s that time of year again – assignments, follow-ups, reminders, and grades. It’s the time of the year when I look at my Google Sheets for each course, fill in the grades from recent assessment tasks, and organise the data. This is often the period when it becomes evident that one or more students will fail the course. Nothing is a surprise here. Students who are behind or are at risk of failing have had numerous ‘nudges’ during the semester. They have had warnings that they are close to the attendance quota cut-off mark, can’t miss additional lessons, or have received emails that they haven’t submitted work. These messages always…
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Giving students a choice: A win-win situation
“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets “We make our choices; then our choices make us.” Anonymous Giving students a choice is an effective way of differentiating my teaching. In my experience, student choice increases involvement and engagement in the course, elevates motivation and reduces stress. When learners read a list of options and identify ones they can achieve, they experience a sense of “I can do that!” empowerment. Granting choice in academic contexts also prepares learners to take responsibility for their progress. Additional benefits are learners knowing their strengths, exploring…
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Chat stations: Moving a favourite teaching strategy online
I am always searching for ways to encourage my students to be active and involved in the lesson; I aim for all to be engaged in the discussion. A whole-class discussion usually means a few students contributing, directing most of the comments to the teacher ping pong style. Even if the teacher decides to hear every group member, it can only ever be a short statement because of time limitations.I follow and deeply admire Jennifer Gonzales, a teacher blogger at Cult of Pedagogy. A few years ago, Gonzales wrote a post on ‘chat stations’, a teaching strategy that resonated with me, and I adopted it immediately. The simple idea involves…
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It’s not homework!
This morning I want to share one of the issues I grappled with this year in my online flipped learning courses for pre-service teachers. For those unfamiliar with the concept of flipped learning, here is a short explanation: Before I describe my experience, I will remind myself and my readers that this wasn’t a routine online learning situation; this was learning forced online in response to the pandemic. My students were learning 100% online for most of the year and were participating in a wide range of courses presented in different ways. Many students were struggling academically and financially, some were juggling study with small children present, and others were working…
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Grand Finale – Goosechase in the gardens
Unfortunately, the pressures of this impossible academic year have caused me to neglect my writing and abandon my blog. Teaching and supporting pre-service teachers through the turmoil of the pandemic was challenging and burdensome, but I learnt a great deal. I sincerely hope to grapple with some of those understandings here on the blog very soon. In the last week of the academic year, I chose to close two of my online courses face-to-face with creative and active events outside in the fresh air. Both courses were didactics courses for language teaching; one was for EFL pre-service teachers, and the other was for pre-service teachers of Hebrew language and literacy.…
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An Opportunity for Collaborative Thinking in Online Learning
I’m reflecting on the last synchronous lesson in the ‘Teaching English to Young Learners’ course. I have quite a lot of thinking to do about the structure of the lessons. I have divided my 36 students into two groups and have allotted 45-minutes for each, in my attempt to free students from sitting continuously on Zoom. I’m happy about that decision, but 45 minutes is looking very short to me now if I want to present a practical activity, and then have a meaningful dialogic interaction activity in small groups. Yesterday we had fifteen minutes together playing two games which can be directly applied in any elementary or high school…
