But our visit had just started. As soon as assembly finished we were assigned two student guides (who spoke excellent English, as well as all the other Norwegian people I met) who would take us around the school and explain everything. What can I say? That the facilities are of the highest standards? That classrooms had no doors but that there were specially designed rooms for group work? That there were computers and interactive boards everywhere? I think the point isn’t to describe facilities. What I saw was a school where children are free to work on their own, where there is a lot of peer learning and teaching (like in the music room where there was no teacher but the students taught each other how to play the cello), where teachers cooperate to teach a class. I saw a school where students and teachers are respected and they are given opportunities to take initiatives and create and be innovative. I saw a school where I would like to teach, and in which I would love my child to attend.
The following night we were invited to Holmen School again. This time a teacher of the school, who is also an accredited chef, would cook for us and two of the students would help in the kitchen and with the waiting. Again we experienced this look on the eyes of the students that talked about the pride they took in their work. And I couldn’t help wondering how often we give opportunities like that to our students.
A huge thank you to our Norwegian hosts who organized this visit and gave us the gift of getting to know from up close such marvelous education system. Thank you Britt-Mona, Per, John, Helga, Jane, Johanes! See you in Greece in autumn.

Here you can find the set of images related to these two Norwegian schools: http://www.flickr.com/photos/annabooklover/sets/72157629940899809/

“But you are a teacher”, says the other voice. “it’s your duty to prepare them, life is not a bubble to keep them inside forever”.

Whenever I have dilemmas like this, I have a solution – I ask myself: what would you want for your child, what do you do with your child? And the answer is I wouldn’t want my child to not be aware of the darker side of life. OK, I won’t make her life miserable by showing all the injustice and violence of the world but I can introduce her somehow to the notion that not everything is pink and sugary out there. Otherwise I would be doing a disservice to her  and to all my students consequently.

So it was with great interest that I attended yesterday’s workshop with Judy Boyle, organized by the Karditsa English Teachers’ Association. The topic was Human Trafficking and Judy presented some hard-boiled facts as well as the work of the NO-Project organization.

Judy mainly works with teenagers and young people and I agree with her that it is unacceptable to graduate from Secondary Education and never to have heard about Human Trafficking. Our school books claim that slavery has been abolished but this isn’t true. Every year thousands if not millions of children are sold and trafficked mainly for use in the sex trade.

Just reading what I have written above makes me sick. I cannot grasp the notion that a human being is sold and objectified like that, I simply cannot. But it happens and just by closing our eyes it won’t disappear.

So for the moment I am trying to come up with a lesson plan for my sixth graders that will revolve around the two videos below and I hope there will be good response to them.

The first one is an awarded animation film by Effie Papa and it won a prize in 2011 in Animfest, the International Animation Festival that took place in Athens, Greece. Effie Papa was a student at TEI (Technical Education Institute) in Athens at the time. It is a beautifully made video with a powerful message.

The second one is a song and video clip by Radiohead. The lyrics are really a work of art too and could spark a lot of conversation in class. I could show the lyrics first and have my students guess the content and the story behind them and then show them the video clip which shows this world of injustice as clear as possible.

Thank you Judy for this, and thank you at all the people in Karditsa for organizing it. Tonight at 18.00 there is another event at the same place (ΤΕΔΚ, Μεγάλου Αλεξάνδρου 10) about projects in first grades of Primary School and about the Barefoot School and different and innovative approaches to education.

More Links that can help you with the Human Trafficking topic:

Jamie Keddie’s lesson plan about human trafficking

The No Project Organisation (You will find plenty of material, videos and info to use in your class)

So in this post (which I hope some of you will read carefully) he talks about photographers but we could very well replace this in some paragraphs with teachers or lawyers or whatever profession you may like. David writes:

 “…Things are changing. Is it easy? No. Is it fair? Does it matter? EVERYTHING is changing. It always has. It always will. If you are in business for yourself as a photographer, your job, as the CEO of You Inc., is to meet those changes head on, to navigate the rough waters and do it in a way you love, while not sinking the ship. No one promised you safe passage. No one owes you a waveless voyage. …f you are floundering, it’s not because you don’t have a better camera or the same 85/1.2L lens that that other, more successful, photographer on the other side of town, or the other side of the internet. It’s because you aren’t being as creative as you thought you were or you aren’t hustling…”

 Do you get it? If things aren’t going well in your teaching situation, if your kids aren’t interested, aren’t learning, are bored, are raucous and so on and so forth, it’s not the fault of books, or the lack of equipment. It’s because we aren’t creative enough. OK, the situation is dire, and it’s not our fault, and it’s unfair. So now what? Are we going to spend the rest of our working time whining and bithcing about the indifferent ministry and the good-for-nothing people who make the decisions? Are we going to waste the time of another school year by doing nothing?

 David has expressed it better than me I think: “…Yes, things are changing. They always have. But you can either make the change or react to it. Either way you need to be creative. You can do two things with your time on this earth – play the cards you’re dealt with all the energy and conviction you can, or whine and moan about how lousy your cards are. But whining and moaning never once changed the cards in anyone’s hand. Yes, Detroit was decimated by the economy, and it was left in literal ruins. But it’s making a come back. Not because it sat there feeling sorry for itself (ok, some did, but they aren’t the ones making the comeback), but because they got creative. They stood up, dusted off the seat of their jeans and looked the situation square in the eye and said, “OK. Now what?” It’s hard work. It’ll take time. And if you don’t love that work, give up now.”

 So, to get back to our situation in my poor little country: the (new) third grade book is colourless, badly drawn, the listening material you have to download yourself etc etc. So why don’t you organize a competition for the best coloured book at the end of the year? We have already started but you may want to join us! 

]]> http://inyourhands.edublogs.org/2012/02/10/lemons-and-lemonade/feed/ 2 http://inyourhands.edublogs.org/2012/01/14/little-k-and-the-music/ http://inyourhands.edublogs.org/2012/01/14/little-k-and-the-music/#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:13:22 +0000 annavarna http://inyourhands.edublogs.org/?p=114 Let me tell you a story that happened the other day at school that had me thinking: It’s the story of K, a third grader and a complete beginner in English. First of all, although I teach K for the first time this year, he is not unknown to me: I used to teach his brother who was notorious in our school and little K comes laden with this burden. As soon as you meet him, my colleagues say: “Oh he’s V’s brother” (with that look that says – beware). Fortunately, V may have been very difficult at times but I remember him as the guy who wrote a beautiful poem about the universe and the stars, in English!

The second day I had a class with K I knew he had his own exceptional view of the world when he showed me what he makes with common school things such as pens, pencils and rulers. I was amazed! I asked him to make one for me too and he did; he made me my very own airplane which I have proudly exhibited on the announcement board.

Fast forward to last Thursday when we do a little listening exercise from our book (I am not going to comment here that we got our coursebook for third graders in late December – maybe it was our ministry’s attempt to get us into unplugged teaching). The exercise was actually a rap rhyme about family. I had my doubts about this thing because my adult, politically correct brain could see all the faults to it: the lyrics were talking about a fat grandmother and a short sister, the language used was unknown to the children and more difficult than what they are used to and so on and so forth. So I put the CD player on, I tell them that first we are going to listen to it while reading the lyrics from our books and I push the play button. The rhyme starts playing and K is already up and dancing. The whole class stands up from their desks and they don’t do what I asked them to do!!! My teacher brain revolts! What a mess! What did I do wrong? How am I going to calm them down again? Quick, quick stop the music. I stop the music and I restore order.  I look at K with my teacher’s look which is specially designed to terrorize even seasoned teenagers, but what he tells me throws me off my feet: “Sorry miss, but I CAN’T resist”. For a few crucial seconds I resist bursting into laughter. But then I realize what I am doing: what a wet blanket, what a killjoy! I don’t resist anymore either, I burst into laughter and I push play again and we start rapping all together (OK, I rap more, they dance and say the words mammy, daddy, grandpa –which was the purpose after all). We start walking around the class stomping our feet to the rhythm and we have great fun! For homework I ask them to practice the rhyme. Next time it’s going to be fantastic, it’s certain. And we are already making plans about performing the 3^rd Grade Rap in one of our upcoming school shows.

Late that night, I reflect about the lesson.  When I started playing the song and saw the chaos that followed my first reaction was to stop the activity. Things were not going as I had planned them, therefore something must be wrong. The only thing going wrong was that I was naïve enough not to have predicted what would happen under those circumstances. The good thing was that I was flexible enough to take advantage of the general enthusiasm and make something out of it. I have a little one-to one with myself: What’s the purpose of you there Anna? To teach people how to follow instructions? They learn that everyday, thank you very much. You are there to expose them to language, to instill a love for learning in general, to kindle their creativity and nurture their talents. And if I take all these into consideration it was a successful lesson. If the objective of the lesson was to have 14 9-year-olds still and quiet for 45 minutes then I failed completely!

This was my story about little K who outsmarted his teacher. Sometimes we teachers are too worried about appearances, about curriculum and the nuts and bolts of our profession that we miss the big picture. Fortunately there are many little Ks out there to remind us what we are there for and that one of the keys to happiness is not to be able to resist the music!

LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

These were all the questions that came to my mind when I watched this beautiful video found on Vimeo. I suggest you watch the other ones too (MOVE and EAT) since I know you being the teacher you are, you are going to find hundreds of educational uses for them. As for here I am going to share one of my favourite learning experiences, one that was many years ago but is still as vivid inside me as then: Learning to fly, or to be more accurate to paraglide!

It was more than ten years ago that I went into paragliding and for a few years I was really immersed into it. I learned how to fly got my first level certificate and flew from Mt Olympus and Mt Voras here in Greece. I will never forget what it was like and I will never forget what  the learning experience either. The instructor was a very patient person who first and foremost taught us how to be safe. The fact that we have remained friends after all these years says something about the importance of the relationship. But what I most remember was my willingness to persist. I think this was what I learned best that period. That if you persist long enough then things become really simple. That if you keep running, you will take off. That if you don’t let the mountain scare you, you will fly over it!

I know I am not saying anything original, it’s in all the books about motivation, educational psychology and theories of learning: the people who are experts in something are just the people who had the persistence to do something long enough. Something like 10,000 hours is considered long enough. Of course I didn’t become an expert in paragliding. At some point I stopped practicing. I imagine that if I started again now I would need months to get to the same level. But the learning is here, it’s inside me. And every time one of my students says, “it’s too difficult miss”, or “I can’t do that teacher”, I remember. And I tell them: don’t stop now!

I would really love to hear your opinions here at the comments or even better in your blog. It seems that everyone is starting a challenge these days so this is mine: What was the most exceptional learning experience you ever had? What will you always remember? Let’s use this hashtag #learnchallenge

I just found out about the blog challenge set up by Brad and already read five or six posts by other edu-bloggers. Their different styles of writing and seeing things seems to be another exercise into reflection and observation!

So here is my contribution from the beginning of our holiday: In the first one my teenage daughter is very expressive in showing how she doesn’t like photographs with her parents at this stage. In the second by pure power of persuasion we got our act together and presto! A respectable family photograph!

What is your compare and contrast story? Check these ones too!

Tyson Seburn

Mike Harrison

Baiba Svenca

Karenne Joy Sylvester

Anne Hodgson

JasonRenshaw

Ian James

Paco Gascón

Jeremy Harmer  

Larry Ferlazzo

Tara Benwell

Chiew Pang

Ceri Jones

Chris Adams

We are both looking forward to your comments and reactions!

Online education holds the promise to enable people to pursue higher learning no matter where they are geographically. While overall access to education has improved due to online college courses, there are still major infrastructural issues that prevent web-based learning from becoming fully integrated across the entire world. Additionally, investment in web-based education in certain countries remains relatively weak. There is an unfortunately stark contrast in the prevalence of this form of education in the United States compared to Europe. These issues show major differences in how each region views and invests in education.

The benefits of online education are quite clear to some education advocates. The non-profit Sloan Foundation argues that web-based education has almost become a necessity for students who must balance family and professional lives and to be globally competitive in the job market. In 2010 alone, over 5.6 million American college students were enrolled in at least one online class at both conventional universities and for-profit schools.

The American Society for Training and Development, a non-profit workplace training association, contends this new wave of online education, or E-Learning 2.0, is a reaction against the limiting demands of traditional undergraduate life and the stale classroom environment of most universities. Typically students have to invest more or less all their time and considerable money in college, centering their schedules entirely around school. This can drive away students who need jobs to pay for school or are taking care of family members. Meanwhile, conventional classroom environments based on semester-long schedules within a top-down hierarchy and fixed class curriculum seem increasingly unappealing to many.

With increased globalization, market competition has become a matter of innovation at lightning speed. Accordingly, students in a country like the United States want instant data, flexible critical thinking exercises, and a bottom-up or democratic approach to learning. In a sense, the more students capitalize on E-Learning 2.0, the more competitively the student population is prepared for careers in the global world.

This begs the question of investment. If e-learning and online education are great educational investments, then the necessary infrastructure to support them must be put in place first. Access to broadband technologies, incentives for schools to offer online education, and the assumption students are sufficiently technologically adept to participate in e-learning are some of the largest obstacles to widespread web-based education.

According to the World Bank, the US only slightly edges out the European Union in broadband subscriptions. As of 2009, 27.8 percent of the US population has broadband subscriptions. In the 27 nations of the European Union, the figure is 24.6 percent. However, there is a major different in the quality of those connections. The average US broadband speed is 3.9 mbps, while in the EU the range is between 20 to 30 mbps.

Besides actual infrastructure, there’s also the issue of who provides online education. Although Europe’s broadband infrastructure is solid, it isn’t much used for web-based education. Glenn Russell, Professor of Education at Monash University, says European schools don’t invest much in online programs. Although many European online schools exist to help those too economically disadvantaged to enter a conventional college, the number of these virtual schools is relatively low compared to the United States.

Additionally, a major difficulty for these schools is that they cater to their specific region’s language, and are accordingly more or less unable to be transnational. In the United States, students in California or Hawaii are able to take online classes in New England or Florida thanks to minimal cultural and linguistic difference across the country. Moreover, the US’ many for-profit schools can move capital more quickly in order to invest in online programs exclusively for their student bodies.

However, even if the US has more private web-based schools, there are also problems with public online education. A 2010 US News report showed that almost 50 percent of all conventional colleges that offered online education saw their budgets decrease. This may be because tuition is usually lower and room and board costs non-existent when students enroll online.

Additionally, many professors aren’t happy with the idea of online education. Believing that face-to-face discussion and debate in a classroom are more worthwhile, many professors don’t invest in developing online curricula.

Finally, the kinds of institutions providing education online have been the target of major criticism in the US. Detractors argue for-profit online schools don’t measure up to the skills and job prospects traditional institutions provide. Questions regarding the legitimacy of these schools’ business practices and academic quality continue to fuel prejudice (legitimate or not) against web-based schooling and those who’ve earned degrees online.

Comparing online education in Europe and the United States isn’t quite apples and oranges, but it may be Red Delicious vs. Granny Smith. Both continents have different levels of investment in broadband infrastructure, the essential resource for all students to access online education. However, both regions also differ in how web-based schooling is available. While the courses of development will surely be different in the EU and US, online learning will certainly see increased investment in the coming years, even if it continues to be regarded as second-rate on both sides of the pond

Yesterday morning just before I left for the first day of school (first day for teachers) I saw this presentation and I was stunned. 3D technology in class! I can immediately think of how many applications it can have especially for science related subjects. And it would be cool. But I also wonder that once we start wearing these special caps, or glasses or whatever, we are going to miss yet another piece of real life around us. (And now that I’m rereading what I wrote yesterday I think I have become a grumpy old teacher who’s afraid to try anything new. The concern new inventions will destroy the world as we know it is as old as Socrates who damned the advent of alphabet because it would mean loss of memory)
Of course, my reality is very far from even approaching what Turkle describes and Steve Yuen shows. Our school is probably low tech compared to other schools even in Greece and no matter how infatuated with our mobiles we Greeks are we are very far from becoming like the people the book depicts. If for nothing else because our culture is not so job oriented as other societies. Turkle for example mentions many times that people find calls more and more intrusive and they prefer to text their colleagues or friends in order to be more effective. This is not happening here (yet). Privacy is not so valued and my personal joke about it, is that for example my parents in law completely ignored the meaning of the word tactful.
In a few days educators all over the world will be welcoming new and old students in their classrooms. Some (me included) are already planning how best to use Skype and Glogster and even Facebook to communicate, to support, to stimulate their students. Let’s share our concerns and doubts on how to best do that. Let’s also take a step back, to take in the whole picture and reflect. Let’s not be Alone Together but Together Together! Looking forward to your comments and ideas!

1. Drawing Inspiration

I used this video with grade six to revise the narrative use of Present Simple. But it was also an excellent opportunity to discuss about inspiration to teach the word predictable, to elicit possible endings. What I liked most was that they went home and showed it to their parents as well and they would come to class discussing various options. “My mum says the artist was the kid with the ball”, one boy said and I thought it was a good activity if they went home to discuss it like this…

2. Early Flight Attempts

Grade 6 again. There was a Unit in our coursebook about Flying. It is a very interesting unit about the inventors behind flying, about the mechanics of flying. The only problem with this unit is that there is so much material you bring in. It is used to teach Past Simple and Pat Continuous, to teach how to write biographies, how to talk and write about paintings, plus a huge vocabulary bank most of which is virtually unknown to 12-year-old Greek students. The labelling the plane parts exercise is infamously disliked by most teachers. I like it though because I see it as an opportunity. So among all these things I thought it was a good idea to show students this short video about early attempts to fly. Apart from helping revise simple past verbs (run, jump, fly, move, etc) I saw it as an opportunity to show the importance of failing!

3. We are what we do (intro)

Grade 5. This is a video I have used the last two years with considerable success. It was used for Unit 5, Ready For Action which is a unit about environmental sensitivity, about pollution and what children can do to change the world.

4. Animal Sounds

Grade 3 and 4. This is by far my favourite video this year. It was an instant hit and was used for many purposes. In one activity students had to write the names of the animals (20 in all), in another to recognise the letters, in a third one to say the sounds (video played soundless). All in all it was very popular and for days if not for weeks they would sing it in the corridors. And it was one of the videos they always asked to be replayed!

So these were some of the videos I used this year in my classes. What about you?

Last night I was reading David Crystal’s book “Just a phrase I’m going through”. I’ve read other books of his and I love his sense of humour and his ability to explain plus his academic expertise. Especially this one is like a biography of us all because he describes how he became a linguist and I’m sure his experiences will echo with a lot of us.

I haven’t read all of it yet, just the first 40 or 50 pages but already I have made notes on things that have reminded me of discussions we are having here:

1. There was an incident he was describing about how he learnt the plural of the word “plant” in Welsh which means child apparently. He mentions how for some time he was under the impression that it was just another meaning of the English word plant actually and that it seemed natural to him because children grow like plants do. Well, that immediately reminded me of David Warr and his language garden and how we teachers are sometimes like gardeners.
2. Further on Crystal is talking about how his early exposure to two languages (Welsh and English) might have given him a linguistic sensitivity that made him the eminent linguist we all know today. That reminded me a discussion we were having earlier yesterday with Mark Andrews who wrote about his early experiences from other cultures and how this shaped his motivation to learn a second language. Mark was lucky enough to have travelled to other countries when he was a young boy. I am convinced myself that travelling motivates learners a lot. Unfortunately it isn’t something easily done especially where my students are located. They live in a landlocked area  and they most come from low income agricultural families, among whom travelling to another country is a remote dream at the best of cases. But even for my family, although we love travelling, we haven’t been able to take our daughter to a trip abroad. That’s why I think that projects that include student mobility like Comenius partnerships, or even eTwinning collaborations that bring students in touch with students from other cultures are essential elements of our teaching.
3. The third point in the book that revived a conversation held in blogosphere was the paragraph he claims a linguist is like an actor. I will copy this paragraph because I think it’s interesting and it relates to my previous post about our language personalities:

“It must be helpful to have some acting in the blood if you’re going to end up a linguist. When you learn a foreign language you adopt a new persona. You don’t just talk differently, you hold yourself differently, you look different, you talk about different things and in different ways. “I think you always feel braver in another language” said Anita Brookner, in a newspaper article a few years ago. This must be why there are so many quotations around by famous people explain that they use different languages for different purposes such as former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s comment: “When I have tense relations with my wife, we speak in Arabic, When we talk business then we speak English. And when our relation is better, then we talk French.” ….Emerging into a new language is just like entering into a new character. You learn its foibles, its strengths, its weaknesses. And when you try to speak it, you have to enter into the activity totally, otherwise you will not be convincing….”

In Tyson Seburnt’s blog we were discussing something similar about role-playing and the importance of names. I agree with him that we teachers shouldn’t try to impose anglicized names to our students just for our convenience. But I also suggested that maybe our students (especially the young ones) want to take up a different name because it gives them a new identity to play with, and it (probably) makes language learning easier.

So, that was it. Just in chapter 4 of the book and already so  many connections with so many teachers in so many places. Enjoy you Sunday wherever you are and I’m going to my veranda to keep on reading.