Interactive Classrooms

I finished my lecture about Interactive Classrooms and that made me think a lot. How much has my teaching style changed in the last 12 months?
A year ago, I recall using the SMART Board only. But that took me to the Web 2.0 world. From there on it was all a snowball reaction: bloglines, gmail, delicious, reader, blogger, wikispaces, twitter, tweetdeck, etc, etc.
My students are far more technologically driven and demanding than 12 months ago. However, there is something that Sir Ken Robinson said in a 2006 TED conference, "Are schools killing creativity?". Believe me, I fight with that thought everytime I start a class. My hope is to engage students in dialogue, interactive and collaborative work, with somebody next to them, or a continent away. Distances are no longer an impediment. Is our personal creativity and effort as educators our sword against the killing of creativity?

Lecturing - November 30th

Last week I went to Rio de Janeiro to give two lectures about Wikis and its uses in Primary and Secondary Education. I went to share my experience during this year. Until february this year, I had never worked in blogs, wikis or anything beyond MSN Messenger and basic internet search engines.

But it took only a few weeks of basic training, institutional support and self-learning to become the ICT Coordinator at my school.

Going to Rio helped me realize that even though I have the possibility to communicate with anybody in the world in real-time through Plurk, Twitter, or receive the information in a matter of minutes after it was published in any part of the world through bloglines; not everybody does it.

Part because their technological immersion is still in the rise, or because the need to do it has not reached them yet. It reached me quickly, and even though I will never stop learning I feel happy to be part of the educational technology world team, because the distances in a global community are reduces with one or two clicks.

Wiki, Week, and Weak - October 15th

"Men are from Mars and Women are from venus" or so said John Gray when published his book in 1992. Cliché phrases are everywhere in our daily lives. I actually found a website that helps you find clichés. Technology doesn't escape from clichés. Female presence in the ICt area is not as high as the male one, yet. I think that proportion will reverse soon. My experience with Wikis is reduced to a few jonths only. I work producing weekly edits in my class wikis, even though I was as weak as any IT ignorant until I discovered the benefit of being "connected". you're in the loop as long as you participate in the world. The World Wide Web has opened new possibilities in the communication area. I read dozens of updates in my twitter network. I follow a lot of people in the same area. I benefit from them. I use all that expertise as an empowerment. ICT empowers my mind, it challenges my perception of things and keeps me very busy, that's for sure.

It helps me discover that there is a whole world of possibilities on a nanosecond base, and if you are out of the loop you'll be delayed in your professional development. Will that be my weakness if I stop checking information on a weekend? I saw a great video the other day, shifthappens, check it out. Information generated daily is doubling on astronomical figures and in shorter time than just a few decades before. I'll try to keep up-to-date!

World Wide Web 2.0 - June 24th, 2008

There has been an explosion followed by a snowball coming to us at all times, it is called flow of information. The resources derived from and to handle all sorts of information generated from the ever-expanding knowledge, but most of all by the practically unlimited availability of it, is astounding. Proof of that is the exponential amount of blogs and wikis that have been in the last few years. This is certainly a new generation of interaction between user, interface and the powerful feedback.

There are several websites that promote the use of the new types of tools available: cool, fresh, dynamic and friendly web 2.0 tools. Pages such as Go2Web2.0, and Mosaic are good examples of that.

the best of all is that a new way to interact and present information is available in Education. Generating contents with new approaches, visions and levelsof interactivity. Let's celebrate the web 2.0 and the possibilities it brings us for our social, academic, business and personal life.

Teachers Teaching Teachers

Teachers Teaching Teachers TTTThis past saturday, May 31st, the TTT event took place in Lima-Peru. In Peruano Britanico, the primary teachers, and in San Silvestre for Secondary Teachers, we all had a great experience to learn from peers.I was fortunate because I could present a lecture about "Demonstration of Wikis and Blogs and Internet Resources in the Science Claaroom". For those who couldn't assist to my lecture I publish it in the following link :

Academic Year 2008

Welcome back students!!!
From this blog, we give you the best welcome back to classes for all the students at St. George's College from Miraflores, Lima - PERU.
This will be a new year for the Science department, with changes, improvements, and lots of novelties. Come back to this page as often as you want, it will be updated constantly for all the students that are curious and eager to read and learn about science.
Remember, this blog is linked with our Science Class Wikispace page:
http://science-learning.wikispaces.com/