2010…Resolute

2010 is a year of hopes, more than the current one. I don’t remember most of my expectations this same day a year before, I’m sure they were important but I just can’t remember them. The only one I remember is that I wanted to go back to university, as a student.

On March, I started a BEd and an MEd, both programs separately in the same university, URP in Lima, Peru. I had started the same MEd a in 2008, but for personal reasons it remained inconclusive. I had had a taste of it and I wanted it back. I did my best even though I thought it wasn’t going to be possible to carry on both programs, 50+ hours of work a week, a wife and two kids.

I guess I was lucky and fortunate at the same time. My family has been a tremendous incentive in my new educational stage. My two kids know when I’ll get home late, and they come to the lab and visit me during their recess time, I work at the school where they study. that gave me a different connection, something that didn’t happen before. We talk about the university classes, and I included them in one of my last presentations when i prepared a video of a moment of creativity.

One of them is more into the plastic arts, the other is more into high tech. He downloads games, and chats since he was 5. He handles electronic devices by intuition and my wife requires his assistance to change the ring tone of her cell phone. Does that sound familiar? Digital Native vs Digital immigrant?

We were planning to go camping for 4 days to celebrate the new year, but my friend (the organizer) had to be taken to the ER due to intense chest pain. He was diagnosed with Angina Pectoris, a sign that you might get a heart attack (Click here to see an animation). I saw him yesterday after staying overnight in the ER. He has to take it slow, and so do I. Apart from the fact that the camping with the kids had to be rearranged, it made me think very seriously about myself.

I’ll turn 35 by the end of February, I’ve had that number in my mind for quite some time. That is the mark where I was supposed to start living a serious and organized healthy lifestyle. I guess I’ll have to stick to that deadline, because I don’t want the dead line.

For the rest, I’m very compromised to finish university and pursue a new turn in my career, and the events for the coming year will tell in what direction that turn will be.

Happy New 2010!

Scientific Week

I read yesterday about crashes in the Moon causing water from the Moon rise to the surface. This along is a great discovery, water has always been the main search engine of life in places other than Earth. Who knows what else is on or under the Moon’s surface. Let’s not forget that the Moon was part of our planet sometime around the first forms of life appeared. There’s always room for speculation.

 

However, I just read something else that sounded very interesting too. Is Teleportation possible? it appears to be, although only for one atom. Nothing shy of impressive and amazing, certainly. I’m not a big fan of tv shows such as Star Trek or others that considered teleportation as a futuristic possibility. However, this report has been a great start, and the computer industry might grab the idea and its potential before the travel industry, that’s for sure.

Podcasting in 6th Grade

I wonder how I would have reacted if my 6th grade Science teacher, Mr. Torres (I think), gave me the chance to participate in a real-time video conference with students half a continent away.

That’s exactly what we did today in class. My 6th grade students from St. George’s College in Lima-Peru, have participated in a video conference, which is not new, but they will start working together with Chelsy Hooper from Ensworth school in Nashville, TN.

They greeted each other and exchanged brief questions and comments, to finally agree on working together in podcasts about forces and motion, and bacteria and viruses.

           

 

I’ll let you know of the results as soon as we have the audio ready and published in the collaborative wiki.

Interactive Porfolios

Not even 20 years, when I was a high school student, the use of the notebook was imperative. Notebooks with squares, lines, double lines, etc. Writing, re-writing, using pens in different colors, drawing and more, were regular activities during my school life. I’m sure that millions of students in most parts of the world did the same. We were all used to work that way.In 1991, during my senior year in high school, the Internet was not known in my area. It was only a couple of years later that the Web started its rampant popularity.

Notebooks continue being a significant part of today’s education system. It is undeniable the importance of notebook when kids learn to write. However, a question comes to my mind, how much do we write as adults nowadays? I thought about this last semester when I went back to University to get my MEd and I had to answer an extensive test. My hand became sore after a few minutes, at that point I realized that I hadn’t hand-written so much in years.

I reformulate my previous question, is it necessary to push kids' to have the perfect hand-writing style if they’ll quit it very early in life? As I said at the beginning, it is undenniable that learning hand-writing at an early age is a necessity, but as long as kids write clearly, should we keep pushing them?

I prepare all my classes using the Notebook software for SMART Board (Interactive Whiteboard), ironic right? And all theses classes are published in my wiki and available to be downloaded at anytime by my students or any person in the world. So, why should they keep using a regular paper notebook?

The immediate answer is because they should be able to take notes in class from the discussions we have about Science topics and the information that is not included in the class files, also supplementing it with additional information, following a constructivist model to build up knowledge and contributing in their own education. As an adult student, it is something implicit for me. However, in school, the implicit is not always evident or practiced.

My classes requested students to work on their paper notebooks the same way. But the results I obtained were not the best. So if the paper notebook as a working or evaluation tool lost its purpose. So, I decided to replace it with something new.

Thinking and browsing information, I found a concept that I liked, Notebooks as Interactive Portfolios. Making a notebook as if it was a web page, a blog, or as Web 2.0 page.

It is kind of difficult to do it on paper, but my first assignment obtained a siginificant gfood response from students. it was going from the darkness of paper notebooks, to the enlightment of Interactive Portfolios, or iPortfolios.

As a necessary activity, I’m planning to request it on a regular basis, but without pushing them.

I have designed a format following the sides of the brain, a “classic” left side with analytical parts, and an “Interactive” right side, where creativity and audiovisual aspects are key.

Here are some examples that I found and the formats that I created:

 

 

Debating in the 21st Century

Travel and lodging costs are being replaced by teleconfrences, and lately by videoconferences. That’s something that we had been used to hear from the business world. And even though they have developed that to create software to supply the demands of today’s globalized world.

However, the technology development and its applicability is being very well used and exploited in Education. Because it’s free, or very low cost, it’s entertaining and the demands of the audience are as current as they can be. Today’s students as defined by Marc Prensky, are Digital Natives, and we, today’s teachers will aspire only to be Digital Immigrants.

I typically organize debates, group discussions and other teaching-learning strategies. However, it was my desire to organize a bilingual debate between students from different parts of the world.

I’m working on that, and I wanted to share my first experience. I had a Class Discussion between my 8th grade students in Colegio San Jorge de Miraflores in Lima-PERU and 9th grade students from Hunterdon High School, a school in New Jersey-USA. Parents and students gladly received the idea and the possibility of expansion and use of 21st century skills bringing down language and distance barriers, to accomplish speaking in different languages and with people from other realities.

That was the case last week, and even though it was a short discussion, we could only stay connected for 30 minutes, it was the first out a series of discussions to be done for the rest of they year. US students practiced their Spanish and discussion skills, and Peruvian students tested their English and discussion skills as well. While they were talking there was a simultaneous webcast camera broadcasting in this channel.

The topic in discussion helped me introduce them into the biology class of Human Reproductive System, it was: do you agree with natural conception only? Or, assisted reproductive techniques as well?

My special thanks to Jon Pennington who coordinated the event from the NJ side. Here is a little sample of that:

 

Perhaps in 10 years we will see the first generations of digital native teachers facing the challenges of the new generaltions of digital natives. How will they be called at that time, Digital Innates?

Creativity

I've been working in education all my life, and I didn't notice it until I became a teacher. A few months ago, I heard something that gave me professional peace, I felt selfish until that moment, benefiting from educating others while I was learning in the process. "Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track", is the title of a book written by Russell Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg, I haven't read the book yet, but I listened to a synopsis via podcast. The book is in my wish list in Amazon, so the next relative coming from the US will bring me a copy of it.
What I rescue more of it is the motto: "The Objective of Education is Learning, not Teaching". no I don't feel as selfish for learning as much, or more, than my own students through my process of teaching.

Open publication - Free publishing - More teaching

I've been preparing a lecture on creativity and Joy Paul Guilford's work on the Structure of Intellect and his 3 layered cube, and while preparing it, I've learned a great deal of expertise, creativity is incredible and so magnificent that we must turn to mother nature before we can do something creative.
I found a countless number of extraordinary TED talks about Creativity, here are some of the few ones that made me feel that I want to create something:

It took me 10 years

I finished my biology degree in december 1997 in UPCH in Lima, Peru. A few months later, I started working as an Embryologist in a local fertility clinic. I might have somebody from the other world with a good soul overseeing me, because I’ve felt that in more than occasion that “at the right time and at the right place” situations were there for me.

After a couple months as an apprentice, I was sent to Santiago-Chile to be trained in a top practice by the best people in South america. I was certainly fortunate, and I learned a lot. In the following two years I went on a training tour that took me to places like: La Serena, Viña del Mar, Cartagena de Indias, Buenos Aires, Mexico DF, and Caracas.

After working 3 years in Peru, I decided to move the USA, I was hired by the largest Pennsylvania Health System, and spent 4 years working there as an Embryologist for 4 years.

Working in an IVF lab gives you ann incredible vision of reproductive health and all its low- and high-complexity procedures. Even though is just an expression, sometimes I felt the power of creating life with my hands. It was a very rewarding experience, to help thousands of people achieve the purpose of life, to create new life.

Before I finished working as a lab rat, I started turning my eyes and my interest to a new activity. Medical Interpreting captured my attention and I began training. After a 30-day class, I was invited to participate in the first 2nd stage training provided for Medical Interpreters in Philadelphia, and I was certainly the youngest and, by far the least experienced. I hadn’t been in the field yet. But I felt deeply challenged and I rose to the occasion.

After finishing my job as an Embryologist, I started volunteering in a company that provided training and experience in the interpreting and cultural competence fields, as well as participating in the training of new Medical Interpreters.

I gotta say that it might have been the most challenging and rewarding experience of life, learning astounding life and death experiences in the best children’s hospital in the US, and one of the top three in the world, perhaps the best place a person can work in.

It was during that time when I started experiencing Education. I had to come back to my country because I didn’t want to put me and my family in an unsafe situation remaining in the US after my H1B had expired.

That gave me the opportunity to rethink my professional activity, and started working as an educator in a bilingual school in Lima, Peru. After 6 months working there I decided to work in a another bilingual school, from there on a turn in my career had occurred.

Being part of the Education System brought new challenges that I’m trying to accomplish now by preparing myself in a Teacher Certification Program to obtain a Teaching License, and a Masters in Higher Education.

It took me 10 years to trace some of traveling steps back. In November 2008, I was invited to offer a workshop in the “ICT for Teaching & Learning Creatively” in Rio de Janeiro. From there, I was also invited to Bogota, Colombia to launch the first social network from the LAHC at their 13th Annual Meeting, it was in that meeting that I received an invitation to participate as a trainer and lecturer in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from where I just came back today.

All these experiences made me think of my professional career so far. In 10 years, I have managed to help babies be born (Embryologist), then I helped them with their health care (Interpreter), and now I’m educating them (bilingual teacher). I guess the natural progression is to continue in the post-secondary education, perhaps the post-graduate degree will help me in that unplanned progression.