Building a Europe for and with children

It's a long time since I posted on Council of Europe for the last time. So, let's go back to it again!

Building a Europe for and with children it's the project to strengthen work on the rights of the child.
We must work to stop children living in poverty and social exclusion. And education will always have a key role, although the main document of the programme doesn't seem to focus on education. We, as teachers, should be up-to-date in all kind of initiatives to be able to help our children, the ones we know and we meet everyday, to grow in an adequate standard of living, social protection, health and education (Strategy for 2009-2011)
The fact that the programme especially focuses on the rights of the children to be involved in decision making seems a quite new and interesting standpoint.

Read here the strategy for 2009-2011.

Web 2.0 is the future of Education

This is Steve Hargadon's presentation and talk. I have just started listening to it, and I feel it's great. I shall come back to it as soon as I can and I post it here in case you are interested in it too.

Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education

view presentation (tags: web 2.0 internet education web)

(And, don't panic! It seems very difficult but it isn't. Just keep listening and you will realise you are able to understand it.)

Becoming a better teacher with technology.

This is another pretty interesting video to justify the integration of ICT in our teaching.
If our students are digital learners, how can we engage them without ICT?

Twitter in Plain English

Are you on Twitter?
As teachers we have to be up to date in new technologies, and Twitter is something to keep in mind too.
I just got started so I really don't know much about it. So, first of all, let's learn about it and then, we can think about applying Twitter to our lessons.
This is Twitter in Plain English.

Edupunk?

Edupunk, a new standpoint to analyze elearning that I have just discovered on a post by Jordi Adell on Twitter.
Edupunk was firstly defined by Jim Goom in 2008 as an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do-it-yourself attitude (Wikipedia)

Edupunk is about ulearning (Martin Ebner, Graz University). It's about learner's autonomy, a learner's centered approach based on a personal learning enviroment or PLE where the learner can choose the tools to collaborate, communicate and learn (Steven Wheeler, Playmouth University).
Wheeler radicalizes his speech when he says that Virtual Learning Enviroments or VLEs stop learner's autonomy as they are controlled. While Ebner isn't as revolutionary as he tries to find a way to open VLE to free contents and tools.

It's curious to know about Edupunk when lots of teachers are just getting started in introducing VLE in their lessons.I like this new concept as it can be another point of view when checking our teaching basis and improving the VLE that we offer to our students.

Edupunk

View more presentations from Martin Ebner.

Edupunk F-ALT 2008

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

A video about the past?

I hope so...

Certainly not the best teaching strategies but anyway, a really funny video.