A live online class

Hi again 21 cenTeachers!

Today I would like to talk about an amazing event that took place last Thursday 4th of May. We, students of the Master´s degree in bilingual education of Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid), had the opportunity of taking part in a worlwide educational conference. This conference was part of a bigger educational event: Moodle Mooc 10 (MM10). 

Moodle Mooc 10 is a set of online conferences related to different educational issues. This set of conferences took place from 1st of May to 4th of May 2017. The main purpose of MM10 is to connect educators from all over the world to share their different points of view, teaching strategies, digital learning experiences and cultural aspects. The online class of 4th of May in which we participated was titled Open Educational Digital Projects for CLIL Primary Education.

Retrieved from Pixabay

Now I would like to share with you my experience and all the steps I followed during this challenge. First of all, I have to confess that when we were told by our ICT teacher María José that we were going to take part in a live online classroom we got quite impressed. But, at the same time, we realized that this would be a great opportunity for us to connect with other teachers from all over the world and let them know what we learnt throughout our ICT course. 

Moreover, we had not only to show the world what we had learnt but also to present them our open educational projects. For this reason, as soon as we were told that we were going to participate in this conference, I started to think about what I would say. Then, I decided to draft my speech in order to organise my thoughts and make it easier for me. In this speech, we had to talk about our experience in our ICT course, the challenges that we had to overcome and our OEP (open educational projects). We had to communicate all these aspects in only 5 minutes!

Here you can take a look at the outline that I prepared for my speech. 

Speech outline (Author´s own creation)

After doing this, we were told to design a personal slide to support our speech in the online conference. To carry out this task, our teacher created an online presentation in Google Drive. When everyone finished his/her slide our teacher upload the whole document was uploaded to SlideShare to share it with the world. Here it is the slide collection.

      

Open educational digital projects for clil primary education from Jefe de Área de Formación en Red y Redes Sociales. INTEF

My slide is the nineteenth slide one and, as you can see, I kept it quite simple. I only included a photograph of myself and some data that I considered relevant and I did not want to forget: the link of my learning diary, the tittle of my open educational project, the collaborative movement I collaborated with and my twitter handle.

After having everything prepared we only had to rehearse for the real conference. To make this rehearsal as similar as possible to real conference, we were challenged to do it from home. In this manner we had the possibility to get used to giving an speech through the webcam. We also tested that everything worked properly and our devices were suitable for the conference. To do this research we used this online platform.

After a week, it was finally the day of the live online class. I connected from home by using the online software WiziQ which enables collaborative and engaging learning experiences. I was really nervous when I started my speech but then I was calming down gradually while speaking. It was such an amazing opportunity since I was given the opportunity of sharing my work with teachers from all over the world.

The whole conference was recorded and uploaded to YouTube.

            


To conclude, I would like to reflect on the learning that I have acquired thanks to our ICT course and the online conference. First, I have to say that by the time our ICT course began I did not know too much about digital learning and online tools. I had the impression that ICT were being introduced in schools due to the current society but I did not find them useful at all in the learning process. Now, I realise that I was wrong and ICT are essential in the primary classroom. New technologies enable us, as teachers, to design and implement more interesting and engaging activities in the primary classroom. They also promote the development of key skills such as critical thinking, creativity and group work. Furthermore, ICT give students the opportunity of driving their own learning and collaborating with other schools.

Regarding the live online conference, I would like to thank our teacher María Jesús and Nellie Deutsch for giving us this fantastic chance. It is the first time that I take part in an online educational conference and I will have a really positive memory of it. I could not even imagine how much effort is required to set in motion an online conference. Thanks to this conference I realized that everything must be planned in advance and rehearsal is crucial.

I hope you like my post and enjoy the MM10 conference!

See you soon!