A BIT OF EVERYTHING

Now that I’m in my last week of the online training program, I wanted to share my experience with everyone. As 21st century teachers, most of us are somehow involved in youth media making. Likewise, there are also educational programs and organisations to help educators to get more involved in media making. Adobe Youth Voices Program is one of them.

Adobe Youth Voices Program helps educators to see the bigger picture of youth media making. It also helps you to guide your students to create a media piece with a purpose.

In the 8-week online training, you are able to collaborate with teachers from across the world, reflect on media pieces created by students from different age groups, learn how to use sofware like Adobe Premiere Elements and Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0, and even create your own media piece before starting a project with your students. The facilitators are always there to help and guide you. The tutorials are easy to follow and apply.

During the next eight weeks, you learn how to build on your knowledge and skills to create media with young people as it says on the course website.

The course requires 4-6 hour work every week, but the outcomes and the overall experience are invaluable.

Thanks to iEarn and Adobe working collaboratively to help teachers improve their ability in supporting their youth while creating media, I have learned a lot, and I hope to guide my students in the most efficient way in the future.

Below is the video I created in the course.

Here is a link to web page where activity packs focused on different themes are avaliable. They are packaged in a widget-format that you can embed in your class Wiki or web page. Each pack includes links to PBS websites and a set of activities by grade level.

Themes range from Arts to Technology. Our common theme at work is ‘Music’ this year. The music pack is full of interesting class activities that can make learning experience fun. Who doesn’t like Jazz or a Broadway musical?

While reading the first report in the BBC’s Hunger to Learn series, the inspirational 16-year-old boy almost had me cry. His name is Babar Ali, and he teaches 800 youngters who cannot afford any kind of education due to the poverty in their region in the evenings. Their classroom is the muddy yard behind Babar Ali’s house. He is even recognized and given credits by the local authorities.

Babar Ali’s modest sentences explain it all.

“Without this school many kids wouldn’t get an education, they’d never even be literate.”

Thumbs up for this young, but very wise young man.

Please click here to watch the tour of the school and to read the report.

This year our new theme is Music. All the English teachers at school have been contributing to create a list of websites related to music and its components. The result has been great so far. I just wanted to share our links with everyone who is willing to make use of music in their teaching experience. Please click here to see our list and you are more than welcome to share your favourite websites with us…

Some of my colleagues and I are going to attend a free eight-week online writing class beginning Monday, September 14 by Erlyn Baack, ITESM, Campus Queretaro, Mexico.  The class will be technically in Moodle. Below are the details of the course:

“The focus of this course is on sentences (simple, compound, and complex), dependent and independent clauses, adjective clauses, appositives, parallel structure, topic sentences, controlling statements, supporting details, common sentence errors such as run-ons and comma splices, and noun clauses. This course contains MANY resource materials or “how to” instructions, followed by many practice quizzes that do not count and many /real /quizzes that DO count toward a final grade. The materials in the course are presented in eight sections over a period of eight weeks. Each week contains practice quizzes and /real/ quizzes that count toward a final score. Quizzes that count are open only during the week in which they are placed.”

If you are interested, click here for self-registration.

ThinkQuest

Last September, my teacher partner, Danny, and I decided to enter the ThinkQuest competition 2009. We formed our team with 6 students from grade 8. Our students decided to pick a topic that needed to be addressed, but also one that had viable solutions. They wanted to do something that has not been given the attention it deserved. These considerations brought the topic of “Child Labor in Turkey” to our students’ minds. We voted and we agreed on this idea. That is how and why we came to choose “Child Labor in Turkey”.

The students worked collaboratively for months and even stayed after school at their own time. I felt so proud of them because all of them were also studying for SBS exam which was going to determine the high school they were going to study at. (If you want to be a student at a good college, there is a standardized test that you have to take very seriously and get a high enough score.) They did a wonderful job and even involved the other students at school by organizing a slogan competition. They felt privilaged to have an impact on the society around them.

On June 1st, we found out that we won the second place . It has been a great experience for all of us and in October we are going to San Francisco for ThinkQuest Live to receive our prizes.

I have come across another amazing Ning page “Integrating Technology for Instruction and Learning” while going through IATEFL’s site. They have online technology sessions for all the teachers across the world and it’s free!