Module 4

Module 4.1 - Learning Styles of your Students. Reflect on how you gather information about the learning styles of your students. How do you know what types of learners there are? What are good strategies to identify this?

As many of us have already said, it is difficult for me too to gather regular information about the learning styles of my students (30 or more students per class, a lot of things to consider etc.). We receive information about special needs pupils, but it is without saying that it would be extremely important for all students.

What I try to do is to offer a variety of activities to do, in order to understand them "on stage".

At the beginning I often organize group works and I always change groups in order to see how they work; then they can choose the best tools and ways to do the work.

Moreover, I talk with them (they are 15-19 years old) and I give some questionnaires where they have to think about their learning style. Tablets are useful when we have to do forms, questionnaires, diaries and so on...

To sum up, I still have to learn a lot and, most of all, to do it in a more structured way...

Module 4.2 - Tablets and Personalisation. What other ways can you think of how tablets can be used to personalise the learning experience of your students?

As I have said before, in my school we have got an institutional domain on Google Apps for Edu. That means that every pupil and teacher has got a domain's account and everyone can share everything with every member of the domain.

Moreover, we can have access to Google Classroom, which is very useful to store, share and manage everyday's teaching routine.

Thanks to this tools, each student can follow the teaching process at his/her pace and can contribute to the whole class activities.

I teach Spanish and I am convinced that an action-oriented approach in learning languages is the best for my students. That is why I find particularly motivating an approach which combines real life tasks and use of tablets (which ARE a part of real life...)

Thanks to GAfE, pupils can create shared docs, forms, presentations, can organise blogs or websites: I mean, they can learn according to their learning styles, increase their motivation and be prepared for their future life.

Module 4.4 - Flipping the Classroom. Have you tried out the flipped classroom model already? If so, share your experiences here. 

I have been working with flipped classroom for several years now, but I have to confess that not always in the "official" way...

I teach to elder students (17 and 18 years old this year), which is good from some aspects (they can pick up immediately what they have to do) but it can pose some problems from other points of view (they are too used to a traditional way of teaching-learning).

What helped me a lot were eTwinning projects: students are obliged to study/deepen/explain topics to their partners and they have to do it without us the teachers...

Then I began to implement this way of working in my "traditional" classes of literature and this year I have gone a little bit further: each group of students is in charge of a specific topic; they have to find out materials and information in the web and in other repositories; we discuss together (via Drive and shared docs) when they have prepared some of their work and then, on a due date, they do their lesson and present the topic to their mates.

The assessment is carried out in a formative way: before starting the module we negotiate assessment criteria and then, at the end of each group's work, some students are in charge of assessment which is discussed with me and the other students.

I have seen this way of working gives them a lot of responsibility and has produced higher results than a more traditional teaching.

Tablets are really useful because they intervene in every phase of the process: from brainstorming, collecting ideas and materials, to preparing presentations, sharing ideas and comments, showing the work, assessing ...

Module 4.6 - Apps and Tools for Personalisation and Flipping the Classroom. 

I have already put the link elsewhere in this course: this is a blog I have done to collect the apps that I have tried in these last years. 

I have organised them according to my "pedagogical" point of view.

However, at the moment for me the best apps and tools to personalise learning are Google Apps for Edu...