My adventure on e-learning starts next fall

I was surprised when my boss said YES on my idea on teaching Italian through computer. First time that I am going to teach without being actually in class but sitting at my place. I have long summer in front of me: I have to prepare the material and start to see the limits and the possibilities of on line learning. In order to do that I applied to Cursera to one course that teach how to implement an on-line course. It will last 5-7 weeks and it's going to be very intresting hopefully. Stay tuned cause I will write about this in the blog.

My teaching training: a semi serial reflection on the experience

My teaching training in Diaconia went very fast: one month, twice a week teaching Orientation English to Social Worker students. Total teaching hours: 20.
The group was very nice: talented, polite, ready for working in group and to use their English in all the situation that we faced during our path. It was indeed heterogeneous group: some of them just graduated from high school, some of them didn´t finish it. Some of them (even belong to religious group that doesn´t have easy access to TV or internet) could speak English rather well, others they had difficulties to follow what I was saying...It was a challenge. I took it 100 %. 

The tutor was huge help: for the first time since I started my teaching carrier I have got advises on how to improve my teaching...and it felt so good!
The tutor role is not simple and it requires a huge dose of patience and open mind: give to the teacher student an entire course is not easy especially if the student teacher doesn´t have so much experience.
My tutor was one of the special one: we could cooperate withouth problem and he gave me time after each lesson, giving me a feedback. 

The Orientation English is a mandatory course for those students that are studying to become Social workers and also work for the Parish.
My lessons were focused in theme such as: Finnish Welfare System, Family life, Adoption and Foreigner clients. We went through also practical things : dealing at the phone with no Finnish speaker, be able to make a conversation with the client in order to help him/her to face the difficulties in life. I found the group ready to face different situation and I provide my self the material based on the themes from the book and instruction given by the tutor. 

In 20 hours wasn´t possible to cover all the book themes so part of the studies, the students did on their own time. I decide to approach in really practical way: problem solving, role activities, support of technologies for the theoretical part  I also promote quite much the collaborative learning: working in a group and as a group it´s a basic thing for a social worker and the best way for learning. I was also careful about the timing and give enough time for the discussion where it seemed to involve students 100 % but in the meanwhile had always ready extra activities in case that discussion wouldn´t start. 

I tried to cover all the learning styles: I used platform like Prezi and Popplet to support the visualist and the kinestetic learners. My tutor said that my strenghts are my social skills: how immediately I made the contact with the students and build their trust. My weakness? my English pronunciation.......I would like also improve the area of assessment and the observation of the group. I felt (even though I observed them for 30 hours) that I would need to observe other thing in order to get my core plan ready...well I guess I have to trust my memory. Lucky for me I eat fish twice a week ;) 

The difficult part for me was to evaluate their final test and give them a fair assessment: my tutor mentioned couple times that we were working in a University so the level of their English has to be proper for the studies curriculum. For the test please  look here: Test for Social Workers

The experience itself was great and exhausting and that´s why I wasn´t able to write anything until now. I need to breathe especially when at the evening I had long trips to go to work, a 3 years old to take care and housework to do it. A huge help came from my parents that spent 2 months in here without knowing English or Finnish, in the dark and cold December and January....to help me enjoying fully this experience. I would never thank them enough. 

the blog for the students

Nowadays my work and my training doesn´t let me so much time to write to every single emails that my students write me when they  miss the class. So here I am, providingfor them a new blog. The philosophy behind this blog is very simple. They can gather information about the classes, homeworks and also links and facts about Italy and Italian Culture.
Here is the link: http://studiamoinsiemeitaliano.blogspot.fi

Starting the spring season at work with a challenging

I am really glad that many old students came  to the Italian class for the spring term (starting already on Monday). Couple of them went to Italy for an exchange and they said - it was really nice experience - but too short cause lasted only 3 months.
It´s true: abroad experiences should be at least 9 months cause 3 months are the exactly time when you get to know the system: your project is over and you have to come back home. What people can learn from that experience? maybe something but not too much.
These two students belong to the ONLY Italian class which has vocational students. The difficulty in this course is that are coming all the time new students with level zero and it´s really challenging to bring all of them to the same level. How can I give  a quality lesson?
 I decided to separate the two levels: in the same learning environment, at the same time I give them different exercises on the same issue. It´s double work for me but I don´t see any other solution at the moment. Applying this strategy contribute to rise the level of paper work and planning. For couple hours planning I need half of the day in order to find on the same issue different but effective exercises, role games and vocabulary activities.
On Monday I will start also my teaching training where I could possible face the same situation.
Let´s see how I will handle it.