Closing Seminar part 1

I started my morning with these two picture: where I am now? I am at the end of this fantastic journey. It has been challengings at time and I have been facing situations (at personal level) later that make me distract from the main focus. Linda and Päivi were using the word FOCUS today and I have after these studies the energy to focus more and more on my next target. I won´t stop my studies here with these school. I want to get further education, get those competences that I can document and add to my portfolio. We spoke about evaluating the competences with numbers: I found that really limited.  (...continue...). Some teachers measure the competences by the time, I wonder how this is going to change. It´s true that I can document my competences throught this blog, I am just worry that this is not taking as serious as it should be.
I am looking forward about tomorrow.

Teaching Training Closing Seminar

The Teaching Training Chapter closed for me today. It was interesting session, especially because I could hear others people experience.
I was very lucky with my practice: the relation with the group and the tutor, the close distance (not so long trip for once) and also possibility to try different teaching method.
We started with a swot analysis and give grades on feelings for general experience from 1 to 4. I would give mine 3-4: I think I still have some weakness.
We discussed about other issues too, going deeply in what we did.
What we learn from the observation of the students and other teachers?
For me was the group dynamics: to see my students hanging around with the same people it was good tool to use int he right moment. especially when we were talking about communication. Other people also mentioned useful stuffs, such as:
- learning to be prepare for difficult personalities
- learning how taxing actual lesson might be
The tricky part in the seminar was: how to assess the learning, meaning not from the final test.
In my case I didn´t assess all the time the learning. I think I was actually seen that from their participation and enthusiasm on the activities. Most of the people had to use quizzes at the end of the lesson or give them at home homework and check in the classroom. exercises, practical tasks, giving them number...We spoke about this last autumn a lot.
So at the end my teaching practise was great. I felt good about it, I still feel so.

The ideal classroom - Educational Science closing seminar

What is the ideal classroom settings and place arrangement in 21 century?
In order to answer that question I think we should consider several aspects.
1) age of the group and size
2) material and space what a teacher would need
3) the activities that a teacher would be doing in that space.

The exercise was fun. Pity that we had only 10´ to produce something but now that I have time I think that having the perfect learning environment is almost impossible to have. In our presentations we all of us had this teacher center classroom instead of students. Many time classroom are arranged that way: I work in 7 different schools and most of them have (what I call) the top 3:
teacher, board (On the teacher side) and desk (Better if individual desks).

In my ideal classroom I wanted to have a round table built from singles one. In this way is easier to separate them during test time for instance. The round table will help the collaborative learning.
Each desk surfice is made by a screen touch computer connected with the screen touch teacher computer. People don´t need to look at the board they have only to look down. In every station there headphones where students can listen as much as they need dialogues if they are learning languages.

In a corner of the class is going to be an inside garden (preferably) next to the big window. All the material is done with ecological material.
At the end of the class there is an area with big pillows and a library shelf with the classics of international literature. This idea comes from my experience with some adult students that actually they didn´t read at school any classic. I think it´s time to introduce that kind of aspect in Finnish school system.

In one wall is going to be an interactive window where every day come different art pictures from all over the word (Picasso, Leonardo and many others) in order to let the students to get to know a bit about art.

So actually my class is a language/culture lab that can be used with adult and young students that need to learn a foreigner language. Educational Science course was well organized and the today session very useful. The second block of the session was "try to guess to which theorist a classroom drawing belong to". I did miss in the first drawing the TV (small and in the corner) so my guess Montessori was wrong.
The second drawing I was correct. The third and fourth Skinner and Piaget.
Between all these theorists probably what I am bringing with me the idea of how important is the collaborative learning. I also enjoyed very much the idea of teaching video and comments there. I was looking for that kind of experiences when I started these studies and so I did.

In here some pictures of my ideal classroom.