Langwitches Blog Silvia Tolisano

"I presented Global Pedagogy, Not Just a Project at BLC 2014- Building Learning Communities in Boston, MA."

"A couple of days, Dan McCabe mentioned me in a Tweet… I took a look at the conversation preceding the "challenge" to "sketch it". "

"I am a documenter, I have always been… maybe it is in my blood… …from keeping diaries from an early age on, being the family letter writer, to taking pictures to document our lives, vacations, family and friends… even when it was tedious… (taking 24 or 36 exposures at a time, then taking it to a photo store to develop them and waiting a week to being able to pick them up)."

"Friend and colleague, Andrea Hernandez, filmed and edited the following video. The video is a smorgasbord of thoughts regarding the possibilities of blogging with your students."

"I have written about curation before using Twitter as a Curation Tool and about the importance of helping our Students Becoming Curators of Information. Sue Waters also just published a very comprehensive Curation: Creatively Filtering Content on her blog."

"It is the responsibility of all educators to model good digital citizenship for their students. Especially when it comes to copyright, plagiarism and intellectual property. The waters are murky. Not being familiar with online digital rights and responsibilities (hey, teachers did not grow up with the Internet being around), educators are wading through uncharted waters (hey, I did not know that I could not just google an image to use. If someone puts it up online it is free for the taking). That does not mean they can close their eyes and pretend life is the same or that the same rules apply to online versus offline use of copyrighted material with their students."

"Sometimes I am still amazed that not more Language Arts teachers have taken a good look at blogging. It seems such a match made in heaven: giving students an authentic audience for their writing… incorporating modern skills of writing & reading in digital spaces… (hyperlinking, transmedia, research, etc.) platform designed for feedback"

"th graders, under the facilitation of their Math teacher, Laurel Janewicz, have learned to take data, analyze the data and tell a story with it. They are demonstrating their understanding of Math concepts, data graphs, misleading graphs and communication skills. Laurel chose to give authentic, relevant and meaningful data (not invented data) to her students to analyze from the results of a Challenge Success survey taken the previous school year at the school. The survey compiled data about the school's extra curricular activities, homework habits, parent involvement, student engagement, sleep patterns etc."

"The step from using a static website or emails as a mean to share announcements or calendar items to sharing the same type of items on a blogging platform is not far nor a steep step. My ultimate goal for using a classroom blog or student blogfolios though, is that of creating transformative teaching and learning opportunities, not to have a platform that substitutes a composition book or paper journal. To make the difference visible and clearer, I am looking through the lens of the SAMR model."

"Blogging is about reading and about writing in digital spaces. We want students to make their learning and thinking visible. We are developing a platform and a blogging pedagogy for students to document, reflect, organize, manage their online learning records and using student work on blogs as a source for formative assessment. Timely feedback from their teachers, peers and a global audience is critical to the process."

"Blogging in education is about quality and authentic writing in digital spaces with a global audience, while observing digital citizenship responsibilities and rights, as on documents, reflects, organizes and makes one's learning and thinking visible and searchable! Blogging is not analog writing in digital spaces. Blogging is not an activity, but a process. The process includes reading, writing, commenting and connecting. It is about reciprocating and an emphasis on quality, not just publishing."

"Another glimpse into the classroom! Previous video clips: Socratic Seminar & Backchanneling, Visible Thinking Routine: Chalk Talk, Mystery Skype Call, Collaborate & Curate In the spirit of opening up classroom walls and creating a ripple effect of teaching and learning by sharing ideas, methods, action research and modern literacy upgrades, here is another video clip. You are watching a 7th grade Humanities classroom, led by their teacher David Jorgensen at Graded-The American School of São Paulo. The students are reading The Giver, by Lois Lowry and have been annotating their thoughts as they are reading individual chapters in a Google Doc chart/table, labeled: Observations Inferences Rituals Questions/ Predictions"

"We are fortunate to have a Visible Thinking Routine (VTR) expert at our school. Claire Arcenas, our MS/HS Physical Education teacher, previously a third grade classroom teacher who has done extensive readings and research in experiencing, implementing, embedding VTR in teaching and learning. Recently, she started sharing her experience and reflection on her professional learning blog: Visible Thinking Across Subject Areas. Claire invited me to an 8th grade PE class before a unit on Volleyball skills and allowed me to film her facilitating the VTR called Chalk Talk. She explains the overview of her volleyball unit on her classroom blog post: Can You Dig It?"

"There can never be enough examples from the classroom to share. The benefits are many, from creating a ripple effect of digitally documenting and sharing to a glimpse in someone else's classroom by having the opportunity to be a fly on the wall via a video clip. I have shared the Excitement of Learning that can unfold with a Mystery Skype call before. The following video clip is from David Jorgensen's 8th grade Humanities class (São Paulo, Brazil), recorded during their first Mystery Skype with a class from rural Iowa, USA."

"Mark Engstrom. 8th grade Geography teacher and Assistant Principal at Graded- The American School of São Paulo, has redesigned his entire course. Students move through the modules of this blended learning course on Geography at their own pace. They build out content knowledge using a Personalized Map (through google maps) and the content delivered through this Digital Learning Farm method will be curated so that they can build out multiple pins on their map. This content is then used as content knowledge to increase their understanding of the region. He wanted to experiment with a different type of note taking to add to students' documentation of gaining subject specific content knowledge."

"These questions intrigued Ana Paula Cortez, one of our Portuguese teachers at Graded, the American School of São Paulo, and compelled her to explore them with her students. prep--Inspiration: 7billionothers.org--In 2003, after The Earth seen from the Sky, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, with Sybille d'Orgeval and Baptiste Rouget-Luchaire, launched the 7 billion Others project. 6,000 interviews were filmed in 84 countries by about twenty directors who went in search of the Others. From a Brazilian fisherman to a Chinese shopkeeper, from a German performer to an Afghan farmer, all answered the same questions about their fears, dreams, ordeals, hopes: What have you learnt from your parents? What do you want to pass on to your children? What difficult circumstances have you been through? What does love mean to you? Forty-five questions that help us to find out what separates and what unites us. These portraits of humanity today are accessible on this website. The heart of the project, which is to show everything that unites us, links us and differentiates us, is found in the films which include the topics discussed during these thousands of hours of interviews. Objective: Raise awareness of culture and interconnectedness of common themes/threads that connect humans no matter of their cultural origin. Take advantage of our multilingual students to share and connect speakers of different languages. Students: 7th & 8th grade Portuguese Language Learners Project Idea: Middle School students create a video (testimonies, journal type) responding to pre-set prompts from 7billionothers.org (love, happiness, work).Future extension idea: personalize the prompts by tweaking to address specific middle school topic…. friends, family, what do you want to be when you grow up….) Process: 1. Discuss video filming techniques.. observe the ones recorded on 7billionothers.org: Framing, Angle, Stability, Background"

"What Do You Have to Lose? was a blog post I wrote 4 years ago… It is a new idea for many classroom teachers/students to move from writing, reading and "doing" work, not only for themselves, supervisors/parents or for a monetary compensation/grade, to share their work openly and freely with others. The idea of putting oneself "out there on the internet" (on a larger scale than the teacher lounge) and publicly "brag" about successes, admit failures, ask for help or document one's learning and teaching process, feels unnatural and even scares many of them. A lot of water has gone under the bridge, a lot has changed in terms of technology… It has been 4 years and my belief in sharing to amplify teaching and learning has grown stronger, even when the work I share gets taken, plagiarized and used for profit by others. I am continuing to make the benefits of documenting (for reflection, metacognition and connection purposes) visible, but the documentation can not be the end all. The next step must be sharing and disseminating that documentation. It is about sharing conversations, resources, model lessons, student work, reflections, innovative ideas, action research, etc. Sharing in service of benefiting the educational community and advancing eduction. Sharing in order to be part of a network that supports each other and and pushes thinking forward. Without individual parts, there is no network. The more parts, the larger and stronger the potential network. In the last few weeks, there have been many examples at Graded, the American School of São Paulo, that show the power of sharing and the ripple effect it created: Teaching others you will never meet Authentic audience Feedback Personal Branding Remix & Added Value Building a Personal Learning Network"

"Humanities teacher, Shannon Hancock, at Graded, the American School of São Paulo, read and worked through The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo with her 8th grade students. Not only did they read the text, learn about literary elements, but also learned to articulate and discuss in a professional manner the text with their peers. Shannon chose to use the Socratic Method, specifically a Socratic Seminar (Inner/Outer Circle Fishbowl) to hand the learning over to her students. She stressed to them: " Educators don't need to have all the answers, it is about asking the right questions.""

"There is more to blogging with your students than simply creating a blog and starting to copy and paste work, that traditionally was done on a paper journal or worksheet in the classroom, into that digital space. Blogging is about quality and authentic writing in digital spaces with a global audience in mind, observing digital citizenship responsibilities and rights, as one documents, organizes and makes one's learning and thinking visible and searchable."

"If you are blogging with your students, you have been exposed to them. You have been exposed to hundreds of unimaginative, cloned, generic and uninspiring BLOG TITLES. When opening your RSS reader that contains the latest blog posts of your students, you are confronted with a list, similar to the one below."