Reflections on CO16 - 3-Day Online Conference about Education and Business (by Claudia de Crescenzo)

CO16 is the 7^th annual event about Connecting Online for Instruction and Learning. This year it’s been organized on February, between the 5 and 7. The virtual conference has been held online using WizIQ platform and Dr. Nellie Deutsh hosted it. The theme of this year has been about ‘Teaching Online to Improve Instruction and Learning in Education and Business’.

In photo you can see all online teachers involved in project; in the top right corner Dr. Nellie Deutsch.

Each teacher in a webinar of about 45 minutes illustrated a different aspect of online teaching, emphasizing the efficient and effective application of technology in teaching and learning profession.

During webinars it’s been possible to connect with the other attendees and at the end of each conference speackers gave answers to attendees’ questions in chat.

In this edition the questions that I found more interesting were about suggests for a correct and professional use of a teacher website and about the way to use online teaching to earn money.

Personally I followed thoroughly this appointment and I watched many conferences. I noticed the great variety of arguments, all interesting.

Some teachers (Jaime Miller, Chris Rush, Susan Brodar …) treated about their experiences as online teachers, suggesting how to avoid the most common mistakes and how to have a right approach with technologies and in the relationship with online learners. 

They insisted particularly on some key issues: tools must be intuitive and reliable and a good website must be easily consulted by users.

I found very exiting the lesson about flipped learning through mobile devices (Dr. Revathi Viswanathan). I think  it's a new way of teaching that considers the students as an active part in the learning process. And it can be considered as a way for the teachers to enjoy themselves. Flipped classroom is not just a new technique, it is a new thinking method. Another good point is made by teacher when he says it is very important to know the content that needs to be online and how to organize. Another way to interest students can be to bring real life into the classroom, just as  Stephen Greene teached in his lesson. It can be possible if music, arts, actuality and all aspects of real life are rapresented with technologies, but also with the rapresentation, rielaborated by students and their creativity.

Also in the lesson of  Rosmery Ribera, teacher gave many suggests to be a successful online student and it seems that an oriented use of multimedia can contribute to this result during a process from motivation to reflection. Young people, but not only, have familiarity with Facebook, Twitter, … and this social network can become a good support for teaching.  

Dawn Alderson in particular reflected about the use of Twitter in teaching, for the level of involvement in which learners can be engaged. For my experience I can adfirm that in effect students feel themselves more inspired to study and to use technologies for their formative success. They know anyone can read what they write and so they’re also more controlled and careful in their comments.

Theodora Papapanagiotou believes that socialmedia give great opportunities. She is persuaded that collaboration is the strong point for teachers to achieve Future Skills 2020 for a globally connected world. For this purpose she attends all online environments she can (networks, blogs, groups…) and collaborates with other teachers all over the world in production of educational short videos.

Also Karin Heuert Galvão in her webinar wanted to explain that collaboration in teaching is the best behavior that the community of teachers can adopt.

After all in his conference from India, Ramesh Sharma emphasized how is important to create a learning society (that is also the title of a book written by J. Stiglitz and B. Greenwald), specially in a world more and more digitalised, in which readers use increasingly tablets and e-books. So he and  Theodora Papapanagiotou say it’s necessary to think how to work for a social intelligence, a new media literacy, a transdisciplinarity, a cross cultural competency, a design mindset.

The conference that particularly liked to me was by Letizia Cinganotto e Daniela Cuccurullo about Techno-Clil.  

To know and to use an additional language for learning and teaching of both the content and language is an entitlement but also a necessity to become global digital citizen. Skills can be achieved by literacy and the goal is fluency in creativity, information, media, solution and collaboration. Teachers were very inspired and communicative.

The event finished with the conference about using Amazon Echo for your Online Teaching Needs by Brian C. Steinberg. 

During the presentation of all possibilities that Amazon Echo offers, for few seconds we appreciated some notes of a great Beatles love song called “And I love her”. Amazon echo’s been only the last but not the least of a series of online resources that are presented during all webinars by teachers.

I admit to be very interested not only as a teacher but only as a learner because I’d like to create a personal website to teach and organize courses to learners all over the world.

I find the contributions of the teachers so interesting and inspiring, as they put so much effort in creating all these new materials and constantly re-think their way of teaching.

I felt great admiration for them, specially for their abilities and their practical approach to consider teaching profession. Hearing them, I tought to change my mind about teaching. First of all I was stimulated to think back on my own teaching experiences. Now I know I want to implement some of the ideas I have heard by teachers in webinars, but I can imagine it won’t be easy.

Difficulties are:

-          Identify the challenges that may be encountered while using new strategies

-          Identify some key factors for success

-          Recognize the effects that new strategies may have on students.

I'm involved in CLIL and this methodology has helped to move the focus of the lesson from the teacher to the students but it's not easy if you work in an educational environment where 90% of the lessons are teacher-led.

In my opinion kay factors should be considered an intelligent content design, consisting both in a simple and clear website and progressive problem solving activities, but also in an appropriate time management and in the availability of the resources.

The challenge demands a great initial effort and a large onvestment in time and resources to be productive.

As a result of the event I woul like to know how to continue to be trained along this formation process.

My purpose is to transfer experiences and procedures in my practice and to use what I’ve learned to become an online teacher: this idea has a lot of traction with me!

I believe that a strong effort has to be done in teachers' training in order to have them get familiar with ICT tools. I will try to give visibility and a stronger design to my lessons, but I can imagine it won't be easy.

I'll like to research as a result of the event the reflections about key factors that should be considered.

CO16 was a very interesting collection of experiences!

A great change is needed.

8 febbraio 2016

Claudia de Crescenzo