Digital Portfolio, part 1

I'm writing here a few given topics for my digital portfolio. The topics I'm going to cover on this post are as follows:

• My most memorable learning experiences 
• My formal studies & learning history (classroom and virtual) 
• My personal teaching history 

My most memorable learning experiences

My most memorable learning experiences was a short course called Suggestopedic English. It was far from traditional classroom teaching. First of all, we didn't have tables and chairs, but instead of that everybody sit or  lie on sack chairs on the floor. The course lasted one or two weekends and during those days we had different kind of plays, games, relaxation, and even a dance. We also made an own song as a group work, and then we performed that song to the rest of the class.

Before the course started we were asked to develop a new character with a name, occupation, and other features and at the course we introduced ourselves by this new character, not by our real names and identities. The idea was to have an opportunity to use larger vocabulary than normally when the real life doesn't limit your imagination.

We also studied some theory. For example, we studied to stress English words correctly. This is often difficult to Finnish people since in Finnish the stress is always on the first syllable, and in English it can be in the middle of a word. This exercise was done by physical movements: by waving hand or sometimes by jumping, so this was not a typical way to study pronounciation.

I liked this course a lot. The idea was to learn the language in a natural way, through social interaction. The course was a lot of fun, and it gave more courage to use the language freely. There was no boring parts at this course, and thus I think it was very motivating for learning.

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My formal studies & learning history (classroom and virtual)

My formal studies and learning history includes the following:

• Master of Arts
• Bachelor of Business Administration
• Vocational Qualification in Business and Administration
• European Union Specialization Programme (seven months)
• Drama, Video Production and Music Education Programme (six months)
• Secondary School Diploma, Matriculation Examination

All these studies are mostly classroom studies. I have taken a couple of language courses as online courses, though. These online courses included different kind of tasks, where you had to fill in missing words or write some short descriptions. I liked these courses, since there was some independency to decide what you want to study. However, sometimes it was difficult to motivate yourself for self-studying. I had some interaction with the teacher during the course when she commented the tasks I had returned. Moreover, at one course there was minor interaction with other students when we had to comment each other's online texts. I think these human contacts made the courses more interesting.

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My personal teaching history

This is easy to answer: I don't have any personal teaching history yet. I have guided new workers at work place, so I have some experience in guiding, though. I like this kind of guiding work, since I find it very motivating when I can transfer my knowledge and help other people that way.

 

The start-up of the iVet programme, June 3, 4, and 18

I was busy in the summer and thus I haven't reflected the content of the start-up days on this blog yet. So I'm trying to reminisce those days now.

The iVet programme started with two contact days in Oulu on the 3rd and 4th of June. I met the other students and the teachers for the first time. We had several activities, but unfortunately I can't remember them all. At least I remember I had a good time there. I also remember I realized this iVet programme contains a lot of learning by doing, which I find a good method. I think it prepares you better for teaching work than just reading theory and listening to lectures. It's better to try different teaching and learning methods in practice than just read about them from books.

I remember that we tried out several computer programmes that can be used in online teaching. I already had previous experience of using the Adobe Connect programme. The Padlet programme was new to me, and I found it quite convenient. It's a good way to give everybody a chance to participate in an online conversation. I also wrote down the names of a few online tests that could be used at online teaching. We also started our own blogs during those two days in Oulu.

We also had a couple of presentations about going abroad for the teacher practise. I found the information interesting and I'm certainly going to consider that option.

On the 18th of June we had our first online meeting where we tested the AC environment. There were some technical problems at first, for example not everybody had a headset yet and there was a lot of echo on the line when many mics were on. But we managed to have that lesson somehow, turned the microphones off and used a chat or padlet window for commenting.

Finally, I have written to my paper notes that I should write a definition of reflection. I searched it from the Internet and found the following that I found good:

Source: Hinett, K. Improving learning through reflection – part one. The Higher Education Academy.
www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/resources/database/id485_improving_learning_part_one.pdf

"Reflection might be seen as both an approach and method for improving the
quality and depth of student learning. Reflection is a way of thinking about 
learning and helping individual learners to understand what, how and why 
they learn. It is about developing the capacity to make judgments and evaluating 
where learning might take you.  

Expressing reflection means finding a 'voice'
by which to express thoughts and inevitably this increases
confidence and self-awareness in ability. Reflection aids not
only deep learning of particular subject matter but also the
development and utilisation of a bank of skills.

Reflection also aids deep learning by promoting independent
thought. The fact that in many education settings learners
are required to provide evidence of their reflection, either 
through a learning journal, personal development portfolio, or
video, means that students have to focus their thoughts and 
articulate either verbally or in written form the results of
their reflection."  

The contact days September 2 and 3

Sep 2: I learnt today several teaching methods. I liked Pecha Kucha method since it's an interesting way to present something in compact form. I think it's a good way to present yourself, your education, and work experience and I could imagine to ask students to make such a presentation. I learnt many new things about the other students through Pecha Kucha today and I think I'll remember those things better now when I saw pictures compared to plain spoken self-introductions.

I had pre-recorded my own presentation as I had thought that it would be nice just relax and watch the presentations in class. However, I wasn't satisfied with the result of my recording and in the actual presentation I decided to commentate the PowerPoint slides live. It went quite well even though I hadn't practised to present it live at all. I had tried to make the recording work several times, so I remembered quite well what to say with each slide. Anyway I liked the fact that Pecha Kucha gave the opportunity to choose how to commentate your slides. Practising live performing is generally speaking more important, but after this exercise I think I also would like to practise more to speak with a mic and get used to it.

Today's second exercise was a QR code race. That was a very contemporary teaching method, and I think it could be a good way to activate younger students, but it can work with adults, too. For example, I learnt something about the theory of experiantal learning in funny way while we performed our race tasks.

Finally, we had some educational sciences activities where we taught and studied poems, drawing, and plays. I learnt some methods how to teach different tasks, for example you can draw pictures or tell a story around the task. Many students in this class are already experienced teachers, and I think that I, as a beginner, can learn a lot from them when we do group work.

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Sep 3: We continued the group activities on Tuesday. Every group had very short time to prepare a presentation on a given subject. My group presented first about effective learning. We came up with a good idea to present language studying with learning-by-doing method called Kolb's experiental learning, but unfortunately our performance was not the best since we didn'd involve the audience in it. The audience also complained that they couldn't see our studying material that we used in our presentation, since we didn't lift it up to them to see it better. But this is all about learning, and I'm sure we will take these issues into consideration next time. I also learnt about different ways to carry out such a task when watching other groups performing.

One new thing to me was a Socrative online survey programme. I think that using it would be interesting to students, and thus I could use it in my future teaching work.

We also had an online presentation given by Dr. Deborah Hill from Utah. She told us that vocational teachers don't often have a pedagogical training in the US. I found it interesting to know how things are in another country and compare that to the situation in Finland.