My Personal Learning Diary CLIL EVO 2016EVO

Week 1- BRAINSTORMING

The beginning of a new journey into CLIL

11th January 2016 The beginning of my learning diary for this course by writing in my website aimed at writing about my online experience and CPD I am an Italian teacher of languages and teach German and also English. My name is Tiziana Angiolini and I am a life-long learner.

The recent changes in education have introduced CLIL in most secondary schools in my country. I decided to take part in the EVO section dealing with CLIL as this is a new way for working in schools and I would like to learn more.

The course is divided into five weeks and we have been doing some activities online after we enrolled on the platform http://moodle4teachers.org/. The tutors are Italian and the mentor is Nellie Deutsch, a person I follow online and I know has been working hard on online learning and technology in education.

The platform used for learning is Moodle, this is a LMS that I have used in many courses online and which I have learnt how to use.I finished the course in November 2015 and the tutor of the Moodle Mooc 7 -MM7- was Nellie Deutsch.

The course is currently followed by about 3,000 teachers and most of them are Italian. Here is our self-presentation online:

Created with Padlet

The first week syllabus follows this pattern:

- introduction

- information about " how CLIL" we are

- reading resources online and sharing them

- learning from other people around the world

Just on the first two days, the tenth and the eleventh of January, we could see two interesting presentations online:

Webinar 1 Introduction

Gisella Langé, Ministry of Education, Italy- The presentation was engaging and it dealt with the present situation in Italy and " the state of the art". It was a detailed description of how Italy is changing and how CLIL is part of the syllabus in secondary schools. As a teacher of English I have seen teachers who tried to work on CLIL in the school where I worked for years. They were engaged but they had not achieved the B2 level in English. We worked with some teachers and last year they chose a module for students of the fifth year to be done in English. It was a pity that we did not work together, I only provided the support in terms of links and materials online. In my school we did not even have the help of a mother tongue teacher. One problem was also money as for these activities we had to rely on the money which had been given by the students when they had enrolled for the school year 2014-2015.

What I thought when I saw her presentation was a sort of " positive" approach towards what is happening around me but also a lot of difficulties due to the flact that you cannot learn a language and teach a subject in English well if you have not lived and spent some months abroad.

The final part was a good summary of what CLIL should mean in terms of " team work":

This a great picture of the description which I think should be studied by teachers who want to work on CLIL: we can work together and as a teacher of English we should help the subject teachers. The methodology is new to some and for this reason school directors should invest on the teachers' self-development and organize seminars or other activities that could empower the teachers who are working on CLIL.

The second webinar on 11th January -

- Shelly Terell, Edspeakers

The presentation was a lively and helpful one: these are the slides which she presented. I will go though them to see what other activities we could do in class to introduce, to brainstorm and to try CLIL.

Shelly is an expert and knows a lot about new web tools and how to get our students engaged. It was a nice presentation which I am going to share with you.

Cooking Up Some Creative CLIL Recipes from Shelly Sanchez Terrell

What we have been required to do is to share our learning diary by following this guide:

Briefly introduce yourself.
Introduce your teaching context.
Collect comments, ideas, resources.
Include links, photos, videos, documents.
Don't forget to add any interesting piece of content you come across on the course to your Learning Diary.

I have chosen to use the webpages of my website where I keep the notes and the links of the activities that I have already done online. It is my e-portfolio. I will add the links and what I think I should use in the next year to continue learning and to share with my colleagues.

Online research CLIL

This is my first search result and it is based on the ideas shared in the first webinar. There is a lot online and we can all add new links.

https://www.britishcouncil.org/europe/our-work-in-europe/content-and-language-integrated-learning-clil

http://c3401281.r81.cf0.rackcdn.com/englishagenda-podcast140224.mp3

http://www.onestopenglish.com/clil/what-is-clil/

http://www.onestopenglish.com/clil/clil-teacher-magazine/useful-links/clil-web-links/

http://www.onestopenglish.com/clil/clil-teacher-magazine/useful-links/clil-clips-on-youtube/

http://clil-cd.ecml.at/

For Italian teachers there is the link provided to a complete guide to the approach:

http://www.laricerca.loescher.it/quaderni/i-quaderni-della-ricerca/i-quaderni-della-ricerca-18.html

Interesting videos online shared in the first week to introduce the topic

My resources for my web search are online and I will add more links this week here.

There will be more webinars in the next days so I will be able to get more information. Meanwhile I have downloaded some pdf and I have found websites and blogs with some nice examples of CLIL activities.

My idea about CLIL- my definition

Empowerment

CLIL is empowerment of our knowledge by learning and using a foreign language. It can help us add new content and develop our mind and our way of learning and working.

See this interesting post on a blog

http://blocs.xtec.cat/educationaltechnologyrosamariafelip/tag/clil/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyrE5L4eaQE

Interesting Webinars online where teachers could learn from the experts.

The focus was on Europe and how the Union is trying to implement language learning, technology and clil.

1)EUN, European Schoolnet Consortium. Presentation by Benjamin Hertz

" European Schoolnet - Transforming education in Europe"

Benjamin Hertz manages the European Schoolnet Academy project, the first European MOOC platform dedicated to K12 education professionals.

Should you need more information about this platform just follow the link:

http://www.europeanschoolnetacademy.eu/web/general-navigation/home

This is an interesting platform that works on teachers and how to support them when they work also on new technologies. It started when teachers had problems to have access to development and sharing ideas. Now they are going to continue to build new paths into teaching and learning basing their research on IT and new technologies in teaching. The platform is European and they have different groups of teachers and activities that can inspire teachers in different approaches and ways for teaching.

2) " Clil Competence Building and the European Framework for CLIL Teacher Education"

An interesting presentation with a general overview about what is happening around us. Italy seems to be advanced in comparison with other countries.

To be updated we do need to get in touch with centres which continue develop researches and studies about CLIL: http://clil-cd.ecml.at/

The book for CLIL teachers can be dowloaded from http://www.ecml.at/tabid/277/PublicationID/62/Default.aspx

It is a book about

a macro-framework that identifies the target professional competences for CLIL teachers;

includes the competences necessary to teach content subjects and an additional language in an integrated manner;
proposes professional development modules to help teachers attain these target professional competences.

3) Webinar with Patrick de Boer - a teacher of Mathematics

Patrick has been a teacher of Mathematics at secondary level in The Netherlands since 2007.

Having experienced bilingual education as a student himself, he adopted CLIL methodologies early in his teaching career. In addition to teaching Maths in English he also was a CLIL coach at his school. To stimulate professional discussion and exchange of CLIL ideas in an even wider community, he launched CLIL Magazine, a free, international online magazine, in 2012. More information on this and his other related initiatives can be found at www.clilmedia.com.

It was a surprise for me to see how Patrick can create interesting lessons and get most of the students engaged. What he does with his classes is great. But he can rely on a good level in English: he knows the language well and can manage with the approach of teaching English and Mathematics. He sees the relationship between language and teaching mathematics and is developing his skills . I think it is worth seeing his website and the magazine he has presented. If you are interested you should write to him and ask to receive it. I have already done it!

Week 2 SURFING THE NET

The week started on 18th January and it was about the implementation of CLIL and the exploration of web 2.0 tools.

We have been provided with lots of links, videos and interesting ideas about the best ways for thinking about CLIL in the XXI century. I am not new to the use of technology but I liked the way the teachers ran the introduction. We live in new learning environments and our students work and study by using modern tools. We had to share ideas about the new tools and see how they could help us.

LINKS TO THE VIDEOS OF WEEKS 1-2

Shelly Terrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hY-81DJsoU

CLIL MEDIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO3-ym0H51U

EUROPEAN SCHOOLNET

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTRV0A6DkGI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh0K-8xYjWw

ELIZABETH EVANS on CLIL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkgwzbbOO9c

WHEN CALL MEETS CLIL

CLIL CARMEN MARY COONAN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9lRbqrqf6A

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