The Power of Videos

Cool video on the power of youtube videos, education and learning with peers:

Dossier of good practices

Dear all!

During the last project period we need to produce a dossier of good practices (and challenges) of using social media in adult education. Since there was a lot of interest Filipe's presentation of wikis in the last meeting, we decided to establish an IEOL wiki for that purpose.

In a few days Filipe will send everyone an invitation to join the project's wiki. He has also promised to make a YouTube tutorial to teach everyone to use it. The idea is that everyone would join the wiki and explore it a little before our meeting in Adria, and we could then work on the structure of the wiki for the purpose of gathering good practices.

Explaining Social Media through ice creams

An interesting video on the possibilities of social media:

Results of the meeting of Leiria (20th November 2010)

The attainment of the objectives of the learning Partnership is made nearer. Particularly we have appreciated in the report of the Finnish group the combined use of google docs with wordpress.
Concerning the constructivist approach presented by the Portuguese we’d like to underline the following aspect: to evaluate what and how an adult learns through the decoding of cognitive maps employed by the examined representative sample.
Particularly the tool employed to discover the cognitive maps has aroused a lot of interest. According to us, in a future project, an experimentation could already be initialized directed to fight the racism and the xenophobia in the adult world that is a priority of LLP underlined in these last years.
Through the care of the language we can change and get clean our concepts, too.
The Spanish and Polish groups finally have showed that through the blog and a good structuring of the adult learners’ groups it is possible to get shortly time good results.

By Italian group

Results of the meeting (Leiria 20th -24th October 2010)

Comments

During the meeting the coordinator suggested concrete activities, useful suggestions to carry out the project and to achieve the project objectives; each planned topic has been debated. The future activities and the respective objectives have been clear and feasible and all the partners will carry out the agreed activities.

It was interesting the reflection about the “constructivism”, as a good educational method to help the students to build their knowledge. In our opinion the constructivism teaching methodology is effective in the field of adults teaching and, at the same time, a winning approach for the on line learning.

One of the most important aspects of the meeting was the participation of the Spanish and Finnish learners. They had the great occasion to visit a modern institute, to discover a nice country and to meet people from different countries, to have the opportunity to practice their English.

During the meeting, we have learnt important information about Wikispaces thanks to Philipe.

Our main objectives for the next part of the project

We believe that for increasing the on line communication we should

• assist our students to improve their English knowledge;
• look for all the activities which are useful to stimulate our students to familiarize with tools of social media in order to interact on line with learners from the countries of the partnership.

This way we will give them the possibility to exchange actively information and experiences with the adult learners from other countries.

By Italian group

Portuguese team homework

Dear partners,

We have come to an original way of presenting our homework by using some cool functionalities of YouTube videos. Did you know that YouTube videos can be interactive? That is, a video can be defined to have "clicable" areas on its screen that link the video's visitor to other videos?
We have done a small experiment and propose you a game: how well do you know Portugal?
Please go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NdT1ivdREg, see the video and play, by interacting with it!

The world of social media

We had an interesting lecture here at Valkeakoski Adult Education Centre last Friday. Planning coordinator Satu Nurmela from the University of Turku gave an overview of what social media is and what some of its pedagogical applications might be.

The world is changing and the gap between the world of a teenager and the world of a senior citizen has never been wider. Eight out of the Top 10 websites in Finland are social media sites. You can check the situation in your country at http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries. This illustrates the impact of interactive media on our lives.

Also, check out this link:

http://informationarchitects.jp/start/

It is a website portraying a "subway map" of active links that shows what kind of interactive web content there is. Have a pleasant journey!