7 things you should know abou PLE

Today I am going to write about the article "7 things you should know about PLE" written by "EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative". The article has given me a more concrete and clear vision about what does it consist of to create a Personal Learning Environment. 

The text presents the following definition of the term "PLE", which in my opinion it's very useful to understand this complex idea: "The term personal learning environment (PLE) describes the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals".

From this definition, I would like to highlight two ideas:

• Learners use PLE to direct their own learning

• PLE describes tools, communities and services

About the first idea, I have reflected upon the fact that, until now, we are used that the teachers are the ones who give us the resources from which we have to select the information that is useful and interesting for us in order to learn. But, with the PLE, it's we ourselves that have to take care of our own learning process and this makes us be more critical with the resources and materials that we are using both for learning and for teaching. In this way, we are also more aware about what do we understand in terms of "quality education", as we are the ones who select the websites, the blogs, and all the other tools that we found appropriate according to this idea about quality education that we have built. As an example, until now I have already chosen some resources that I will include to my PLE and by only choosing these few tools, I have already noticed in which characteristics of a website I put more emphasis.

Otherwise, as it is also said in the text: "the process of self-directed learning requires a degree of self-awareness, and it must be given time to mature." To my mind, it is essential that students have enough time to reflect upon the way we learn and, as a consequence, upon the way we want to teach. By doing this reflection, the ideas integrated in the PLE will be more meaningful and truly useful for us.

On the other hand, as a "negative point" I can see that it could be very difficult to know what is going to be useful for us in the future taking into account that until now, not everybody has got many opportunities to get involved in the real education world (except for the practical trainings). Moreover, the theory studied at university is not always applied as we imagine in the real life and that can make us chose the wrong resources. However, this weak point could be balanced by another idea noted in the text: PLE can always be updated with new resources. Personally, I believe that we never stop learning and that's why we are always adding new ideas and thoughts. For me, it is important that this platform allows this kind of actualizations because then it can be really used during all our career as it will be adapted to the new necessities according to every moment and situation of our lives.

Another idea I liked about the text is that it could be very helpful to direct our own learning process the experience and advices of other people. Sometimes, it is very helpful to listen to the opinion of people around you in order to see the same thing from different perspectives and, it this way, enrich the own learning. That's why I like the idea to include other's feedback in our PLE. It could be written by our university partners, or even by professionals, ...etc.

Moreover, about the second idea of the PLE definition cited previously, I would like to point out that the platforms which offer creating a PLE also include all kind of "tools, communities and services". That is to say that you can find a wide range of resources in the same PLE.

This, despite can be seen as an advantage because it contains a big variety of facilities, in the text there is also mentioned a more "dangerous" part with which I agree. It says: "Despite their ability to quickly learn new online tools and computer applications, many students lack the information fluency necessary to recognize when a writer speaks from authority, for example, or when a nar­rative is opinion". Personally, I think I have pretty good judgment when I have to evaluate if a resource is valid or not. Nevertheless, I also think that it is really difficult to find good tools and resources and having a good criteria to evaluate them. That's because on the Internet you can find whatever you can imagine and more but this lack of "filters" can also be disadvantageous. In my opinion, it would be interesting to do a lesson in order to talk about what do we take into account when we have to chose a "good quality resource" or a "valid" website, ...etc as these terms for me are very subjective and even a bit abstract.

Another idea connected to the one about the wide range of tools and services we can add to our PLE is that, nowadays that in the schools the words "transversality" and "interrelation" are increasing, as it is said in the article, PLE represents a "model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organize." This skill of creating connections that we can improve doing our PLE, can be very useful for us to develop this transversality that we, as children, almost didn't see in the school and that I personally found difficult to achieve but at the same time necessarily to do so because it is totally meaningful for the learning of our future students, especially thinking that, in the real life, the knowledge from the different areas is not divided but instead it is interacting constantly and we should identify and apply them together.

Finally, I believe that, specifically the platform "Symbaloo" can be very appropriate and helpful for doing our PLE. Considering that nowadays one can have access to the information from everywhere and this sometimes causes some difficulties in order to find the adequate information quickly, with our Symbaloo we will be able to access faster and more efficiently to the resources that we would have selected previously as the ones that are useful for us. They will be organized and gathered in the same place and it will be very easy to find the one that we need at every moment because we ourselves will be the creators of our Symbaloo.

Creativity in online resources

This Monday we had a different lesson. It was conducted by Ricard Garcia, a teacher of Barcelona's University in the field of teaching English as a foreign language in the schools. He gave us a very interesting talk called "Creating, the way to learn", which was about how to implement multiple online resources in the classroom but in a creative way.

About this talk I am going to highlight some ideas that I found very necessary to be aware of in our future. Mr. Garcia said that, although nowadays children are "digital natives", they are not professionals using digital medias, but they like using them to play, as a hobby. We have to take advantage of this motivation that they have in front of digital resources and make children use them in a way that they can learn from it, so that they can enrich the uses of technology and see that it is not only funny for playing but also for learning, and that implies learning English too!

Another advantage that he mentioned about digital resources is that they can be learned for most of us pretty quickly and easily. It is very dangerous to use a tool that you don't master in front of a class, so we ourselves have to practise and use this resources before we show them to children, but it is not going to take so much time to be confident with this tools and it could be a very original way to do an English class.

Moreover, Mr. Garcia also stands out the idea of increasing student's self-esteem with this resources. Because of the easy way this resources can be learned and the beautiful aesthetic they have, every student could be able to do a great job by himself and it could be very heart-warming to show to their families and friends the final results of their works in the English class.

Despite of this advantages, teachers also have to be careful of two aspects. The first one is that we have to keep the balance between digital resources and the non-digital ones. Although technology can be very appropriate and enriching in some cases, not everything has to be done with it, sometimes we will also have to keep using "ordinary" materials. We are responsible for recognizing which resource fits better to the goals of every lesson. And also, it is important to be aware that in many cases, before using the digital resource that we have planned, students will have to prepare carefully what are they going to do with the digital app by writing it by hand...etc it will be only when they are ready with this previous preparation that they will be able to use the digital resource. If we don't prepare the activity step by step and we allow children to "play" with the online tool directly from the beginning, it can happen that they get distracted by the app and they don't manage to do a good job.

To finish with this post, once Ricard Garcia ended this interesting introduction, he started showing us a wide range of digital resources that I personally had never seen before. Although I am not going to mention all of them because they were quite a lot, the ones that I liked the most were those which allowed students to create animated stories, digital timelines, digital posters, speaking avatars, youtube videos with questions included, to dub Bollywood film clips or write their own books with beautiful illustrations. These are some examples of the websites and apps that Mr. Garcia showed us and by which we can improve the speaking, reading, writing, ... and more English competences learning in a creative and funny way! I am definitely going to use some of this resources in my English classes.

The importance of little details

This week we have officially started the lessons of the subject "Didàctica de la llengua anglesa". After a short presentation of some of the tasks that we are going to work on during this semester, we started to do some activities that have already given me a first impression of this subject.

To begin with, one of the things I would like to highlight about Monday's lesson is the ease to include other areas in the English subject in a manner that kids not even notice that they are working on them although they actually are. I noticed that point when we were organizing ourselves in groups in order to make an activity. Instead of just letting us deciding the groups without even think about it, our teacher counted how many students we were in the classroom and according to that, she made us calculate how many groups we were going to do and of how many people each one. It was a quick and easy exercise that made us think mathematically in English.

After the short mathematic exercise, in order to divide us, each of us had to say a number out loud and that was going to be our group. In this point, the teacher emphasized on giving clear instructions to the kids in order for them to follow easily what we're doing in the class. In this case, it was important to remember the number said out loud for creating the groups and children has to know that. Moreover, it was also important to check if everybody was understanding what we were doing by asking it and doing the division slowly, for example making raise the hands of each number one by one so that children could see the members of their group easily.

In this point of the class, I had already noticed that we were going to work on this kind of details that will really help us taking a good control of the class and make the students feel confident and comfortable.

Another resource I learned on Monday's lesson was how to make the students pay attention to what's going on in the class. After discussing three questions with our group, we had to put in common the final ideas with the rest of the class and, to ensure that everybody was listening to every group, the teacher told us that if one of the ideas that we had in our group had been said by another group before, we wouldn't need to repeat it. She also pointed out the relevance to check if everybody could hear properly, because in the wrong case, it would be more difficult to pay attention. By sharing the answers to the questions with the hole class I saw new points of view and also common things between us although we don't know each other that much yet.

Furthermore, about Friday's lesson I would like to dwell on the song called "Wind the bobbin up" that our teacher showed us. At the beginning I felt a bit shy playing the choreography of the song, but then we started talking about how we could take profit of this song and it became very interesting. I loved the idea about making children change the lyrics of the song, or the idea that the teacher doesn't sing some key words of the song and kids have to fill in the gaps instead. In my opinion, this kind of activities are very useful in order to break a little bit the routine of the class, especially when students have been doing long and hard exercises and they need to move and disconnect for a moment, although they will keep practising English skills but in a more unawareness way.

To end up this first post of my blog, I would like to explain the last activity we did this week. In little groups, we had to comment on two sentences related to the education field. Our group chose as the most relevant sentence the following one: "They see little purpose in studying sentences that do not make sense in their world, yet they do understand the purposes of language to communicate, identify, persuade or find solutions". We all agreed that as a teachers, we should always provide children a meaningful context of the activities we present to them according to the real and daily situations that they can live. In this way, they will understand much better the purposes of learning a language and they will be more engaged to it.

Finally, until now I can say that I really like the fact that we do the activities for the children as if we were them. In this manner, we experiment the way they can feel in first person, at least for me, the learning is more meaningful.