2/14/13

Introduction to ETMOOC

This is a quick post to introduce myself and to kick things off with ETMOOC.  I might make a quick intro video to go with this but the simple bits are here.

I am not sure if this is too late but I hope it is not.

My reasons for asking to join in were that I wanted to get involved in this course as a teacher to learn better how to develop and extend my own tech skills and also to try to get a better understanding of some of the ways that teaching is changing in different areas of practice. At the back of my mind I am bringing with me to this some questions about working as a teacher principally as that is my background.

The short version is that I am a teacher / researcher in education. The longer version is that I specifically look at education in development (working in poorer countries). I am also interested in social entrepreneurship too, but that is not quite the topic as I understand it here. My interests in technology tend to span across these three areas and often seem to bunch up around the same issues about change and innovation in each area (or teacher development and training ). In fact I am a bit out of practice with the classroom since I have been studying policy stuff for the last year at uni for my MA.  My subject area is English and ESL (secondary) which I previously taught in Australia in Perth. I had a lovely job working with refugees and limited schooling kids there.

From my understanding a lot of the course will involve talking about what technology can bring and do for education and educators and what that means for them. I am hoping to listen in to some discussions on how we can build new models and ways of learning and teaching. I am totally down for the pedagogical stuff. But I also hope to maybe hear a few things also from the perspective of some tech entrepreneurs who are out there too maybe, on how engaging with teachers and educators more widely makes them think about their work.

At the moment I am doing some work on mapping Open Education Resources around the world. If you want to see a link to this then it is here:

http://www.virtualschoolsandcolleges.info/ 

I am also interested in the work that the Mozilla Foundation is doing on creating a generation of Webmakers and trying to learn about some of the awesome ideas that are coming out of this about web-literacy, open badges and building a better world wide web. I have written a summary post on my blog about this if you are interested too.

So with this pretty long winded sort of introduction, I hope to try to use this experience to reflect practically a bit on my experiences. These are a few of the questions that I would be more than happy to explore if people want to do that too along the way.

1 comment:

  1. Welcome to Etmooc, where there is no such thing as a long winded post. Thanks for sharing all the links!

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