Wednesday, November 27, 2013

We have now finished the first part of our studies and I look back on that with mixed feelings. Most of those eminate from the fact that I have had to do this simultaneously with work which has made team work and attending virtual classrooms during the working day quite a challenge. However, I feel like I have learned a lot and I have gotten to be a part of a wonderful group connecting over Skype, Adobe Connect and email.

What I have brought back from our lessons and meetings is a positive approach toward teaching AND learning with constantly developing methods. The world is in perpetual change, therefor the tools that we use need to follow suite.

I have been teaching Theory of Knowledge in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program while doing my teacher studies and hence have  been able to bring ideas and tasks from those to my own classroom at school. The one thing that has turned out to be a wonderful tool for reflective thought as well as critical thinking (the essence of the TOK course) has been the Pecha Kucha assignment. I had my students start the course off with their own Pecha Kucha presentations in which they reflected on their own learning and I have to say that I learned more about them during those than I have during an entire year. They were truly insightful and wonderful.