The eTwinning Experience: Beyond the Classroom

The purpose of this paper is to give a presentation of the programme eTwinning, the use of CLIL methodology in eTwinning projects, give a glimpse of a successful project carried out by secondary students and present the future ahead regarding Higher Education. eTwinning offers the suitable environment to use the English language in a “real” context; it can be integrated in any subject due to its cross-curricular nature. In short, it prepares the student for the real world: international research, to get to know other cultures, to communicate and to learn content. I will start by giving a general view of what eTwinning is about. The second part will deal will eTwinning and CLIL. How CLIL methodology fits perfectly in the carrying out of eTwinning projects. In the third part, and drawn from personal experience, a project will be shown: “Addressing the Energy Crunch; Every Little Action Helps” as a good example of how to integrate content-learning in a collaborative project between different schools in Europe. The last part will deal with the future of eTwinning and Higher Education, within the new programme just approved by the European Parliament: Erasmus+ (2014-20).

The FaceUOC Project : An Open Social Learning experience by the Open University of Catalonia

The possibilities and expansion of the use of Web 2.0 has opened up a world of possibilities in online learning. In spite of the integration of these tools in education major changes are required in the educational design of instructional processes.This paper presents an educational experience conducted by the Open University of Catalonia using the social network Facebook for the purpose of testing a learning model that uses a participation and collaboration methodology among users based on the use of open educational resources.- The aim of the experience is to test an Open Social Learning (OSL) model, understood to be a virtual learning environment open to the Internet community, based on the use of open resources and on a methodology focused on the participation and collaboration of users in the construction of knowledge.- The topic chosen for this experience in Facebook was 2.0 Journeys: online tools and resources. The objective of this 5 weeks course was to provide students with resources for managing the various textual, photographic, audiovisual and multimedia materials resulting from a journey.- The most important changes in the design and development of a course based on OSL are the role of the teacher, the role of the student, the type of content and the methodology:- The teacher mixes with the participants, guiding them and offering the benefit of his/her experience and knowledge.- Students learn through their participation and collaboration with a mixed group of users.- The content is open and editable under different types of license that specify the level of accessibility.- The methodology of the course was based on the creation of a learning community able to self-manage its learning process. For this a facilitator was needed and also a central activity was established for people to participate and contribute in the community.- We used an ethnographic methodology and also questionnaires to students in order to acquire results regarding the quality of this type of learning experience.- Some of the data obtained raised questions to consider for future designs of educational situations based on OSL:- Difficulties in breaking the facilitator-centred structure- Change in the time required to adapt to the system and to achieve the objectives- Lack of commitment with free courses- The trend to return to traditional ways of learning- Accreditation- This experience has taught all of us that education can happen any time and in any place but not in any way.

The Transformation of Practical Teaching Focusing on Dialogic Learning

This study investigates the transformation of practical teaching in a Catalan school, connected to the design, implementation and development of project-based learning, and focusing on dialogic learning to investigate its limits and possibilities. Qualitative and design-based research (DBR) methods are applied. These methods are based on empirical educational research with the theory-driven of learning environments. DBR is proposed and applied using practical guidance for the teachers of the school. It can be associated with the current proposals for Embedding Social Sciences and Humanities in the Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges. This position statement defends the social sciences and the humanities as the most fundamental and important ideas to face all societal challenges. The results of this study show that before the training process, teachers apply dialogic learning in specific moments (for example, when they speak about the weekend); however, during the process and after the process, they work systematically with dialogic learning through the PEPT: they start and finish every activity with a individual and group reflection about their own processes, favouring motivation, reasoning and the implication of all the participants. These results prove that progressive transformations of teaching practice benefit cooperative work in class

Blocking and unblocking in a navigation task

Rodrigo, Chamizo, McLaren, & Mackintosh (1997) demonstrated the blocking effect in a navigational task using a swimming pool: rats initially trained to use three landmarks (ABC) to find an invisible platform learned less about a fourth landmark (X) added later than did rats trained from the outset with these four landmarks (ABCX). The aim of the experiment reported here was to demonstrate unblocking using a similar procedure as in the previous work. Three groups of rats were initially trained to find an invisible platfom in the presence of three landmarks: ABC for the Blocking and Unblocking groups and LMN for the Control group. Then, all animals were trained to find the platform in the presence of four landmarks, ABCX. In this second training, unlike animals in the Blocking group to which only a new landmark (X) was added in comparison to the first training, the animals in the Unblocking group also had a change in the platform position. In the Control group, both the four landmarks and the platform position were totally new at the beginning of this second training. As in Rodrigo et al. (1997) a blocking effect was found: rats in the Blocking group learned less with respect to the added landmark (X) than did animals in the Control group. However, rats in the Unblocking group learned about the added landmark (X) as well as did animals in the Control group. The results are interpreted as an unblocking effect due to a change in the platform position between the two phases of training, similarly to what is normal in classical conditioning experiments, in which a change in the conditions of reinforcement between the two training phases of a blocking design produce an attenuation or elimination of this effect. These results are explained within an error-correcting connectionist account of spatial navigation (McLaren, 2002).

El canto coral y las orquestas infantiles, una educación en valores = Choir singing and children’s orchestras, an education in values

This article looks at the musical activity carried out at Palafrugell Music School as a musical education centre over the past forty years. After giving a brief description of the work carried out there by vocal and instrumental groups, the article analyses and offers examples and tangible motives that use activities to show that forming part of a coral or instrumental group helps personal development and promotes the acquisition of habits, alongside musical training and learning. In short, an education in values

Approaching the experiences of young immigrants for the citizenship learning

This thesis seeks to answer the question: how do the participation experiences of young girl immigrant contribute to citizenship learning? Citizenship learning in youth comes from different contexts(family, school, friends and leisure and ambiguous) –where participation experiences take place–, combined with interpersonal relationships and personal dispositions (BiestaLawy& Kelly, 2009). So that, I want to know which are the young girl immigrants’ contextsand relationships and which kind of learning comes from each one. In addition, being young, girl and immigrant, are categories to take into account to understand their learnings.