This past week, during IDEAL video tutorial shoot, we had the opportunity to spend a day with Anna Uttaro, a technology teacher. Attending her classrooms for adult immigrants has been a very interesting experience.
Students were very collaborative and responsive throughout the lesson. They seemed to have a very good relationship with Anna, and the atmosphere was good even if some students were worried about the videos and they did not want to be filmed for personal reasons.
The day has been an important opportunity to understand how social tools can be used in classroom in order to support adults’ learning process. Anna, in fact, normally uses social tools to increase participants’ motivation and engagement and to create interesting moments that stand out in students’ memories latching on to the issues that they are studying. She uses different tools, such as EDpuzzle, Edmodo, Kahoot!, Padlet, Book creator and many others, to explore and share new contents, to create fun classroom challenges or to make a quiz. Moreover, when students can’t attend the lesson, they can review materials online uploaded by teacher. This is useful for them and they like very much!
During the first lesson there were a lot of students and Anna used EDpuzzle, a web platform where students can watch videos uploaded by teacher on to deepen an issue tackled in classroom or to learn a new issue. During video tutorial shoot each student saw a video on how to prepare a good Italian coffee and they answered some questions about it. Successively, students corrected the answers all together with the support of Anna.
During the second lesson of the day, students used Edmodo tool to review an issue and make a quiz prepared by Anna. In this way, they tested their knowledge and had fun.
In conclusion, it was a very pleasing day at school! We have seen that social tools enhance creativity and collaboration and they can be used to develop a multidimensional learning environment, targeting various learning styles and integrating technology into 21st Century skills.