Yesterday, the blue-haired-girl came back from Tunja. She was invited to be keynote speaker at the Colombian History Conference (Congreso Colombiano de Historia). She presented the Bicentennial project and had awesome responses. The saddest of all: your project is awesome, wonderful, amazing... pitty it comes from the (this) government. Sigh.
The Ministry launched the Bicentennial project the blue-haired girl has been working on for a while now. She is in charge of the whole gigantic project and has done an awsome job so far. Thursday there was a 1 hour TV show about the project on almost every channel. All thanks to her! The project is amazing. I love it. How could I not when it started with a few drawings on my living room window and now the woman I love is leading it!
Terminó la primera semana de trabajo de los profesores en el colegio, no con pocos pocos problemas de parte de mi Departamento... los sistemas no estuvieron listos a tiempo para la planeación (y aún no lo están) y todavía hay muchas cosas pendientes.
A short while ago I listened to a Ted Talk called "Five dangerous things you should let your children do." It was fun. Today I read a post on Open Education on the same topic and got thinking about that again. I watched the Talk again.
Gever Tulley, who runs a summer school where fourth graders play with power tools and "come back pretty bloody and scraped" suggests children should learn to manage dangerous and unsafe things by actually getting to experience them. How else do you learn, someone could say?
Here's his list:
I do agree that doing these dangerous things helped learn my limits and how to cope with some level of danger. I don't break easily and feel I'm still quite tough even though I never exercise. All this helped me grow up.
I sometimes feel children are nowadays way too overprotected by their parents and supervising adults. I don't have kids... but it seems I'm not the only one who thinks that. Writing about an English organization that promotes play in children (including "dangerous" play), Open education says:
PlayEngland’s focus this year has been on one of the most traditional of child behavior’s, climbing a tree. The group found that half of children aged 7-12 years reported they were not allowed to climb a tree without adult supervision while the other half reported they had been stopped from climbing trees because it was considered to be too dangerous.
I remember being in the third or fourth grade and having lots of fun climbing a tree behind the art classrom. Me and my friends (I don't remember who were my friends back then) had about a month of fun before Alice de Cuervo, the primary school director found out we were up there and made us climb down. Years later, when I was a teacher back in the same school, the tree had been felled. I missed it. It was a beatuful evergreen with sort of a roof top where we used play when we climbed. I also used to climb lots of trees around my parent's house with my neighborhood friends. It was also great fun and nobody ever told me to climb down. When I went to the park with my mom she even helped me climb trees that were to high for me to reach on my own. Wasn't she awesome?
Just a snippet of the post in Spanish below...
Esta semana empezó como una carrera. Así suelen ser las primeras semanas en los colegios. En dos días he corrido como hacía tiempo no lo hacía (literalmente, corrido de un lado para otro). Profesores nuevos necesitan que sus usuarios para la Intranet y el correo electrónico funcionen y algunos de ellos son bastante novatos en el uso de computadores. Además, hemos tenido algunos problemas preparando los sistemas que deben usar para la planeación anual y esto ha complicado las agendas.
One of the strategies I am putting together as part of the schools ed. tech. plan, is to have a few people blog. I am sure this will improve communication with parents and students, and withing the staff. The bloggers will initially be the principal, vice-principals and academic director. Aweome people to accept doing this in the first place. I will, of course, also keep a blog in the school website.
Bienvenidos al nuevo sitio. Me tomó un tiempo organizar todo para que funcionara con la nueva plataforma, pero parace que todo está listo. De pronto hay errorcillos... me cuentan. No migré los usarios, así que si estaban registrado en alguno de los blogs anteriores y quieren registrarse en este (para comentar, por ejemplo), deben hacerlo de nuevo. Siento la molestia, yo también detesto crear nuevos usuarios en todo lado.
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The Technology, Innovation, and Education Program (TIE) prepares students to contribute to the thoughtful design, implementation, and assessment of educational media and technology initiatives. Graduates of the program fill leadership positions in a wide range of fields, including design and production, policy development and analysis, technology integration and administration, research and evaluation, and teaching with new technologies.
With two locations in Bogotá and eight affiliate institutions throughout Colombia, the Colombo is a cultural foundation and research institute affirming intercultural exchange and understanding. We hope to help every visitor engage in experiences which invite them to reflect on their own culture and to explore the world without.
From the year 2000, until 2002 I was group director and English teacher in the seventh grade. I taught 20-24 hours of class every week, and as group director was in charge of counseling groups of 30-35, communicating with their parents, and mediating in their relations with other teachers and students. I used computer technology to facilitate daily tasks such as record and grade-keeping and also explored some of the educational implications of using the Internet. I guided my 13-year-old students in the use of information technology, and developed a website that concentrated materials relevant for the course.
My work included correcting Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and matching it with originals, proofreading authors' final drafts, suggeting stylistic changes, and ghostwriting. I worked independently from home and communicated mostly via telephone and e-mail. My worked entailed responsability for meeting demanding deadlines with no supervision.
As an independent consultant, I was part of a two-man team that prepared a grant proposal for an initiative of the "Secretaría Distrital de Educación" called "Nivelación para la Excelencia", a project that has been recognized by international organizations such as PREAL (Partnership for Education Revitalization in the Americas)as a model in helping raise the academic level of schools with the lowest test results in the city . We were awarded the grant and prepared two more proposals for grants from international foundations for projects related to basic literacy and bringing over-age students up to level.
As a freelance editor, I worked under a senior in-house editor in the preparation of books for different collections. My work included proofreading authors' final drafts and suggeting stylistic changes, revising the graphic designer's work, and correcting publishing drafts. I worked independently from home and communicated with the team mostly via telephone and e-mail. My worked entailed responsability for meeting demanding deadlines with no supervision.
ABC English Insitute is committed to teaching English as a foreign language in Bogotá, Colombia. The Institute offers general English classes, exam preparation courses, and consultancies for schools and other educational institutions. ABC's clients are professionals and university students who need to learn English to advance in their careers, and educational institutions seeking training for their teachers in both pedagogy and English language skills.
"The Concord Consortium is a nonprofit educational research and development organization based in Concord, Massachusetts. We create interactive materials that exploit the power of information technologies. Our primary goal in all our work is digital equity — improving learning opportunities for all students." (Concord Consortium website)
The Ministry of National Education's is the Executive Office that oversees education in Colombia. It's mission is to guarantee the right to education with criteria of equity, quality and efficiency that educates responsible citizens capable of constructive a happy, equitable society that is competely solidary and proud of itself. Between 2005 and 2007 I worked in different positions. My last position was Use and Appropriation of New Technologies Cordinator in the Media and Technology in Education Program. I designing and coordinating strategies to foster classroom use of media and computer technologies to improve teaching and learning in k-12 education.
You will find links to the work I am currnetly doing at Gimnasio La Montaña and a few samples of my previous work: A presentation at Ministry of Education, some of the work I did as a teacher in the early naughts, and samples of things I worked on while studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For a broader sense of my thinking, visit my blogs by clicking on "Vitacora" and "Edgeek" in the top navigation bar, which, I am sorry to say, don't get updated too frequently.
If you wish to contact me, please check the contact section on the top.
Excepto donde se diga lo contrario, el contenido de este sitio tiene una licencia Creative Commons, atribución, no comercial, compartir igual.
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed with Creative Commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike.