La buena maestra
Nota: Pendiente de Traducir. ¡Anímese a traducir esta página!. ( y otras páginas pendientes)
Esta historia es una traducción de la historia "The good teacher" de Art Ladder que esta en [[1]] Vamos a intentar traducirla entera!!! LA BUENA MAESTRA
Había una vez una Buena Maestra. Sus alumnos y sus colegas reconocían que era una Buena Maestra. Humilde como era, sin embargo, también ella sentía que era una Buena Maestra, y estaba orgullosa de serlo.
Aun así, como sucede a todos los buenos maestros, ella quería ser una maestra todavía mejor.
Hablaba con sus colegas y ellos le daban muchos consejos útiles (si bien ella sospechaba que algunos de ellos le tomaban un poco el pelo).
Hablaba con sus alumnos, y sus reflexiones con frecuencia eran muy interesantes y estimulaban su pensamiento.
Fue a ver a su director, y él le dio algún buen consejo (sin duda, lo hizo).
Leía revistas y libros, se unió a una ListServ, visitó páginas web, se apuntó a cursos, asistió a talleres y conferencias y, en suma, buscaba el conocimiento dondequiera que pudiera encontrarlo. Estaba realmente motivada.
Poco a poco, comenzó a ensayar nuevas estrategias y técnicas en su clase. Por ejemplo:
- Comenzó a considerar la teoría de las inteligencias múltiples en la planificación de sus lecciones.
- Empezó a usar el aprendizaje cooperativo en su clase.
- Integró el aprendizaje basado en proyectos en sus métodos instruccionales.
- Hasta comenzó a usar un proyector LCD.
Algunas veces se sentía abrumada. De hecho, estaba exhausta. No todo funcionaba como ella pretendía. Pero perseveraba, porque quería que sus alumnos aprendieran lo más posible.
Aun así, sentía que faltaba algo. Quería hacer con sus alumnos cosas que nunca había sido capaz de hacer antes. Cosas que fueran divertidas, cosas excitantes, cosas que los alumnos realmente disfrutaran haciéndolas. Es más, cosas que hicieran que sus alumnos QUISIERAN aprender.
Pero no sabría decir qué cosas serían esas.
Un día, leyó un artículo en el periódico local acerca de Mr. Dougis, un maestro que estaba haciendo grandes cosas en Internet con sus alumnos. Parecía excitante, y se preguntó si no sería eso lo que andaba buscando.
Conocía la escuela donde Mr. Dougis trabajaba, y le dejó un mensaje telefónico. ¿Tendría objeción en quedar un día para charlar?
Al día siguiente, recibió una respuesta. Podrían quedar un jueves para ver de qué se trataba. Pero tenía que ser un jueves.
Fue al director y le explicó que necesitaba un sustituto para el próximo jueves. Le dijo la razón y él le concedió con mucho gusto un día para dedicarlo a la investigación. Lo hizo.
Fue a ver a Mr. Dougis. Él la saludó con una sonrisa amistosa.
"Bienvenida", dijo, y sonrió. "Es estupendo que haya venido hoy. Los jueves, moodleamos."
La Buena Maestra miró a su alrededor. Había unos veinticinco estudiantes sentados delante de sus ordenadores. Parecían tener unos trece años. La mayoría no se apercibieron de su presencia. Estaban enfrascados en lo que estaban haciendo.
"¿En qué están trabajando", preguntó.
"Bueno", dijo Mr. Dougis, "en un par de cosas. Algunos trabajan juntos para crear un glosario de términos que se usan en los artículos sobre sucesos correientes que leemos cada semana."
"¿Y saben cómo hacerlo?", preguntó ella. Pensaba que crear un glosario en línea debía de ser un poco complicado a esa edad.
"Claro", dijo Mr. Dougis. "No es tan difícil hacer eso en Moodle."
"Ah, sí, Moodle", dijo ella, "Leí algo sobre Moodle en el artículo del periódico. ¿De qué se trata?"
"Es el software que usamos en nuestra clase virtual", contestó él mientras la conducía hasta un monitor.
"Mire cómo los estudiantes están simplemente rellenando un formulario para crear entradas en el glosario", dijo. "Eso es Moodle."
No parecía que los alumnos tuvieran ningún problema.
"Y otros alumnos," dijo él, "mantienen un debate en línea sobre la forma en que se lleva a cabo la guerra contra el terrorismo. Se está convirtiendo en una discusión ciertamente acalorada", dijo riéndose entre dientes.
"¿De qué modo tienen un debate en línea?", preguntó ella.
"Están usando un foro de discusión en el que todos hablan, e incluso califican las respuestas de los demás de acuerdo a unos criterios que hemos desarrollado juntos," contestó él.
¿Y pueden hacer eso siendo tan jóvenes?" preguntó ella.
"Some are still learning about how to deal with constructive criticism and how not to take everything that is posted personally," he relpied. "But we are getting there. With a little guidance and encouragement..."
"No, I mean the technology," she interrupted.
"Of course!" replied Mr. Dougis. "In Moodle, forums are easy to use."
And throughout the day, that is how it went. Moodle this and Moodle that. The Pretty Good Teacher had to admit that even the younger students seemed to be proficient Moodlers. And almost all the students seemed engaged and interested in their work.
She was impressed, but wondered if all were really as it seemed.
During Mr. Dougis' break, they talked over a cup of coffee.
"Tell me more about Moodle," she said.
"Well," he began, "I use Moodle to compliment and enhance my classroom instruction. I might, for example, just upload a Power Point presentation to the site for my students to review or post links to a good web site. Or we might do something more social, more collaborative, as you have seen today."
"So, Moodle helps you do some things differently?" she asked.
"Not just different," he emphatically corrected, "better."
"How so?" She really wanted to know.
"Let's say," said Mr. Dougis, "that we are discussing the effects of global warming. I can send my students to the library to do traditional research and we can discuss what they find out in class. And I can have the students make posters to display what they have learned. We can break into groups create lists of top ten easy ways to fight global warming. And we can have a debate in class about th effects of global warming, too."
"That sounds fine," said the Pretty Good Teacher. "What is wrong with that?"
"There is nothing wrong with that," replied Mr. Dougis, "but we can, for example, also go to Moodle and create a survey about global warming to administer to students here at our school and to students at our online partner schools in Canada and South Africa in order to see to what extent we all agree on the issue. We can design the survey together, invite our partners to take it, and have a discussion with them about where we see eye to eye and where we don't. And that is potentially a rich, valuable educational experience that we could not have without Moodle, don't you agree?"
The Pretty Good Teacher did agree. She wanted this Moodle thing for her students.
Mr. Dougis showed her how to go to any one of several sites and set up a Moodle classroom. That weekend, the Pretty Good Teacher started learning the basics of Moodle.
By the next Friday, she and her students were in the school computer lab. She showed them how to use a discussion forum and urged the students to discuss the novel they were currently reading.
Some students had a good bit to say about it. Others had very little to say. Some comments were insightful. Others were quite foolish.
The Pretty Good Teacher was disappointed. Was Moodle not really all Mr. Dougis had claimed?
A few days later, she tried again. She set up a chat room and told the students to chat about anything, but to pretend they were characters from the novel. A few students did a really good job, but many students did not seem to take the assignment seriously. And the chat room became very confusing when everyone spoke at the same time. Frankly, the lesson was a flop.
Some of her students must have been talking about Moodle in a less than complimentary way, because the Pretty Good Teacher had to endure some snide comments about it in the staff room. Some of her so-called colleagues actually seemed happy to see her struggle a little. It was incomprehensible to her, but it was undeniable. And she didn't like looking foolish.
Now the Pretty Good Teacher was quite sure that Moodle was not as wonderful as Mr. Dougis seemed to think it was. Annoyed, she sent him an email, telling him so.
She received a quick reply. "You sound upset," wrote Mr. Dougis.
The Pretty Good Teacher returned, "I am upset. I am not so sure that Moodle is right for my students."
An exchange of emails ensued.
"Maybe," he responded. "But let me ask you this: Did your students do what you asked them to do?"
"What do you mean?" asked the Pretty Good Teacher.
"Well, when you asked them to discuss the novel in the forum, did they do that?" he asked.
"Yes, I suppose most of them did," she replied.
"And when you asked them to chat about the novel," he continued, "did they do that?"
"The majority of them did," she answered."
"So, why are you unhappy?" asked Mr. Dougis.
It was a good question.
"Well," she wrote, "the students did not seem very excited about the lessons and I am not sure that they learned much, either."
"Does that ever happen in your traditional classroom?" asked Mr. Dougis.
Now she was offended. "Almost never," came her indignant response.
"Why not?" asked Mr. Dougis.
She thought about that. Normally, her lessons had something like a beginning, a middle and an end. They were well thought out and the students understood just what she expected of them. So that is what she wrote in her response to Mr. Dougis' question.
"Can you honestly say the same of your two Moodle lessons?" he wrote back.
She knew he was right. She had expected Moodle to work some sort of magic on her students, but she had not really designed the kind of good, effective lessons she normally planned.
"What would you advise your students to do in a situatiuon like this?" asked Mr. Dougis.
She decided to give Moodle another chance.
This time, she asked herself, "What do I want my students to learn?" And she wrote down her objectives.
Then she asked herself, "What resources will we need to make the lesson work?" and she collected and organized her resources.
Finally, she asked herself, "What is it I want my students to actually do in order to be successful?" And she designed her activities.
The Pretty Good Teacher wanted her students to recognize and identify the importance of conflict in the novel.
She located a couple of good online resources to give students the information they needed to do this and she posted her own notes to help them better understand what they found on the web sites.
In addition, she wanted them to create a web page for each major conflict in the novel, describing the conflict and suggesting several possible ways the conflict could be resolved. Then she set up a wiki where her students could do this.
Before going to the lab, she discussed the lesson with her students and showed them how to work in a wiki. She used her cool, new LCD projector for that.
She posted clear instructions about the lesson to the web site, reinforcing what she had said in class.
The next day, they went to the lab.
The Pretty Good Teacher was gratified to see how much better the lesson went. While a few of the students did have a little trouble the first few minutes getting used to the wiki, most of them actually caught on very quickly, and it was a pleasure to see how they helped each other get up and running.
After about forty-five minutes, almost all students had contributed to the wiki. Some of their web pages were surpisingly good.
As the Pretty Good Teacher circulated around the lab, she encouraged the students and complimented their work. Of course, she also had to remind a couple of students that playing card games on the computer was not part of the lesson.
While she could not say that the lesson was perfect, the Pretty Good Teacher was pleased. The students had not only learned a lot, they seemed to enjoy doing so.
That evening, she went back to the wiki to reread some of the pages. She was surprised to see that some students had continued to work on their pages from home. They had added graphics and links and some shocking, but enthusiastic, text formatting. She had not assigned this as homework, they just wanted to do it.
And the Pretty Good Teacher smiled a little.
When class met the next day, several of the students were quite excited about Moodle. One said, "When my father asked me what we had done in school, I showed him the wiki. He thought it was great!" It was obvious that she was proud of the work she and her classmates had done.
The Pretty Good Teacher was feeling pretty good.
"Can we go back to the lab today?" one student asked.
"No," she replied, "not today, but we can go back next week. Do you all want to do that?"
When they said yes, she was not very surprised.
"In the meantime," she suggested, "maybe we should think of a name for our online classroom."
They thought of several good posibilities and decided to vote to pick the best one. The Pretty Good Teacher said, "We do not have to vote right now. I will post a choice to our new web site and you can take a few days to decide."
Almost everyone agreed that this was a sensible idea. But a couple of students looked unhappy about it.
"What's wrong?" the Pretty Good Teacher asked one of them as the class was leaving.
"We don't have the Internet at my house, so I can't vote," said the student.
The Pretty Good Teacher hadn't thought of that. But she had an Internet connection in her classroom. And there were quite a few online computers in the school's media center.
"Why don't you stop be here right after school and use our computer when you want to Moodle?" she suggested. "Or I can write you a pass to the media center during class one day when we have a few extra minutes."
The student smiled. "Thanks! I'll stop by after school", she said and headed to her next class.
When she returned at the end of the day, she had a friend with her. "You're not in my class," teased the Pretty Good Teacher. "I know," said the friend, "but it sounds like fun."
And the Pretty Good Teacher was pretty happy.
And so it went. Over time, Moodle came to be an important part of the class. Soon, the Pretty Good Teacher was posting lesson plans to Moodle. Not very exciting, but the parents seemed to appreciate it. After a while, she began setting up little practice quizzes to help students prepare for tests. Together with another class, the students collaborated on articles for the school newspaper. They submitted rough drafts of papers for peer review and discussed class matters online. Some students even used the chat room for occasional online study sessions. And once they discovered instant messaging and blogs, things really got crazy.
After a few months, Moodling became second nature to them. It felt natural. It was fun.
And other teachers at the school began to Moodle. Sometimes, they met with their wireless laptops at a local cafe for "Moodle and Coffee" sessions. The teachers began to look forward to spending this time together.
One day, the Pretty Good Teacher ran into Mr. Dougis at the grocery store. She told him how well things were going. And she thanked him for Moodle.
"Glad to share," he said, and smiled.
"Know what I like best?" she said. "It is cool that we can do a weekly podcast for our new partner class in Australia! My students love that podcasting module!"
"So there's a podcasting mod? I didn't know that," said her Moodle mentor.
"Really, well, we should set up a forum where we can share on a regular basis," she replied, secretly thrilled at this unexpected role-reversal.
"Yes, that's a great idea. Let's do that," answered Mr. Dougis, who was clearly pleased.. "You know, it sounds like you have become a Very Good Teacher."
And he was right. She had, indeed, become a Very Good Teacher.
