MariaVlachopoulou

I have been spending time on courses about web tools 2.0, online learning, virtual learning, blended learning, flipped classrooms etc. for about a year now. I have to admit this has been the best thing I have done for my professional development for ages! What I have learnt has open new horizons for me. It has changed my perspective as a teacher no matter how exaggerated this may sound! The way I see it now, the role of the teacher should change or at least adapt to the new conditions.  Times change and we, as educators, should change, too, if we wish to stay close to our students. The place of the teacher among a group of students should change as well. The teacher should act more as a  facilitator, a helping hand in the students' journey of dicovering the knowledge. Let's face it. We are not the only source of knowledge for our students any more, neither we nor our textbooks! Students are bombardised with loads of information everywhere, everyday. So we have to take advan...

What is character? Virtue Ethics in Education University of Birmingham You still have time to join. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/what-is-character

I never really thought I would become an English teacher. I was really good at English at school, yes, but  teaching, no, had never crossed my mind. When I succeeded  in the university exams in the English Department I loved everything about it! I enjoyed my studies,but yet I couldn't imagine myself in front of an "audience" teaching! I thought it would be hard. However, when I finished my studies I got my first job as a teacher. And it was not that hard! In fact, I started enjoying it more and more. But in May I got fired! I got fired from my first job! I couldn't understand what went wrong and I got really depressed. A friend of mine suggested that I forget all about it and try to look for something new. It got me some time to get over it but when I did, I got really organised, prepared a new C.V. and started sending it to schools. I remember sending it to about 15-20 schools. I also did some interviews. There was one school in particular, which made an im...

The Heart of Teaching: What It Means to be a Great Teacher | Edutopia

I read about this challenge on Vicky Loras' blog and it seems to me as the best way to start the year and this blog in general. (2012 has been called 'The year of the MOOC' by the New York Times-3 years later I'd like to believe that  every year from now on will be the year of the MOOC for me) It's already been a year since I started enrolling in MOOCs. What  a year! I consider myself a fervent lifelong learning advocate and when I learned about the existence of MOOCs ( M assive O pen O nline C ourses) the word became immediately synonym to "Open Sesame"for me . It opened the door to a whole new world of learning that I knew nothing of. My first course about online and blended learning also came as a surprise to me! I had no idea people learned this way. (Please , don't get me wrong!I love my job and I used to get informed about everything new but during the past ten years I have been a full time mummy to 3 children and I had to slow down with ...