About learning...

“Learning as one goes along, looking at the centuries” is my life motto.

Alright, it’s not really mine, but I borrowed and made it mine a long time ago, and I firmly believe that Dositej Obradović, the rector of the Great School in Belgrade and the first minister of education (popečitelj was a title of ministers in the rebel Serbian government after the First Serbian Uprising against the Turks) would not take it against me.

The digital age has brought many benefits to all those who want to study regardless of place and time, regardless of age, occupation or any other determinants.

A man learns while he lives is a saying by our people.

Learning has long stopped being a privilege of the rich. It is a constant need of every individual who lives and works today no matter where they are in the world. It also became important because of the rapid development of engineering and technology at the beginning of the 21st century.   

Education

Thanks to education, we are able to understand, more or less, the things that surround us, to explain different phenomena and events, to express our interests, to develop our potential and to show our capabilities.

Education offers us not only knowledge from different sciences and fields, but also the opportunity to gain experience in whatever it is that interests us. Through education we acquire and develop certain skills that help us to perform various tasks, explore, do business, and organize the world, helping it become a better place to live for all of us.

Education is the most powerful weapon which can be used to change the world. Nelson Mandela

Serbia too has many NGO’s, associations and centers that offer programs for a population of age when being in school is not a popular choice in Serbia. But this, too, is changing. Even here, more and more opportunities are being provided for those who have long or not so long ago graduated from school, and want to continue their education. It's still insufficient and fairly reserved, but every beginning is difficult.

The majority of these trainings are still aimed at the unemployed and the pensioners. Media often informs us that some pensioners passed a training in order to raise their level of digital literacy and digital competencies, or that the National Employment Service has organized training for the unemployed in order for them to gain basic knowledge in digital literacy.

Whether formal or informal, education is an integral part of life for every one of us. These days, our professional life often involves various forms of non-formal education so that employees can acquire new skills or improve existing ones.

My reflection in the mirror

Where am I in all this?

Where are middle-aged people?

I am not unemployed and I am neither young nor a pensioner.

What does that mean?! Am I worth less? Or do I not have a desire to learn and find out something new?

Can you believe this? I don’t!

And it is not just me, either.

There is a lot of us… usually people between the ages of 40 and 60, who are still actively working.

Did the digital age arrive only for pensioners and the unemployed?

These are all reasons why I find the Internet so valuable, as it allows me to find things that I'm interested in, which would otherwise, for a million reasons, not be available to me. Maybe I will not get a certificate because I do not always have the money to pay for it, but this does not stop me from learning, expanding my horizons and improving my skills, digital ones most of all. But there are those who find the language barrier insurmountable, and those whose digital skills are underdeveloped or modest. They certainly require support and help. I do not miss a chance to raise my digital competencies day by day and to keep them in shape. I follow, read, write, and sometimes I surprise even myself with how much willpower I have, and how much I can do. Tirelessly, insatiably curious!

New Technologies and Me

Five years ago, the eTwinning platform was unknown in Serbia. I heard about it by accident while searching for web tools that I could use in my teaching practice. I saw the outputs of student work within the eTwinning project on the official website of one school in Croatia. Upon seeing it, I immediately thought that this is good stuff, and wanted to try it for myself. While looking at the conditions for joining this large network of teachers and students throughout Europe, a "cold shower" followed, because Serbia was not yet a part of that big family, and therefore, as a teacher working in Serbia, I could not become a fully-fledged user of the possibilities offered by the platform. However, this did not stop me from continuing to explore Web 2.0 tools that students can use to collaborate with each other.

Why should ICT be used in teaching?

It enhances interactivity, the content is easily changeable which enables revision and customization, it facilitates learning and resource management, it allows for better collaboration and communication between teachers and students and/or between the students themselves. It provides a diversity in teaching and learning as well as the ability to more easily monitor each student's progress while also making formative and sumative assessment easier.

In this way, greater social, informational, visual, functional, IT, media and digital literacy of both students and teachers is achieved. The use of ICT has several key advantages:

• All that was once inaccessible becomes accessible and can help the students to master the material better and more easily
• It allows the students and teachers to connect with those of other schools
• It enables the exchange of ideas, knowledge and allows for collaborative work in real time
• It enables connection between experts of different profiles
• The work of students and teachers can be available to a large number of people and serve as a resource for learning, reviewing, and so on.

eTwinning stimulates learning by the teachers themselves, as well

New teaching tools require learning how to apply them and how to use their capabilities in the best possible way.

As an eTwinning ambassador, I had the opportunity to work with educators, lecturers and school teachers all over Serbia and share my experiences with using Web 2.0 tools. Teachers show interest in the application of new technologies in the teaching process, but they need additional support in terms of how to use a particular tool, and are always eager to see practical examples from the classroom.

Web 2.0 tools are always a hot topic because 21st century teachers have students in the classroom who grow up surrounded by new technologies. These students expect challenges in the learning process that will involve them being networked so that they can exchange, share, create, modify their ideas, knowledge, learn, and discover the world around them. The eTwinning platform provides teachers with the opportunity to enhance their skills, such as: critical thinking, problem solving, analysis,  information interpretation and synthesis, creativity, innovativeness, communication skills, collaboration, information and media literacy, flexibility, initiative, productivity, and finally social skills, through different forms of professional development and cooperation on projects with colleagues from other schools.

The development of primarily digital skills is a real challenge for those born in the second half of the 20th century, who only got access to a computer at the beginning of the 21st century, and access to the Internet, in most cases, only a decade ago. And that's the average teacher in Serbia. Students expect him or her to be contemporary and familiar with new technology and their application because the teacher should be someone who will motivate, encourage curiosity among students, develop critical thinking and broaden the students' horizons. The development of technologies inevitably already brings big changes, not only in our lives, but also in the economy, the labor market and education. In the modern society, skills of critical thinking and problem solving are necessary, in order to lead to innovative ideas that will be developed and implemented in a collaborative environment for the common good.

Learning tools

I like to search for new tools that I will happily share with my colleagues or students in order to make it easier for them to work and learn. This is how I discovered many OERs (Open Educational Resources) and Web 2.0 tools such as:

1. TitanPad (now defunct) used to enable real-time collaboration so that students could jointly write an article, list of tasks, or provide their comments and/or answers to specific questions. In addition, you could import/export documents of different formats.

2. LearningApps.org is a Web 2.0 app that supports the learning and teaching process through the help of small interactive modules (linking, pairing, comparison...). There are no individually structured blocks, but you can independently create or exchange them with colleagues from a rich database, and then adapt them to your own needs and embed them in a teaching scenario.

3. Padlet is an online tool made for collaboration. The tool is used as "blank canvas", i.e. an online wall where you can add your ideas, reviews, notifications, information, upload images and documents, and also enable other participants to provide all of the above. It is characterized by its ease of use, availability on different devices, customization to the needs of users and ability to be used for various purposes.

4. Thinglink allows for the creation of interactive posters where text, video and audio can be added, or links to other websites tracked.

5. Kahoot is a tool for creating quizzes, discussions and questionnaires that can easily be used in a classroom either as an introductory activity or for checking the learned material, evaluating some activities, etc.

6. Storyjumper is another interesting online Web 2.0 tool that can stimulate the creativity of your students because they can add their illustrations together by editing and writing songs/stories and thus creating e-books that you can reuse as a resource in the classroom or supplement with new content.

7. Animoto is a simple tool for making video clips from images or for making shorter videos without having to learn complicated software.

What’s next?

If we encourage students to use these tools, we can provide them with some new ways to learn, acquaint them with different learning styles, enable them to present what they have learned, promote cooperation and development of collaborative relationships, share, create a learning resource base and build a community that continually learns and expands their own knowledge.

It is precisely short, specific trainings that can teach the teachers the skills they lack and thus improve their digital skills. To me, when thinking about it in my spare time, it is inconceivable that a person in the 21st century does not have an e-mail address and does not know how to use it. Still, reality begs to differ, as I was a witness and a volunteer who trained a lady, just a year older than me, to open an email address at a free e-mail service so she can use the email address to be registered as an e-diary portal user.

There is nothing more important than education, as it is our stake for the future. Whether it is formal or informal, sometimes doesn't even matter. What matters is that it is of a high quality, that it is usable and useful, that it improves the quality of life, broadens the horizons and provides satisfaction to the learner. It is necessary for  education to maintain the spark of youthful curiosity in you, in order to have a motive to continue learning and educating yourself.

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

Jim Rohn