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Teach me, tech me, tag me - my love and hate relationship with technology - UPDATED

Virtual insanity - LMS and VLE This section was updated to include the context for my interest in Google for Education products and Google edtech evangelism in Europe More than 10 years ago I was working as an EFL teacher in a secondary school in Bulgaria. Prior to that in my private language school context I had always been interested in incorporating tech in my classes - you could say I was a very innovative educator. Thus, I incorporated Google Classroom (a LMS in its initial stages at that point) in my classes and was responsible for its deployment across the school for teachers wanting to try it out too. It was a state-of-the-art technology at the time, our school being the second one in the country using it only a couple of months after its market launch. Needless to say, little did I know about ethics, student data etc. and I later regretted doing that, feeling I might have done harm more than help. To give you a bit of context - it all started from a Google for Educators confer...
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Quiet Waters Run Deeper - some thoughts on passive and active learning

This week I had an introductory session with Chinese students coming to study at a UK university. One of the lesson aims was to introduce them to the active learning model which is commonly applied in Western educational institutions. We watched a carefully crafted presentation referring to recent research on the benefits and indeed better outcomes of the active learning approach as opposed to the passive learning model.  In the ensuing discussion I gained further insights into students' own learning experiences and idea of passive and active learning. It was interesting to note they considered passive from the point of view of their confidence in expressing their ideas. If they have knowledge of the topic they said they would be more active in participating and if they did not, they would keep silent which is only logical and natural. Personality types were also menteioned which further complicates the dychotomy. They were discussing it from the point of view of the self-awareness...
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