Teaching Smarter, Happier Me

My new favorite hobby is studying: attending classes, watching video classes, and researching. I don't like homework at all, although I agree that doing it is how you really learn.

But it also makes me very happy to teach, even though I am not a teacher, I love being involved in learning facilitation processes and it is something outside of my work that takes me to another space of balance.

One of the last courses I took was one called Teaching 4.0, which was offered for free by the Telefónica Foundation through another foundation called Mochila de Sueños.

At first, I thought it was a course that would take one to three days, but it turned out to be a week-long course, or more. The teacher is a 27-year-old genius, a very prepared young man with extraordinary abilities. My classmates are teachers eager to grow and evolve in their skills, demonstrating that technology can be very friendly and suitable for offering a nutritious learning experience.

The modality of this course has been hybrid; the first session was virtual, then we had an in-person session, followed by two virtual work sessions, and there are still several in-person days to go. I was motivated to take this course because I have been wanting to study a teaching component for a while and haven't been able to, but I urgently need to because I am increasingly teaching in the three diplomas in which I participate as a facilitator.

I didn't imagine that productivity tools would be so important in this course, and I was motivated to see how they can be configured for teachers, and yes! It is wonderful and totally applicable for planning educational processes that all productivity tools are of great value.

So far, we have worked with Tick tick, Milanote, and Miró, the latter being the one we have spent the most time experimenting with, including live practices. Although for many teachers it was very complicated to work with this collaborative digital whiteboard, for most, the objective was achieved. It is incredible how exciting it was to develop great work among all the online participants.

Before entering these practices, many hours were dedicated to teachers learning about artificial intelligence so that they could make the most of these generative models to obtain more resources in their research and get ideas and strategies.

It made me very sad that some teachers were still only concerned with asking if there was any tool to detect artificial intelligence in the work they planned to assign to their students. Of course, there are already tools for that, but beyond that, the reason it made me sad is because even with everything we are learning, those particular people do not change their way of thinking about how to evaluate what they teach. And although they are being given a significant amount of resources, they still think about traditional evaluations.

A very important part of the entire training program had to do with ideation strategies, critical thinking, lateral thinking, the correct development of Brainstorming, Design Thinking, prioritization strategies, osmotic communication, and a number of liberating structures to unlock creative intelligence.

I hope my fellow teachers enjoyed this course as much as I did and that the days we have left to finish also come loaded with more information, resources, and empowering and disruptive tools. The most beautiful thing of all is that in the midst of humanity's crisis, there are teachers with a vocation, eager to teach and do so by breaking paradigms, wanting to be innovative in education to thus make their students fall in love with learning.