Lyons,+Florence

toc

**My work during my e-Fellowship:**

 * Link**: []

**My Current Educational and e-Learning Interests:**

 * 2011 has been another very busy year for me.**

This year, I have been given a Year 9 Social Studies class. Although it was quite a hard one for me as I have never told Social Sciences before, I have embraced the challenge and the students and I have been trying to work more on a constructivist approach. We have been using myPortfolio for storing our reflection which occurs at the end of each lesson. Indeed it is essential for every learner to spend some time reflecting in order to know where and how to get there.

The NZAFT (NZ Association of French Teachers) has helped me financially to enroll in an online course about Online Facilitating. This course was well made, easy to follow and the facilitator, Sarah Stewart was incredibly helpful. This was very useful to me as I have been teaching my Year 11 French online, using Adobe Connect Pro once a week. This experience was sometimes very rewarding and sometimes not as a lot of difficulties emerged, especially the lack of independence from the students. In order for the pupils to get more autonom, I have been working on an online course which concentrates mostly around reading and listening French. The course has been created with the idea of any student in NZ being able to pass NCEA Level 1 in French in a more autonomous way.

I have also been involved in a NLC (Network Learning Community) with other language teachers and we have been looking at the implementation of myPortfolio. Watch this space =)

It was with great pleasure that I was also invited to be a member to the VPLD community in which @Joel Dodd has been a member for a quiet while now. Rachel Roberts is my mentor (and life saver) and we meet online on Skype once a month. Thanks to her and to the community I have made giant progress in my teaching and I think that the students's learning has been enhanced tremendously. The other participants in this community have been helpful, reachable and non-judgmental which has enabled me to be a bit more experimental in my teaching practice.


 * Link**:

**Books/people/websites that have influenced my thinking:**
Efellows 2010 Joel Dodd] Puti Puti Gardiner ] Florence Lyons] Margaret May] Nathan Parker] Tara Taylor-Jorgensen]