virtual session 4

It was nice to have the last session on Vocational Pedagogy 1 (VOC1) over. It’s quite stressful to manage to do the work as a group and to find time to do the individual work. I really liked our subject (entrepreneurship in vocational education) and learnt a lot during the preparation. The actual presentation could have given more to the students, though. The message didn’t come out as strongly as we had planned.

Overall we had a good session covering teaching special needs students, how to develop cooperation between working life and vocational schools and lastly, how entrepreneurship is being developed in vocational schools.

I am still not used to presenting subjects virtually. I would like to see the audience and see their expressions. Video image should be used during the presentations, at least to say “hi” so that you can be in visual contact with the others. The microphones should also be on for everybody so that we could have a dialogue. A "yes", "seriously?" or “I have some experience with this..” should be possible. Now there is only designated time for discussions or some interactive exercise set by the presenter. We are rookies, so no problem, but I would like to participate in an ideal virtual session, learn what it’s like so that I could apply it in my own teaching. Yes, we learn well from others and learn by doing, but it is no harm done to see professionals teach online!

The materials for special education and cooperation between schools and working life were excellent. I had a new glance just now, and learnt many things. We will all teach special education students in the future since the main idea is to integrate all students in the class and give special education separately only in the needed subject. Many good tips for the future and we had a good discussion in the end with the group.

I’m VERY interested in the cooperation between working life and schools. I’d like to be a student counselor, and what drives me is to help people find their dream job and push them towards that goal. But that doesn’t mean that I know how it works in practice, yet. There are a lot of players to involve and there are many forms of cooperation to consider. What we teachers need to do is to bring the outside world to the school, or the school to the outside world.

Last but not least of the subjects was entrepreneurship education at school. Entrepreneurship is a wide definition and it can be taught in many ways and it is not only learning business skills! When teaching or learning just about any subject, you come very far with an entrepreneurial mindset. Creativity, innovation, problem solving, critical thinking, taking responsibility in own learning, risk taking, positive attitude towards self-employment and so forth. An entrepreneurial mindset is handy in everyday life too. It kicks you forward.The EU commission final report from November 2009 on Entrepreneurship in vocational education and training is a good starting point for digging into the subject from an EU-perspective.

We wanted to have a quiz at the start of our presentation in order to introduce the subject.  During the search, I found the yrittäjyys mittaristo measurement tool for entrepreneurship education developed by Lappeenranta University of Technology and Kerho keskus ry. We would have used it as a pre-task before session 4, but since the test is only available in Finnish and Swedish, we had to do something else. I however, recommend you to measure your entrepreneurship education skills, tools or potential.  It is easy if you know some Finnish or Swedish, but you may also do it with google translate J It takes about 15 min and you get instant feedback and a score based on your response.       

references:
Measurement tool for entrepreneurship education. Retrieved on 16 December 2012 from http://developmentcentre.lut.fi/english.asp?show=yrittajyyskasvatus