VOC II

My VOC II Experience

About VOC II in general

We have now completed another section of our Vocational Pedacogical Studies, VOC II.
VOC II studies consist of five themes: 1) internationality and multiculturalism, 2) entrepreneurship, 3) working life oriented approach 4) sustainable development and 5) special education.  In this section these themes were studied first in small groups and we were asked to use different pedagogical solutions learned in VOC I studies to present our findings to other students. In practice this meant that the groups with different themes learned first themselves the content of their own theme. After this we created an innovative learning environment with different kinds of tasks and pedagogical tools. Then other students were studing our theme in the created learning environment and finally we were assessing other students´ learning tasks.

There was also peer evaluation of the learning environments and an individual assignment analyzing our own experience about this kind of teaching and learning activities.


Some Comments About My Learning Experience

I found this kind of learning in many ways very interesting and inspiring. As we started VOC II course with our first virtual session I was very happy to hear about this kind of way of learning where we could combine i.e. group work, virtual learning environments and different pedagogical tools. I think we were very effective as we get the process started already during the first virtual meeting. We created small groups and chose the topics that we would like to teach. We also started to think about the possible learning environment. Next time when we met together we presented our learning environments and next day everybody was able to start to research the given topics in different learning environments.

The most important thing for me was that in this way students had to think about some new ways of teaching virtually. It was very useful that we should also create this virtual learning environment in practise covering the whole learning process. Only creating something yourself and getting some feedback how your creation is working in real learning situation, you can get the most relevant experience how some environments and tools are working out.

It was very interesting to see how in many different ways different groups were creating the new learning environments. Even if many groups were using blogs as learning platform the content and the methods were very different. In many learning environments it was not so clear what kind of pedagogical tools they have chosen and why. I would have been happy to read more about this kind of background information. In this way I could have learned more also about different tools and it would have been possible to evaluate how those tools are working in real learning situations. In many learning environments there was lot of  interesting material available but the tasks didn´t activate students to use them so much. Some of the tasks could have had also more connections to our future teacher work and own special field. Finally I was very happy to test some new learning methdos I have not used before. I.e. making and publishing the video and  analyzing a piece of art were very interesting tasks.


About Our Own Group Work

This time we had very effective and inspiring cooperation in our group. We were three enthusiastic ladies which were themselves very interested in this topic. We all had experience both from working life and school and that´s why it was very interesting to compare different experiences and try to share these to other students as well. We found it also interesting to think about different pedagogical tools and we put special effort in finding the best solutions for our learning environment. We recognized quite soon that  it´s not very easy to use many traditional teaching methods directly in virtual environment but we adjusted some of the tools and I think that we got them work out quite well.

We thought also that it is very important to be clear with the structure and the content of the learning environment as the students are doing these kinds of activites independently. It is also useful that you give the students the possibility to learn more if they want and offer them some extra material and sources. These were important aspects in our own group work. We also wanted to make our blog to cover the whole course with our instructions, tasks, material but especially we wanted to collect the tasks of the students to be seen by all students at the same time. I think this was a good idea and we got people also to comment each other´s postings in this way. This made our learning environment more communicative, interactive and hopefully relevant compared to many other learning environments where you just found the links to the tasks students have done.


Have a Look at Different Learning Environments

Please find the links to different learning environments and also to my comments and answers to different learning tasks below:

1. Global and Multicultural Activities                  Activity 1 , Activity 2 , Activity 3
2. Entrepreneurship in Vocational Education      Entrepreneurship in Vocational Education
3. Working-life Orientation                                Learning Environment of our group
4. Sustainable Development                             Sustainable Development in Vocational Education
5. Special Needs Education                             Letter to Daddy -71, My Summary Video


My Individual Study Assignment About VOC II 

Here you can find my final reflections about the whole course. I have written some comments and feedback for different learning environments and also reflected how useful they could be for my future work as teacher. You can also find there deeper reflection about our own learning environment, Working-life Oriented Learning.

Individual Study Assignment