Claudio M. Rojas

This week I began a new school year in my Institute. As it is usual I came to the school full of energy, with a lot of fresh ideas to put into practice with my students and with a lot of expectations about what this year might bring us. There is no doubt that we are getting into a big challenge this year. We at Centro Educativo Horizonte 2000 have decided that in this new decade are going to make our best effort to become a College, at the same time that we are going to incoporate the use of technology in the classroom even more than in previous years. My goal this year is to become a better teacher, to explore new ways to complement my classes outside the classroom and to help my students to create their own Personal Learning Environments. I know that many of my students do not have enought time to study at home, because they have many responsabilities, but I will do everything I can to help them find new ways to practice and study at home, and many gadgets (cell phones, mp3's, ...

When I decided to enroll in Full Sail's Education Media Design and Technology Master's Program I have one idea in mind: to learn how to incorporate a LMS into my school's site. Eleven months later and several nights of not sleeping well and constant visits to my doctor, this idea is now a reality. For the first time since Centro Educativo Horizonte 2000 was created 11 years ago, we are now capable of offering online courses to our students. I must give a big thanks to my classmate Felissa Leppo who helped me to install Moodle in our server and Joe Bustillos, my teacher for the last three classes at Full Sail, who gave me very good ideas of how to estructure the online courses (thanks God for Udutu). I am really happy with the results and I am very excited to see how is going to be the response of our students in this first trimester of 2010. I would like to invite evrybody to visit our site www.horizonte2000.net and give us some feedback about the things that we can impr...

Choosing a Media Project to do in this class is not an easy task. I have been thinking in many possibilities and I think I finally got what I need to do. Since my thesis is about taking a new approach to Open Education in Costa Rica, and implementing a LMS that students can use to prepare themselves for the test, then I was not clear about what would be a good complement to my paper. After a short conversation with our instructor Joe Bustillos, he gave me a good idea that I am planning to develop. Using Udutu I will create a demo lesson of an English as a Second Language Class. At the end of the lesson I will include a short quiz that the student could take to evaluate their understanding.

I wanted to include the original video of Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror, to complement my posting for Wk2 Discussion Quickies: CD Ownership, Music Sharing or Spontaneous Listening. I would like to share with you the powerful message that this song includes.

Today I will like to share with you a video I found on the TED site about the 8 secrets of success.

Since the beginning of our school life we soon get accustomed to receive grades. As we grow up we begin to be differencitated by the grades we receive, and those grades influence the choices we made about who our friends are, the clothes we wear, the music we listen to, the places we go to, etc. Many accept those numbers or letters as a label and a true representation of who they are, some others do not. But those grades, as many other things in our planet were invented by human beings, and they do not represent how much you know or not about a particular topic, after all there are many factors that can interfere in the grade you receive in a test, a homework, an assingmnet, etc. In the most part of my student life I was labeled as a C+ student, and I was ok with that. I created my own frame and I never tought deeply in the true meaning of that grade and the possibilities that could open for me if I was able to think outside the box. It is for that reason that after reading the page...