Monday 19th

Today was Election Day in Canada, it was a Pedagogical Day too, therefore there were no classes. We, the Spanish group, had a workshop, "Digital Resources Across the Curriculum" with Sam Bruzzese. Most of us wished it had lasted longer; we really enjoyed it and thought it was both fun and useful. 

Mr. Bruzzese believes in using technology to engage students at school; he also believes cell phones will be the technology of the future for education but he soon learnt that we are way behind for that in Spain. Here is why: he wanted to show us the use of a webpage, Poll Everywhere, which is based on texting, so he asked us to text him to start the activity going and we explained to him that texting is not free in Spain and that is the reason why most people use whatsapp. (In fact, when we arrived here, we were surprised to notice that most people send text messages, so that is why.) He went over the webpage with us but we coould not actually use it...

Next he asked us to take out our tablets - he had some devices for those of us who did not have one - and we did quizzes to learn how to use Socrative to create, give answers and assess multiple choice, true/false, graded short answers or open-response questions.

The third app we learnt about was Adobe Voice, with its own microphone, to produce short and simple videos and slide show style presentations.

As I mentioned before, most of us would have enjoyed staying there longer, but that was it. So off we all went and, since there was no school today, we decided to go downtown. We even knew where we wanted to go to and what we wanted to see but...

This is a video of one of Sam Bruzzese´s students - a class assignment in an undergraduate course, Integrationg Educational Technology in Classrooms. It was filmed at McGill University, a campus we are all familiar with, although not in snowy weather

We started at Jean-Talon Market, a farmer´s market in the Little Italy district. To our disappointment, many of the stalls were closed. We liked what we saw, though, because the products were nicely displayed and we were surprised by many of them, for instance,  the variety of pumpkins and squash (click here to know the difference between them)

As usual, everything was written in French... we had a few jokes about this: we are all afraid  we will greet our students saying, "Bon jour!", when we go back to our classes  ...

When we left the market, we meant to walk south St. Laurent Boulevard. but .... we headed the opposite direction, north... It took a while before we noticed it - we were so engaged in our conversations - and we ended up bordering Jarry Park a couple of times.... We had a few (many laughs) with this... 

We decided to get the subway (streets are several kilometres long in Montreal) and, when we asked a couple of kids from a school nearby where to get it (the metro, as they say), we noticed that these students wore no uniform but the prevailing colour was black.

We eventually found the subway, got off at Victoria Square to visit a part of the underground city of Montreal at the World Trade Center. We walked along the Ruelle des Fortifications, bordered by offices and some pricey stores, but a relaxing place with a black marble fountain and a piece of the Berlin Wall - donated to the city of Montreal by the city of Berlin to commemorate Berlin´s 350th anniversary. We took the last picture at the `Circulations´mural

And that was the end of our day...

Lunes: día de recogida de basura orgánica, compost, y restos de limpieza del jardín - siempre en bolsas de papel

Temperature in Montreal: 4ºC / -4ºC. It was really cold today, the cars were frosted over when we left home, and there were freezing cold gusts of wind during the day.