WEEK 6- MY REFLECTIONS

First at all I want to share this quote with you:

“What we learn with pleasure we never forget”. Alfred Mercie

During this week I have  learned  important things to improve my teaching and they are:

Firstly I read about Interactive Classes, regardless of the subject matter and the age group of the student, interactive teaching tends to work best. In today's technology driven and information based world, most interactive learning is done via computers. This can take many formats, such as:

- PowerPoint presentations
- Video presentations
- Webinars and web conferencing
- Audio
- Games

Secondly and the most challenging was how to make an Interactive Power Point to be used in my classes in order to avoiding my students to get bored and in this way to improve their learning.

Now I am ready to start a new week!!!

Sylvia.

WEEK 5- MY REFLECTIONS

Another busy week that ends!!!!

I want to start sharing with you this quote:

“You don't need fancy highbrow traditions or money to really learn. You just need people with the desire to better themselves” .- Adam Cooper and Bill Collage 2006

During this week I learned interesting things about how to improve my teaching and obviously my students learning using technology!!

The first thing that I did was to create  my Rubric page:

 http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?screen=ShowRubric&module=Rubistar&rubric_id=2072292&

Rubrics are beneficial to students and teachers, provide a fair and objective way to assess student work,  measure student progress and encourage active learning among students.

WE CAN USE RUBRICS to grade projects and assignments that require subjective evaluation. Teachers create rubrics by first identifying evaluation criteria that demonstrate student proficiency in the learning objectives the assignment is trying to reinforce.

The evaluation criteria included on a rubric can help students identify learning goals and teacher expectations. Rubrics encourage active learning among students, who can monitor their progress by evaluating their work taking in consideration the rubrics.

THE WEB-QUEST is another technological resource in motivating students’  learning, this means it is a classroom-based lesson in which most or all of the information that students explore and evaluate comes from the World Wide Web. Beyond that, Web-Quests:

 

• usually (though not always) involve group work, with division of labor among students who take on specific roles or perspectives;
• are built around resources that are preselected by the teacher. Students spend their time USING information, not LOOKING for it.

Creating a Web-Quest was very demanding and I want to share with you mine:

http://zunal.com/process.php?w=108928

A PROJECT BASED LEARNING method is a comprehensive approach to instruction. Our students participate in projects and practice an interdisciplinary array of their skills. They learn from these experiences and take them into account and apply them to their lives in the real world. PBL is a different teaching technique that promotes and practices new learning habits. The students have to think in original ways to come up with the solutions to these real world problems. It helps with their creative thinking skills by showing that there are many ways to solve a problem.

Project-based work involves careful planning and flexibility on the part of the teacher. Because of the dynamic nature of this type of learning, not all problems can be anticipated. Moreover, sometimes a project will move forward in a different direction than originally planned.

Using PBL in teaching English is very important, it gets students active in their learning process, we as teachers put them in a path that deep in their knowledge and their skills learning in the future, allowing them to use not only their critical thinking skills  when they work as a team, but also it gives them the opportunity to make questions, do researches, collaborate, give each other feedback in order to get their project ready.

Sylvia.

WEEK 4 - REFLECTIONS

At the beginning of this week I thought I could not complete the assigned tasks because someone very important in my life passed away on Monday, but here I am sharing with you what I learned during this week.

READING/WRITING SKILL-BUILDING:

After reading the article written by Jarek  Krajka, I can say that one of the benefits is the wide range of materials available for different topics which can be used as teaching aids, with them students can learn how to write different writing genres, useful vocabulary and key structures and some additional activities for speaking: a letter to a friend; formal letter; a biography; a description of a person; an argumentative essay(both For and Against); notices and advertisements; a description of a festival or ceremony; a description of review of a book, film or play; a newspaper; a personal opinion essay and a description of a place, all of them with useful vocabulary and key structures and some additional activities for speaking.

She also mentions about The Internet for English Teaching: Guidelines for Teachers", that gives some tips about how to use Internet in the classrooms successfully:

-          Teachers do not have to choose at random on-line activities in the classroom, it means that teachers need to spend time searching for different websites suitable for their students.

-          Set the course goals.

-          Teachers must prepare the syllabus in advance.

-          Teachers need to be conscious about the difficulties of the on-line learning environment, it means when they use the internet inside and outside classrooms.

-          Teachers always have to monitor students’ tasks in order to provide help or feedback when they need.

C     CREATE A TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED LESSON PLAN

So how do you go about planning for a class? Begin by deciding what content you want to cover and what your objectives are for the lesson - this will depend a lot on your class's level and it might depend on an ESL textbook that the Institution has provided for you or that you have brought yourself. Ideally, these objectives will include both new vocabulary and new grammatical forms. Then think about what activities you want to use to accomplish these goals and the most important how you can use technology to improve and motivate your students’ learning. These may include a short introduction to the class, a warm-up activity to get everyone involved, group work on dialogues, or written exercises, and a short conclusion reviewing what was learned and pointing out common mistakes.

Finally, you should always have a "contingency plan" to fill up any space that might exist at the end of the class. These plans may consist of an additional game/activity, or of an exercise that will help students to build bridges in their minds between structures and vocabulary learned in different lessons and that learned that day and as  I said before do not forget to include technology!!!

To get information about go to  University of Tennessee. There you can find lots of information.

Sylvia

Skill-building Websites for Oral/Aural Skills

CALL technologies:

Can support experiential learning and practice in a variety of modes, provide effective feedback to learners, enable pair and group work, promote exploratory and global learning, enhance student achievement, provide access to authentic materials, facilitate greater interaction, individualize instruction, allow independence from a single source of information, and motivate learners.

PROS:  CALL provides teachers an endless choice of multimedia, software, applications and devices with which to create more exciting, interactive lessons. The traditional lecture-based lesson, while effective to a point, does not stimulate every type of learner. By adding a dimension to their lessons, teachers have the opportunity to engage more students and lead a more involved, energetic class.

CONS: With this increased access to knowledge also comes a probable loss of communication skills and interactive abilities between students and teacher, and students to peers. These skills are not as necessary in a classroom of computers, where individuality is a component of learning and is encouraged. Aside from learning, conflict resolution and socialization used to be two prominent reasons children came to school. The emphasis now has shifted away from these areas.

After reading Linda Miller’s article I completely agree with her when she says that for many teachers listening is not the main aim in the English language teaching classroom, in some Institutions here in my Country we have this problem,  I think it is because teachers sometimes  consider that it is not necessary to develop this skill and they are centered only in fulfilling the text so they devote most of the time only teaching  grammar, writing and communication, another important factor is that teachers do not have the required technology to teach in listening  in the classrooms.

For those teachers interested in teaching listening Miller gives some good and helpful strategies to follow in this process.

I recommend this website: http://www.esl-lab.com/elem/elemrd1.htm in this site we can find material to increase students listening such as: Pre- listening exercises; Listening exercises; Grammar; Post-listening exercise; Quizzes not only for beginners, but also for pre-intermediate students.

http://esl.about.com/od/beginningreadingskills/a/d_intro1.htm  This is another good option to improve communication specially if you are teaching English for beginners, intermediates or advanced students; here you can find exercises related to grammar, vocabulary, listening, speaking, writing.

But if you want to teach using games this site is excellent: http://www.esl-galaxy.com/forum/index.html

Try them!!!! I am sure that they will help you in the  teaching process.

Sylvia 

WEEK 3

DELICIOUS PAGE:

The first task that I did during this week was to create my own Delicious page, at the beginning it was kind of difficult, I had some problems because I could not open in Firefox it was impossible so I had to do it with Internet Explorer.

WHAT IS DELICIOUS?

"Delicious is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others."

"When you find a web page you'd like to add to your list, you simply select the delicious bookmark let, and you'll be prompted for information about the page. You can add descriptive terms to group similar links together, modify the title of the page, and add extended notes for yourself or for others. You can access your list of links from any web browser."

What do I think of Delicious?

Well, it is very helpful if I want to save my favorite links online and share them with people that have my same interests that is teaching, oh !! just one more thing, using Delicious from now on  it will be much easier to find out my favorite pages.