WEEK 10, An encouraging ending!!!

Dear Teachers,

Time goes fast, don’t you think so? I remember my first post on NICENET, my first task, and now this astonishing course is just about to finish! It is incredible how much I learned in such a short time. Everything was so interesting, helpful and practical, but what I like the most were the TASKS as I could create technological tools by myself. I never thought I could do it. They were particularly significant because by using them I can change my teaching process. Another thing I really liked was when we met some other people who are making the difference in teaching, for example the editor in chief of FORUM, and the creator of ANVILL.

On the other hand, readings helped me a lot because at the same time I was reading for doing the posts I could enhanced my reading skill. For all the knowledge I acquired during these 10 weeks I want to thank my coordinator Msc. Wilma Zurita from Central University-Ecuador for letting me be part of this online course, our tutor Donna who was always there for helping us and particularly for helping me in facing some issues I got along the course, and you, for sharing your teaching experience. As I said before you all are great teachers, and I think you are making the difference in your classes, taking this course shows it, that is why I want to share this video with you. I hope you enjoy it.

This is my final message to all of you: NEVER GIVE UP!

WEEK 9

Enjoy this video!!

This week has been fruitful. On one hand, because writing my project report let me share what I have learnt in this amazing course and how I applied the new knowledge with my students.

On the other hand, discussing about the multiple intelligences and learning styles has made me think what I am doing to address each of my students’ learning styles? As I have been saying it can be hardworking, but important to be developed during a lesson, because using the right strategy at the  right time can help our students learn the language better and help to make them more independent and autonomous.

According to Gardner's division I am visual-kinesthetic learner, more visual actually, so I need to see and do for learning. Let me share with you an new knowledge with my students. experience. When I was studying to get my university degree I discovered that is my strongest learning style because I could clearly remember what I had written.

And according to Felder’ article I may say I am a global learner. I need to know the results and then I go for the details.

Do YOU know which your  learning style is?

Katty

Week 8!!

There is always something new to learn. This week has been spectacular just like the others. Knowing about all the useful tools ANVILL offers has been heartwarming because I know we as teachers have lots of resources to work with for changing the way we used to teach. The most I like about ANVILL is the idea of recording voices, so we can give feedback and students love the idea.

But the best thing about this week was the creation of my own NICENET class. As I said in my other post THAT was something that caught my attention from the very beginning. I wondered how I could create mine! And this week gave this big opportunity. It was quite easy to create it.  Nevertheless I got some troubles when my students started using it because for the explanation I used my laptop computer only, so some of them misunderstood some information, but now everybody is doing a great job. I am really happy to use it for my classes.

These are my little kids who I will develop my project with. They are clever and lovely students, and very disciplined, that is why I chose them for working on the project. I really like working with them. I love this group of children.

I think reading others reports let us get new ideas. I read Ale’s one and it is fantastic, because she wants her students be better in their speaking skill and in their cultural knowledge. Great Job Ale!

After reading and applying all the new expertise we have leant in this course made me feel I won’t ever be the same teacher I was 8 weeks ago.

We are in the week 8 and we begin the countdown for the completion of this practical and enriching course. Two weeks left, and I am looking forward to starting the new week learning. Here I go week 9!!

Week 7!!!

Incredibly we are about to finish the week 7, time passes so quickly, don’t you think so? and along with it new knowledge to improve our teaching process!

In one hand, I liked this week a lot because it focused an issue that is related to my reality: “One Computer Classroom” The tips described have given me a great hand to do my job better with technology. Being honest sometimes I feel the necessity to work with computers to everyone, mainly when I want my students to practice something, to do exercises and as I said before, there are some students who can get bored as they are not participating. For solving this “problem” I will pay a lot of attention to the tip which suggest the creation of a database to organize students’ participation, so all students participate. The lesson plan I created was based on the topic I am just teaching next week. I hope this works well!

On the other hand I think education is being transformed, and we need students who are responsible of their own learning. When in the “Autonomous Learning” discussion I mentioned that we need to create necessities in our students I meant that when a person is learning something it depends on his/her INTEREST, NEEDS and MOTIVATION. Besides it is also important to enhance autonomous learning as students know how they learn better I mean they know their learning styles even if they don’t know the exactly name for them.

Along with Ale we decided to work together in our projects as we have similar ideas to put into practice with our students. I am willing to read your draft dear Ale! And my best wishes for all of you with your partners, you all are great!

Katty

Begin to Implement a Technology-Related Change!

As I have been telling you I work with both: children and young adults. When I wrote about my concerns, I wrote for both and I have been working in the development of a project for my two groups. I will describe what have been doing in each one.

For my kids: Since I said I want my children be better in the reading skill I started with this page: http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/songs/the-way. I chose this page because I am teaching them the simple present for daily activities. The first day we did the exercise that it has, we listened to the song many times, watched the video and mimed the actions, this activity was nice for them and great in terms it addressed all learning styles as I said I would try to do it in my classes.

Auditory: Listening to the song

Visual: Looking at the video and lyrics

Kinesthetic: Miming the actions

Another day, I made photocopies of the song and gave everyone, I asked them to bring their pencil case to the lab, because while listening to the song we were reading and underlining the specific sentences related to “Daily Activities” to recognize the simple present structure. I have to say that we don’t have an English lab with computers for everyone, we just have a big screen and an over-head projector, so we were working together. I am working with the resources the institution has. As a “Project Based Learning” I asked them to bring a puppet or any toy and tell me what their puppets do every day. They will start their presentations tomorrow.

Before describing the project I am running with my university students I have to that the university I work in is public and doesn’t have neither English lab nor computer with an overhead projector, for the other class where I used the “authentic materials “ for telling the time I had to asked another teacher to lend me use his.

As I said, I just started a project with those students; they are 38 young adults students with a mid-low economic level. (I am mentioning this because only the half of them has internet connection at home). They are a new group. We started classes on Monday 2^nd. Last week on Monday 9^th I started discussing about technology, what they think and know about that topic and the importance of technology in education. At the end they got the conclusion that nowadays, it is a necessity. On Tuesday 10^th I asked them to search about what blogs in education are, so the next day on Wednesday 11^th our talk was about it, they saw how educational and useful they are. I asked them if they would like to have one and they all agree in creating one for our classes! So by groups using my computer and my internet connection I explained them how to do it. I asked them to create one following the steps and post their first message about their personal information, because that is the first unit related to. In the next weeks I will tell them the other task they have to do. I gave them Wednesday and Thursday to do the task. On Friday 13^th I could saw some blogs as some students got trouble in creating and I told them to try again during this weekend. You can see some of my students’ blogs here: http://gabitasalazarm.blogspot.com/ ;  http://alejandraperezm.blogspot.com/

This is what I have been doing to improve the teaching-learning process in my classes using the technology and what I have learnt so far in this amazing course.

Katty

Thanks Week 6 for the new learning!

Have you ever been to any lecture like this where slides just move on, and their functions are to let the speaker read and get the audience asleep or bored? I have been to many!

But now that I have learnt how to create interactive presentations, I know that the idea is not reading, the idea is letting the audience interact with us. The documents we read gave us some useful ideas for working better on it, for example the blank slide technique, the pauses, so forth. To tell you the truth, creating my interactive presentation took me some time, but it opened my mind because now I understand that we don’t need to be a computer specialist to create interactive presentations. Anyone can do it, what is needed is the desire to make the difference in class!

On the other hand, teaching large classes is a real challenge, it has been difficult for me, for example I would like to listen to everyone’ dialogues practice, but if I do it the two hours finish, and we need to move on the topics. What I do is to be sure I listen to everybody at least once, and then I start the other round. One useful technique to face this reality that many teachers face is working in groups as it makes large classes more manageable.

I was talking to my coordinator at the university yesterday and she made a great point when she said that traditional teachers speak a lot “teacher-centered classes”, when the best is “student-centered classes, One quote she loves and I do too is “Less Teaching, More Learning”. Isn’t that the idea?

Katty



Week 5 ! Just the Middle of This Amazing Course!

It is really impressing the things we are learning in this course, starting with PBL, I have to say that such alternative assessment is just practical, we need to think in other ways for assessing and for giving the students to practice what they are learning, to use real language and to do what they want to!

There are also the WebQuest which are good in terms it develops students’ community and responsibility for doing the assigned task, focusing on their motivation as a need for leatning.

Finally, creating a rubric was helpful, it let me think what I want from my students and in their cases what to do exactly, I will use my rubric as I said in my post in four weeks while we are finishing the level I started last Monday.

Let's change education, let'give our students the opportunity to work on something different!

Let's try something new and fresh!

A productive week 4!

I have always thought reading is very important in the way it involves many good things to be worked. It gives the students the opportunity to be connected to a real language. It let students increase their vocabulary and be familiar with structures. What do I mean with “be familiar with structures”? Let me tell you! When I was preparing for taking the FCE exam, my tutor used to say: “when you are not sure about any structure, write it as it sounds to you”. She meant that sometimes we cannot not even know why the words have to be in such order but we “think” is like that, it happens because in any time we have read that structure before and it sounds to us, this is the magic of reading. Searching different pages I found very helpful the one where you can read and the same time listen to the reading! And the information is up-dated! Why I am saying that? You know that the Royal Wedding was just past yesterday, that page has already an exercise related to that, even Laye did the task using that page! Good!

I also looked for an exercise to help my students feel more confidence in writing words, and I did my ABCD objective using a page where students practice their spelling by playing. I found that page really fun and useful.

On the other hand, planning a lesson with technology let me know there are a huge number of activities to be developed with the use of it. I wrote my lesson plan related to a structure I have to teach in the first level at the university, it is “There is /There are”. I found GOOGLE MAPS very useful for practicing it, that page has nice pictures of different places and I saw some beautiful ones of my country, students are familiar with those pictures, so they can write sentences of our real context.

Finally writing about the concerns I get in my jobs makes me focus in what I will do for solving them. What worries me is that a big number of students don’t read! I think reading has to become part of us and our students.  In my opinion just practicing over and over again it might have the category of habit. Another relevant problem I face don’t have environments where they can practice their English, they just TRY to do it in class, but is it enough? I don’t guess so! Do you?

Katty

!What an amazing week 3!

¡Another week full of learning!

Discussing about aural/oral skills, gave me the oportunity to know how I can work on listening and skpeaking skills. Starting with listening, it was surprinsing to know that the 40% of our time we spend on listening, and this skill can be worked exactly the same as we do with reading, it means with a pre, while, and post listening. For developing this skill in our students we can use lots of materials, but the one I found just practical was " authentic materials", with this students are listening to real language which is good as they are familiar with native speakers.

On the other hand, using CALL (Computer-Assisted language Learning)is a great idea as computers are now part of teachers and students' lives, they give students the big oportunity to get feedback without affecting their sensitivity and they can learn by their own pace. At the same time we cannot forget that human element is necessary in the learning process.

Going to "DELICIOUS", I can say that using it will help me search information easier and quicklier, and the idea of sharing with other teachers is much better, so we can "steal" websites from them. I was talking to my collegues about this handy tool and I even suggested that they should create their own ones. They liked the idea a lot! One thing I have notice since I started this course,is that the knowledge I am acquiring is not only helping me be better in my teaching process, but also I am sharing this expertise with people around me. It's rewarding!

Finally reading some other people's report about their final project, helped me in order to have a much clearer idea on how I can address mine! The one that I chose was based on the multiples inteligences, the author wanted to reach every student's style and do a better job for EVERYBODY!  I think it is a magnific idea as all our students need to benefif from our teaching process.

This week was just extraordinary!

Waiting for the next one!!!

Katty

Just for fun!

Sometimes it's necessary to take a break and relax! let's do it! But...is it possible to forget what we are learning? I couldn't, enjoy it!

Living a Great Experience!

         !A week full of learning!                                       

This, as the other week have been just great! Personally I've learnt a lot! What about you?

Starting this week with the wide world of search engines made me think I was living in old times. It's incredible the number of them we have online. I put this nice picture because of my litle pupils. I am fascinated about the things I could find on internet, the idea is just to give it a try, and I thank all the ones who helped me with new and handy searches for my children! I am willing to work on that with them! You know, they learn more by playing, by listening to songs, by watching videos than learning grammar rules!

On the other hand, there are many searches engines which help us in different teaching things such as iSeek, and Scholar Google which are useful for more academic information.

Another significant thing about this week was to set objectives using the ABCD model. At the beginning it was a bit confusing for me, mainly the "Degree", but after reading the others' objectives, it was much clearer and finally I could set one with less difficulty. It is good because now I can use that madel in my classes, and actually the two I post were set for coming lessons.

Going to the project, first step, it let me continue thinking about the incredible things we will be doing. As I said in one of my post, I liked the idea of using blogs with my university students. I gave it a try ,and today I saw my students' blogs, there aren't perfectly done!, however I was really really happy. It was a rewarding job!. I felt I did something new, and interesting for them, so in their soon future despite I won't see them again, they can continue using their blogs! Here's one of my student's URL for you to check, her name's Alexandra (first level English student) http://alexa-moon-scarlet.blogspot.com/

Lastly, I want you to look at the picture on the right and comment on it! Isn't it a magic finger?

Best regards

Katty

A Charming Week Using Technology!!

Week 1 Blogging

The importance of blogging as a useful tool in education