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