week 10

WEEK 10 August 26, Final reflexions

“A strategy without tactics is a slower path to victory. Tactics without strategy is a noise before defeat” Sun Tzu

Some people used to say “there is no better time than least” now I can say yes, because during these weeks we has the opportunity to get information to make our classes different, this course has provided us useful opportunities to make important and relevant changes, we can offer our students autonomy, an important thing is to awake the curiosity to research, during these weeks strategies learnt to introduce technology in our process to teach English, have been difficult, but it was a real challenge which could overcome, I hope our student can overcome it too, when we notice that any of them do not have the correct path we should help them to find the right one, as well as Robert did with us.

“There are dreams which seem difficult, and they can be performed with determination”

When we had the first week of training most of us dreamed to finish quickly and now when the time had passed we would like to return, but we should come back to teach our students, while maintaining the same sense of wonder with which we began, we can realize that the reality is stranger than fiction.

Technology and Learning StylesTechnology

Week ) ..My reflection

This week was really nice, I finished my project, I realize that we have a lot of opportunities to teach in different ways, and then our student would receive more and better learning opportunities, now I am able to do many things by myself .I read some articles suggested this week, and I noticed this phrase, “Exploring Tomorrow's Education Today,” because  our students are not the same we were, actually education has some interesting offers, that teachers should take into consideration, we must first know and diagnose learning styles that our students have, what kind of intelligence they domain and how important  is combine them with the instructor´s teaching style, otherwise it will be a daily struggle and frustration when our students do not advance with their knowledge, technology would help to the solutions of many problems, and surely it is because we would have students motivated to learn, able to solve problems, and with different abilities to perform their jobs.

If we are based on the four pillars of education which holds the UNESCO which are: Learning to do, learning to be, learning to learn, and learning to live together, then we could say that we are applying what education really means, I mean to assist the process which help to put out the best of our students  ( applying appropriate methods related with learning style) to help improve their skills (taking account multiple intelligence) to update their talents, and develop their potential (guiding through technology).

If multimedia (videos, sounds, animations, and graphics) facilitates learning, so the technology will help teachers and students to improve the way of transmitting knowledge, to change the role of students, from passive to active (autonomy)

Teaching with Online Tools

WEEK 8 Teaching with Online Tools

This week has been really hard, unfortunately we have to conjugated with all daily work, I really like to have all the time to read about this new tools, I felt a little confused at the beginning of this week, the creation of our wiki class took my sleep many nights, three nights were necessary to create it, at the end I am satisfied and happy, because I know now that I can include interesting activities in my class, creative tasks for my students, and motivating ideas, I´ve included my work in power point with the idea to encourage students to develop their skill of listening. Voiceboard, Tcast, quizzes, etc these incredible speech tools are going to help teachers and students.

Navigating on easy test maker was nice too, here we can explore the idea about the tests we need to apply, and this site gives us great ideas to elaborate test in a better way, being a new era (technological one) teachers must be aware to manage and take advantages of these tools which enhance learning process and autonomy in our students.

Week 7: Learner Autonomy.

During this week the autonomous learning was the most interesting issue to be treated, I found this topic really useful to implement in class, because   autonomy and sufficiency are two requirements for leading succeful students, who are responsible with their own learning, the autonomous learners are able to solve problems, evaluate, reflect and develop new ideas and satisfy necessities by own, with a minimal help of teacher.

Teachers who implement this process create an environment where giving birth opportunities to fly by themselves and go wherever they want, they will land on autonomy directly, it can be applied with projects where students manage and get the information elaborating a draft which contains all aspects of the project, including  the result, so technology  is a great allied that contribute to get this purpose, because the students are involved in the cybernetic era.

Week 6 technology aids in large classes
This week has been very interesting because I realize that we can improve our work with technology, and  use it to develop projects (PBL), with power point we can realize that it is extremely useful to engage students, this also facilitates our job as teachers, however it is also true that we should devote time to the preparation of these materials, a well-developed and care process will make our classes successfully. Power point is a great tool to capture the attention of our students in big classrooms, we should not reject the opportunity we have to do our classes fun, active and students will wait with eager to learn English,students who are behind the classroom will have more opportunities to act and understand what is explained, we should take into consideration that sometimes large classes are not easy to manage specially for teachers who are beginning their work, so power point´s animations offer attractive presentations to engage student´s desires to learn, and we may even combine it with our teacher´s book.
We should remember that as teachers we also need appropiate places to work, a room equipped with modern technology would be helpful to do a better job, but that means we must be prepared to be a technology teacher too, give our students the opportunity to access to web pages is a good idea, we need to be sure that they do not waste their time in fruitless and undirected searching 

Week 5- Assessment, Rubrics and PBL

Week 5-Assessment/ Rubrics /PBL

One of the activities that most liked me this week was handle rubrics, which will help us  to guide students in their learning-process in a better way, to evaluate our students in this century is a challenge, we need to measure their  performance in a normal classroom conditions to check who is performing well and who is finding difficulties, rubrics could be a good help to realize about it, assessment has different ways to obtain and give information about our students, and alternative is one of them, the best of rubrics is, that we can use them variously, and all of them are useful, we can use rubrics to assess any skill or performance, it depends of our creativity or our necessities, they could be holistic or analytic. Another interesting thing was to be motivated to practice PBL because; it helps students to be more cooperative, to work in groups, and to be more independent, furthermore they become active learners, it requires critical thinking, we can use problem solving, in this exercises students do much more than remember information, they need to learn about how to work as a team and contribute to the group effort, about WebPages, teachers and students have easy access to them, different websites could be visit, they select a topic, or a page after that they can debate original questions using the arguments they found.It was a productive week......

WEEK 4- READING WRITING SKILLS

WEEK 4- READING WRITING VOCABULARY SKILLS

During this week I reflected about  why people use to read?, and I supposed  they read for study or simply for pleasure, in my experience I realized students don´t feel motivated to read, so teachers  should make it easier for students because it´s useful for language acquisition, the more they read, they better they get at it, reading is a good way to increase students ‘vocabulary knowledge, if reading is developed with a well input process, the consequence will be an interesting writing, it is important to select authentic materials like books, novels, magazine, newspaper, etc. because they stimulate discussion, debate, and  imaginative responses. The web pages could be an excellent  “tour”  to take a glance, specially if they work  in  an interactive tasks like pairs activities, jigsaw readings,  after that  they can conclude in a fun writing or vice versa like the example from the page which Mykola Kisil posted  (make a story).

Oral Aural Skill Building

WEEK 3

ORAL AURAL SKILL BUILDING

When I listened about the listening and speaking skills I thought about what is the purpose of language? And how did it evolve to play this role in our lives? I think the answer is that we need the language to declare something, to express feelings and attitudes; therefore language is a tool with which we do things, all ideas are then transformed into words, they must have correct syntax to be understood by the rest of the audience, for that reason our students need to be competent sharing correct information

I think English curriculum is based squarely upon the four skills listening, speaking, reading and writing, aural and oral skills can't be separated, while teaching reading, for example, teacher is  at the same time teaching other skills.

I think  to develop oral-aural skills, the activities which works best are those where we can use lively songs and games, some repetitions of stories, (retell the story) tongue twisters with total physical response (they motivate the students very much) all of them share, of course a high value of communication

I would like to share some ideas in order to develop skills:

• Create simple activities to understand for the students. It´s important to be clear in the activities and focus them directly where we want them to work.

• Create challenging assignments that match their skills, in addition to
that they can be completed, if the student can resolve the tasks  they are going to be motivated to do them and to learn.

• These activities should focus primarily on developing the expression
oral, which, combined with listening comprehension, but remember that these activities  requires much more time
to be develop during the process.

• Writing activities should be included gradually, especially among
 small children, whose writing skills are just developing
in their mother tongue.

ABCD OBJECTIVES

WHY TO SET CLEAR OBJECTIVES

If we want to our classes have sense we need a plan, because a plan can reduce the level of uncertainly and we can anticipate what will happen in the development of the class providing consistency to the process, teachers almost never set the objectives at the beginning, and I think we should, because with them we say what we hope to achieve or what we want our students learn or be able to do at the end of the lesson, the more specific we are the easier it will be for us, because once we have designed aims, we can select the activities, to put them in the best order and choose the most suitable aids, and materials, this is a good opportunity to look back to see whether we have achieved our aims, or whether we have succeeded in teaching what we planned to teach. Set objectives will help us when we need to evaluate our students, to get a real rubric to assess them too.

Now, I know that to create a blog is not so easy, due to my lack of experience, I found a lot of information, I had to read and read, but it was a productive time, I learned many interesting things …. Sometimes I lost the north, and when I was going to give up the attempt, something returned to the right way, and at least…. I got it.

To have a blog means you are in the technological age, access to information and people of interest, we can interchange information all the time, now I can write and I have the possibility that the world and I read other blogs.