Week 10 ... this is the end, unfortunately

Well, the title of my post describes everything I feel now ... It is a mix of emotions and it is kind of weird to describe how I am feeling because I am a little bit sad and at the same time proud. It is 5:30 PM and I am actually having my final written exam with the students in which I implemented the project for my webskills course. Saying "bye" to them and also to my webskills course makes me feel very nostalgic.
Taking this wonderful course made me reflect on what I am supposed to do and also helped me changing my mind in many aspects related to my teaching style. On the other hand, I had the opportunity to reinforce many ideas I had about using technology in my class and at the same time I was able to interact with many people from all over the world.
If there is something I would be glad of saying is that I had a wonderful tutor ... Maybe I will never be able to meet Mrs Donna Shaw in person but the only thing I may say is that she was an extraordinary leader and a one of a kind person. All her help and things she shared are going to be reflected on better results in my classes from now on.
There were too many things that I learned in these last months and they are going to help me being a better teacher ... Interactive powerpoint presentations, integrating MI and learning styles using technology in classes, writing class objectives, developing the four macroskills and some other topics related with technology are going to be my day to day challenge as a teacher.
I am very satisfied to see all the things I have learned lately but knowing that I will not have the readings of my course and all the tasks I was doing make me feel sad. Well, this is all for my course ...

Week nine ... MI, Learning Styles and the use of technology

Well, another week has gone and we are about to finish out wonderful Webskills course. This week has been really rewarding as we finish our final project report. It was nice to finish it after taking some hours of writing, analyzing, correcting it and taking my classmate's advices to shape it better. As in the previous weeks, we studied a relevant topic this week. We learned how to incorporate technology with Multiple Intelligences (MI) and learning styles. This is one of my favorite topics when teaching English and it is always a challenging for me to learn new activities to implement them in my classes. I have always found this issue  really important and necessary for teachers when planning and also when analyzing my students' behavior. I read a couple of articles about MI and LS and made me think about how necessary is to implement technology in our classes nowadays. Students are immersed in a technological environment every day and it is a good idea that teachers may take some time to figure out how to take hand of technology in order to meet students' learning needs. 

Well, this coming week is the last one for our course and I am eager to see what the last step is. I hope it may be as pleasant as the whole course has been. 

8th week ... first draft, online exercises and technology tools

This week has been with a lot of work on the webskills course. We presented our first draft for our final project. It was a little hard to write it because of the time. Fortunaley, I could finish it and I was able to continue with my blog project class. There were many positive reactions toward it from my students and I was really glad to listen to them. They are working hard on the blog to develop their listening and on the Facebook group discussions they have about the listening. My Basic English students also presented their first listening answers sheets from last week and they did really well. I hope they may continue working this pace in the following two more weeks that are missing to finish our semester

In our webskills course, we reviewed may online exercises that can develop students' fluency and we also checked some really interesting websites. I particularly found that some of them provide relevant help for teachers to create different activities like crosswords puzzles, elaborate flashcards and exams and I found them really helpful but the one that highly caught my attention was the "Hot Potatoes" program because its six different applications may give a wide variety of autonmy on students.
Before I installed it, I thought it was going to be difficult but it was not at all. I tried almost of all them this morning and to be honest I liked them all because they are meaningful and they also help students increase their autonomy and they make them feel free to make mistakes and try to develop the activities over and over again.
Also, I checked, but I have not tried yet, ANVILL. This seems to be a great tool for teachers to implement more interactive classes because it allows teachers to incorporate different tools that may help students build their confidence and creativity. This resource looks interesting but it takes more preparation and it seems to me more time consuming than other resources.

Also, I created an online exercise for my class using Jquiz. I read a little about how to embed it into my class blog and I created one reading comprehension practice for an exam we had last Friday. Some of my students mentioned they did pretty good and they really liked it. They also mentioned that we should have some practices for out written test on that way because they could practice more and more. I did not expect them to tell me that but I am seriously thinking of helping them getting prepared for this exam as well. This week has been with a lot of work but unfortunately two more weeks are missing to finish the amazing course.

Week 7 ... Learner Autonomy and working on my project

Time really flies so fast ... this amazing course is about to finish. This week has been really productive for me and also for my students. The blog itself started a week ago and I have already posted three exercises to my students. They gave me the answers sheets back last Friday, and I am starting to check them tomorrow (Monday). This week I learned more abour Learner Autonomy. Well, learner's autonomy is a very extense topic. Throughout the readings and my background knowledge about the topic, I may say that encouraging greater autonomy among students is a very challgenging task it this is new for them. In fact, this is something that students need but teacher-centered classes hinder students development in this issue. That is why, it is necessary to incorporate activities in which the students may feel comfortable with, so they will have the possibility to take a better understanding of their own learning process. They are more aware and more active on what they need to learn.

For instance, we as teachers have to learn them discover which their intelligences are and provide them with the adequate tools to develop activities according to their learning styles. Because of this, it is necessary to incorporate technology in our classes because this is what the students like and it is a very powerful key to motivate students succeed in their learning process.

Also, in my course we started looking for partners who are going to help us checking our reports and projects this week. I am going to work with Elias Dalio who is from Senegal and also with Hoda Kain who is from Lebanon. So far, Hoda has given me some good pieces of advice about my blog and this has encouraged me because she knows lots of things about blogging. I also cheched a website called "Padlet". It is interesting and very useful because it is interactive but it is a little messy because everyone may post different things in a kind of "wall" there. Well, this is all for this week and there are many things to do for this coming one.

Roberto

Interactive Powerpoint and teaching laaaaarge classes ... six week is gone !!!

Well, I do not know where to start how this week was. I started the week as the previuos ones: I read the checklists with all the activities I was going to do for this week, read a couple of interesting articles about teaching large classes and how to create interactive Powerpoint presentations and I also started planning my first activity for my course project. Everything was going well until I started feeling fever, headaches and pain in my throat. At  first, I thought this was not going to be a big use and I started taking pills. By Wednesday afternoon, I was not able to move because of the high fever I had and I was really worried about all the work I had at the university and about my Webskills course. Nonetheless, I was able to give my input about the readings I had and to start working in my project at home when I was feeling better.

It is Sunday here in my place and I was diagnosed severe tonsils infection and since Tuesday until today there is no injection or pill that has stopped my fevers and headaches. I thought twice about writing all these things but this is my reflective blog and to be honest I thought I was not make it, but hopefully I did. Fortunately, I told my basic English students in advanced last week about the blog project on helping  them with their listening skill, so it was easier to control everything at home. I asked them if they have internet access at home and all of them said they do and I also told them that I was going to create a facebook group so they could add me as their friend to include them in our class group. I thought that this was going to be a good idea because they spend long hours on facebook and they have access to it in their cell phones so it was going to be easier if they receive a notification and they could know there is a new task. By Thursday ,16 out of 17 students were in the group and I already had the first activity for this week. Luckily, I know a little about podcasting, so I logged into my account on www.archive.org and I uploaded an mp3 I downloaded from www.listenaminute.com about animals, I embedded the code to the blog and I also posted some exercises related to the listening clip. Believe me, it took me some time because I had sore eyes and my head was about to explode but I was able to finish and post the link of the blog into the Facebook group. I asked my students to bring their answers on a piece of paper by Tomorrow (Monday 12th) so tomorrow (God willing If I feel better) I am going to check their work.

Another activity I just have finished (honestly) is the interactive Powerpoint presentation. At first, I thought on   creating a presentation about "There is and there are" but then I changed my mind and created a Jeoparly game about this topic. When I was writing the first category, I changed my mind again and decided to include some of the most important topics we had studied so far in class. It took me a couple of hours to create it but I made it. As I am writing these lines, I feel really proud of myself because by Friday I was really frustrated and a little sad because I thought I was not going to do anything. I am under treatment now so I hope I could work better this coming week.

Roberto

Half our way ... PBL, Rubrics and WebQuests

Well, another Sunday afternoon and I am enjoying my time here in my place. It has just finished raining in my hometown and the weather is cool and amazing to think and reflect on what I learned about my online course this last week. As I have done in the last four weeks, I started the fifth one doing my readings about rubric and alternative assessment. I realized throughouth the articles that there are different ways in which we as teachers may evaluate students's learning performance. I liked one of the phrases that were in one of the articles I read and it textually says "Alternative assessment uses activities that reveal what students can do with language emphasizing their strenghts instead of their weaknesses". This was really shocking for me because I have seen that we are focused more on pointing out students errors rather than highlighting their effort to do well in the exams.

Also, I read a little about holistic, analytic, primary and multitrait rubrics and as practice I designed a rubric at http://rubistar.4teachers.org/ website. The rubric I designed was based on a poster presentation I am going to have with my Basic English students. This was not the first time I checked this site so it was a little bit easier to work on it.

Besides this, there was something new that I learned this week and it is called "WebQuest". What I mean by saying "new" is because it was the first time I heard about this with this name. A WebQuest is a form of PBL (Project Based Learning) and its goal is to motivate students meaningfully going through the learning process little by little (scaffolding). WebQuests are very useful and attractive to teach and also to learn and I would like to implement it in the future with my students but I need to continue reading about them to get more benefits for my students.

Week 4 ... Reading and writing websites and planning lessons incorporating technology

Another Sunday afternoon and I just finished doing my homework for this week in my online course. This week has been really challenging for me as I have been really busy at work teaching, administering tests and checking them. Because of this, it has been a little hard to catch up with my course. Nevetheless, I have learned many important things week with the readings and suggested websites focused on reading and writing exercises. At the beginning of the week, I had the opportunity to read two very interesting articles, one was about using the internet in ESL instruction and the other one was about using the internet to teach literature to children. Both articles share very helpful ideas for teachers in order to incorporate activities to enhance the reading and writing skills in their students. On the other hand, we were also provided another two articles on how to incorporate technology to our lesson plans. It was a nice experience to read them because I also had a the opportunity to check how this works by checking one database with lesson plans from the Baltimore County Public Schools Office of Instructional Technology. 

Besides this, I designed an ABCD objective based on one of the two websites I shared with my classmates of the course.  The two websites that I found really interesting were: www.manythings.org/ and www.breakingnewsenglish.com. Both of them present lots of activities that are focused on assisted learning activities and they provide very useful tools to teach our classes. We can find lots of readings and listening exercises. 

What caught my attention about the first website is that it brings activities that can be developed by using iphones, ipads or cell phones. This is really good because this is "trendy" nowadays and it may be really useful for the students. The second website is really amazing and I simply loved it because it presents updated news with lesson plans and all the activities to develop the class. 

As a last activitiy for this week, all the participants of the course were asked to design a lesson plan based including technology as much as we could. To be honest, it was not difficult at all because I sometimes include technology in my classes and I am planning to develop this lesson plan focused on simple past this coming week with my basic English students.

As I mentioned before, it was a very busy week but the best of all is that I am enjoying my course and I hope to continue doing it this coming week.