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. 

Week 3 ... Oral/aural skills websites and Delicious

It is Sunday afternoon and I am done with my third week on my webskills course. Frankly, I never expected I could learn so many things in such a short period of time. This week started by reading two out of three articles that were provided by our tutor. I chose reading By Maria Busa on New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation and the other one was written by Juila Jong that was focused on the employment of CALL in teaching Second/Foreign Language speaking skills.  We were also asked to take a look at some lesson plans and suggested websites that are related for English language learning and I put especially attention to two of them. One of them is Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab (http://www.esl-lab.com). I highly recommend this website because it presents different kinds of listening exercises for different levels. On the other hand, we can also find listening quizzes, listening quizzes for academic purposes, videos, teaching tips and links for supplementary material. Additionally, we can also download the tracks and videos clips by installing some plugins to our computers. 

The other website I am recommending is found on the Best Sites to Practice Speaking English(Larry Ferlazzo) and its name is The Art of Storytelling (http://www.artofstorytelling.org) This website may be useful to develop the four macro skills and it can be implemented for any kind of student who can structure sentences in English. The best of all is that you no not have to Log into the website and it is free. The peculiarity of this site is that you can create a story by recording your own voice or typing a script. It is really funny to do so because you are free to choose the genre, background, characters and objects to the story. Besides that, at the end there is an option in which you may select sending your story to several e-mails so people may read or listen to it.

Additionally, I also created my account on “Delicious” (www.delicious.com). This was the first time I saw this website and I find it very interesting because it has many features that are not found in other site. Perhaps the most peculiar characteristic is that users do not need to keep a record of their favorite websites in their web browser. That means that I can easily log into this web space and click on the previously saved link and I can have access to it. Having managed the bookmarks efficiently is a good way to avoid having problems in the future. You can also tag the links you save and at the same time look for information by typing any Key word.

Besides all the readings and activities I had during this week, I could analyze one final project report from a previous Webskills course participant. By reading this project, I have been able to start thinking about my final report as well. To be honest, I have not made up my mind but I am expected to have a better idea in the following weeks.  

Second week is gone ... ABCD and Web Searching

Well, this is my second reflective post. Up to this point of the course, every has gone well but I am a little bit concerned about myself and the tasks that I am "supposed" to do as a teacher. My word in quotations comes because I sometimes take for granted that I am doing the right things but suddenly I get to know that conformism comes to my teaching style. I try to be honest to myself and what I learned this week has helped me to have a different perspective about writing clear objectives and searching for valuable information on the web. This week has been an eye-opening experience and I am looking forward to applying all the things I am learning.

I have been writing course and class objectives for my classes since I was in studying in the university and I have used different methods. In fact, it was difficult to come up with class objectives at the beginning but I got used of doing it because I was asked to design lesson plans when I started working. However, writing objectives became monotonous and sometimes tedious for me in the last couple of months because I was following the same model. Fortunately, this week I learned a new way of writing clear objectives and it has changed my perspective on how I have to work. Our tutor from the online course provided three very useful documents related to this issue and they helped me going back to my starting point to see why class objectives are necessary not only for myself as a teacher but also for my students as learners. The method I learned in my online course is called “ABCD” and its name comes from the “Audience, Behavior, Condition and Degree” acronym.

To be honest, it was the first time I see this method and that is why I am really concerned because there is still much to know about this area and I have not been constantly upgrading my knowledge about teaching. Luckily, courses like the one I am taking are focused on helping teachers, like me, to have the opportunity to learn more about being a better professional. Furthermore, if I contrast this new method for me with the one I was implementing before, I can see that the ABCD method is more concise and specific which is better for me because I am a very practical person. I really like this method because it is a starting point to understand who my students are, what I expect them to do, how they will learn based on the learning environment and how much the students will accomplish.

Moreover, to see if the participants of the course understood how to apply this method, we were asked to design one objective applied to one of the classes we are teaching. For instance, I design one and this is the one I came up with: 

Description: 
In my Basic English class, there are 18 students who are 17-20. This is their first 8 hour weekly class in English in the university and they are studying to become teachers of English.

ABCD Objetive:
"C:Given sentences in simple present tense written in strips of paper, A: the students, B: will be able to re-write the sentences in simple past in their notebooks D: with no spelling or tense errors."

The second task assigned for this week was to think about the search engines we use to gather information for our classes. In order to do so, we were recommended to visit the website http://www.noodletools.com and we were asked to analyze two of the websites presented there. I took a look at some of them, and two that caught my attention were: 

http://www.intute.ac.uk
This search engine is very helpful and simple. It provides very technical information from many academic sources that come from universities and very reliable institutions all around the world. The information can be gathered specifying the title, description or keyword about the topic. On the other hand, the site itself tells the researcher that there is another option on the site itself if there was not enough data. It also specifies that this information does not contain the same quality as it does from the main source on the page. As this website was new for me, I was curious to try it out and I searched for information related to English consonants classification. The result showed more than fifty websites with journals, reports, projects, researches and articles. I really recommend this web page because it may be useful to find information about different areas as it shows studies and academic papers. 

http://www.ipl.org/div/askus/
It is a really interesting web site in which we may find solutions to doubts related to specific topics. A person needs to fill a simple form in which you type your question and e-mail and trained professional librarian volunteers and graduate students in library science programs will answer the questions. Personally, I tried this tool by typing a doubt I had about my phonetics class. Surprisingly, in less than one day I found an answer in my e-mail account. I found this website very useful because it is very efficient and accurate. I am planning to use this tool more often to have personalized answers with reliable information that is hard to find in books or in the web.

I have to admit that I have learned many things this week and this makes me feel happy and satisfied because this course has been really useful to me. I hope to continue learning more new things during this coming week. 

First week reflections

Well, this is my first post in my blog. It has been a little bit difficult for me to catch up on posting information in previous logs, so keeping this blog updated is going to be really challenging for me.


This blog is going to be focused on sharing my experience and thoughts about the online course I am currently taking. This course is provided by the University of Oregon on the spring of the year 2013 and it deals with helping teachers to build skills through the interactive web.


This has been a week for the participants to know the generalities of the course and the procedures to follow during these 10 weeks. At the beginning, I was sort of scared because this is the first time I am taking an online course, and I had some doubts last week. Hopefully, I have been receiving very useful information in my e-mail from my tutor, Ms Donna Shaw, and this has reduced my anxiety a lot.


I had lots of expectations before the course started and I have been learning many things since the very first day. I learned how to log into http://www.nicenet.org and alll the information and tasks are assigned there, so I have been constantly checking the updates in this website. Furthermore, I introduced myself to the group and I also commented in a couple of posts that other participants have made. On the other hand, I have also read very relevant information about online discussions, weblogs for ESL teachers, and to create a blog.


I think this has been a very interesting week and I am looking forward to continue learning more and more in the following weeks