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."
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.
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.
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