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