WEEK 10

I cannot believe it, but the course is coming to an end. It has been a lot of work, a busy summer. What is more, I was even on the beach with my laptop finishing the assignments!

However, it has been an invaluable experience; among the things I enjoyed the most are, for instance, reading about alternative assessment or project based learning.  Besides that myriad of activities of inestimable worth, which help enhance communication and collaboration in the classroom. Online resources such as Padlet or vocaroo; and the fact that we have written a technology implementation plan to be brought into our lessons. This course was about bringing theory into practice; that's what I liked the most. I have reflected a lot about my own practice, and I have discovered new ways to use technology in my lessons; ways that are based on cooperation and communication among students. I tended to forget my main goals while I was using technology in my lessons, now I see it. I have learned to plan, develop and teach with technology in a significant way. I will use interactive Power Point presentations again; I now have a clearer view about how to use it efficiently. I am going to include mobile learning tools too; I am already doing some research on the free apps which can be used in the classroom in order to introduce WarmUp activities before the lessons. I am very interested in Just in Time Teaching, and I think mlearning is very useful for that purpose.

Many thanks to all my classmates; for their kindness and for sharing their knowledge and a lot of wonderful web resources. Also, I want to thank and send my warmest regards to our instructor, Donna Shaw. She has been an active and understanding teacher. She encouraged all of us to participate in the forums from the very beginning, making us feel we were not alone. The experience wouldn't have been the same without her. Had it not been for her level of involvement and expertise, I wouldn't have enjoyed the course so much.


An immense pleasure!


Begoña
Spain

WEEK 9

This week has been dedicated to learning styles and strategies. There are very different kinds of learners, and teachers are meant to think of every learning style. Students have to strenghthen their skills by observing the kind of lessons they are attending, to later make decisions that help them study more effectively. That is what Richard M. Felder's article about learning styles and strategies (http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSdir/styles.htm) says. And I totally agree with him. Each student will have to approach self-study at home in a different way depending on the kind of lesson he or she goes to. The common ground for either teachers and learners is the need of the language as a means of communication and successful teaching or/and comprehension. Learners make connections between concepts to comprehend knowledge by means of language, so the main learning styles which will be addressed in lessons will be verbal and visual.

Technology turns very useful when the teacher wants to address different learning styles. Thanks to tools like Padlet, Quizlet, Nicenet, Vocaroo, etc., the teacher can be more and more creative each day. Technology gives the teacher the opportunity of bringing authenticity and real practice into the classroom. The Web is full of different tools which help visual and verbal learners improve their skills in the foreign language; but teachers may also make use of technology in creative ways to cater for every learning style in the classroom. Thanks to the Internet, it is very easy to include music, kinesthetic activities or to use natural contexts to present language in the lessons nowadays.

I handed in my final Project Plan last Friday; I am quite happy, because this week I have realized how much I have learnt, and how useful these tools are going to be in my future practice. Up to now, I have to say that most of those tools were buzzwords in my head. I had tried very few of them, and I think the implementation in my lessons was not very good; probably because my didactic goals were lost half way through the end of the activity. After this course, I do have a clear idea about how to address different types of activities with different web tools, in order to work different learning styles.

Last part of the week I read and watched some articles and screencasts about ANVILL. It is a different and useful platform, since it is a speech-based toolbox for language teachers. I think it can be a great aid for me, because it focuses on oral and aural language. And that's what my students demand the most.

The end of the course is near! See you next week.



Begoña

Spain 

WEEK 8
This week we have done some research on different web resources, I have learned how to create a survey with Google drive, for instance. Something I find quite interesting. There are a lot of good resources, which are visually very appealing for both, teachers and students; and which can make a difference to the way I do my job. I practiced with crosswords made up of words which are part of the vocabulary of the lessons: one of my students' favorite activity. I usually tell the students to work in pairs, and then I give them half of a crossword each. My students have a lot of fun defining and guessing words. These tools are going to be very useful for me in the future.

Then I went ahead with my final project, which I think it is getting more and more complex. I designed a whole year plan to implement new technology in my classroom. I will work technology as part of three collaborative projects to be done for each term. I will start with a very guided project where students have to post a recording of a one-minute story based on an Edward Hopper's painting, connected with the first unit of work, which is developed around narrative tenses and the parts of a story. The students will be working for several weeks until they hand in the final draft of their project by the end of the first term. The second project will be a 2-minute recording of a holiday itinerary around our city, connected to the unit of work "Holidays." to be handed in by the end of the second term. As to the third project, since students at the end of the year have to sit a B1 certificate exam; and there is an oral part with a three-minute monologue in it, the third project won't be guided, students will choose a topic covered in the academic year, and they will prepare a three-minute talk, similar to the monologue which is asked in the exam, about the topic. The students will be in charge of reviewing the first drafts of their peers, to later hand in the final recording of a three minute oral presentation. Every student will be able to access the others' projects, because they will be posted on the virtual classroom.

I have also checked my partner's project, and I have received Megumi's comments about mine. Thank you very much, Megumi; your review has been of a great help to improve my final report.

As we get closer to the end of the course, I think I have a clearer idea of what I want to do in my lessons regarding technology from now on. I have always worked with technology in my lessons, though my class has always been a one-computer classroom. I have always used moodle or edmodo to have virtual classrooms where students can post or interact, and improve their language skills with extra materials related to the topics of work in the course units. However, the idea of working speaking outside the lessons, with the aid of vocaroo is new to me, and I think I can be successful with my students in helping them speak more. Just the fact that they have to record and listen to their voices is very good for them, and would be enough; but they even have plenty of time to edit and revise the contents of their recordings. I think my students are going to enjoy this new form of work.

Begoña
Spain

WEEK 7

This week has been busy too. I started reading about learner autonomy, philosophies of learning, learner strategies and attitudes towards learning, and motivation. All of them are key factors to be taken into account if we want to give our students good lessons where they learn efficiently and effectively.

I agree with Dimitrios Thanasoulas in his article "What is Learner Autonomy and How Can it Be Fostered?" (http://iteslj.org/Articles/Thanasoulas-Autonomy.html) when he affirms "Learner autonomy consists in becoming aware of and identifying one's strategies, needs and goals as a learner, and having the opportunity to reconsider and refashion approaches and procedures for optimal learning." Autonomy takes a long time to develop, and teachers have a crucial role in developing learner autonomy. Lessons have to be meaningful to students, dealing with topics of interest; entertaining and full of critical thinking and opportunities for students to speak up their views. They seem to be quite a lot of things to think of. However, David Little gives some advice in order to maintain the motivation and the attention of learners in his article "Learner autonomy: drawing together the threads of self-assessment, goal-setting and reflection" (https://sites.google.com/site/webskillsuo/home/assignments/week-7/Learner%20Automomy.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1) For instance, using the target language as the common medium of communication; using learning activities that can be shared, discussed and evaluated by learners; giving the students a more proactive role in their learning; requiring learners to keep a written record of their learning; or engaging learners in regular evaluation.

As I already mentioned in one of my posts for week 7, the most important factor that influences the development of autonomy in my lessons is motivation. Most of my adult students come to my lessons instrumentally motivated. It is really difficult to foster integrative or intrinsic motivation. One sentence that impressed me was this one: “the learning of a foreign language implies an alteration of the self-image.” Taken from an article by Dimitrios Thanasoulas (http://iteslj.org/Articles/Thanasoulas-Autonomy.html) when the author is paraphrasing M. Williams. Thus, cognitively speaking students need to understand a new way of comprehend and categorize the world around us. My students, as adults, are not encouraged to change their views and their ways of constructing reality. David Little mentions in the aforementioned article that “feeling free and volitional in one’s actions nourishes our intrinsic motivation and our proactive interest in the world around us.” So that is probably the key to enhance students' intrinsic motivation, letting them decide on their learning goals.

I have also discovered a tool called “Padlet”, which is an online notice board. It is a versatile tool that may be used either for homework or for class activities. You neither need to register, nor any special skill on computing. Just double clicking at the background you can post a notice in the shape of a sticker. There have been more readings about the one-computer classroom and mobile learning, and about all the pedagogical possibilities these tools have. The most appealing idea for me is to use any of these tools as a backchannel of my lessons. Thanks to backchanneling (http://www.edutopia.org/blog/backchannel-student-voice-blended-classroom-beth-holland) all students can contribute their questions to the entire class. It is a way to “hear” the students easily, since it is sometimes difficult to hear everyone in face-to-face classroom communication.

I keep on working on my plan report; my classmate, Megumi Tabata, has accepted to work cooperatively with me in peer evaluation, so I am very glad to have the opportunity to work hand in hand with a partner. I have just realized that there can only be one or two technology tools in each project, so I am trying to decide which one to use. I had decided to use an online recording tool “Vocaroo,” which is very easy to use and to share. There’s no need to register, it is very good for my students; immediacy is paramount in completing homework tasks. My students are working people without much time for English homework. However, I also wanted to use “Padlet” for peer evaluation; “edmodo” to post the links to the recordings and the texts of the stories based on Edward Hopper’s works of art; and a “power point” to give more theoretical content. In fact, the only tool I am using to try to ease the students' embarrassment when they have to speak English is vocaroo. 

Happy week!

Begoña

Spain  

WEEK 6

Crazy week! I was on holiday last week, so I was on the beach with my laptop. A freak at the beach!

Well, let's start with everything I did. I think it is the week I have read more in all the course. I read the compulsory and the extra materials. I found all of them very interesting. At first we learned about how to manage a big group, and that brought me back memories of my teaching at university.I really enjoyed the article "Teaching Large Classes II - Enhancing Learning by Engaging Students" by Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw (https://sites.google.com/site/webskillsuo/home/assignments/week-6/engaging_students_handout%282%29.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1) I felt I could have written many of the things which were said in the article. One of the most difficult things to do in such big groups is to find out the needs of the students. You always give them times for tutorials, but it is rare that they come to see you. I read about the pace of the lessons, variety of activities, and interactive Power Point presentations as a way to get the students engaged, and monitoring their own learning. I was surprised to know that the attention span of a university student is 20 minutes at most (https://sites.google.com/site/webskillsuo/home/assignments/week-6/engaging_students_handout%282%29.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1). I thought it was longer. The thought of large groups made me think about the spatial layout of the classroom, and how important it is to develop the lessons well. My classrooms at university had very long continuous tables that would not separate, so making groups for speaking was really difficult.

I learned about jigsaw activities, that enhance peer interaction and high level thinking skills, such as analysis and synthesis. I also learned about JiTT. (http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/justintime/index.html) the "Just in Time Teaching" An excellent idea to work WarmUp activities; previous tasks to be done at home that will help develop the activity better in the classroom.

In my final project I'd like to introduce JiTT, so the first step was to create an interactive Power Point, something I hadn't made for long. It was a bit chaotic at the beginning, I didn't remember how to include animations or hyperlinks. Even the version of the program was new to me; but in the end, I got used to it easily. The worst problem I had was when I read about interactive jeopardy games, and I felt attracted to them. I decided to create that kind of game to work on listening comprehension. And although I succeeded at first, I made some kind of mistake when I tried to copy paste it, and I have lost most of it. I'll keep on working, and I hope to include a jeopardy game in my final project. It's been very hard to understand how to create one.

I've changed my mind about using the website of the Delaware museum to write a story about a famous painting (http://www.delart.org/education/the-art-of-storytelling/) I was working with the application, and I don't think it is useful and quick. I decided to use voocaroo instead, to create a podcast and post it on a wiki afterwards. The activity of creating a story from a painting is going to be much more guided. I've chosen Edward Hopper paintings. I think they are suitable for the purpose of the activity; most of them are set in urban scenarios, and there are people involved, so there are characters and setting for the story. I found some examples in the form of videos on you tube, so I think they can be very valuable for my students.

The interactive Power Point presentation is about the parts of a story; I know my adult students know a lot about all these things; but when they write, they sometimes forget to plan their writings to organize their ideas. I would like them to be more critical about what they see and write, to help them understand the rubrics I use to correct their assignments.

In the presentation, by means of two very well known fairy tales, (Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella) students will explore the elements every story has. Then they will listen to a story based on one of the Hopper's paintings, (Nighthawks) and they will play a jeopardy game to check understanding. In the end, they will write and read aloud a story based on one of the works of art. I am still thinking about the length and the format of the assignment.

And I think this is what last week was to me. I had a lot of problems to connect to the internet from the beach resort, but I had sun and webskills course in the end!

Cheers,

Begoña

Spain

WEEK 5
This week we have been working on PBLs and alternative assessment. We have read excellent articles about new ways to face our lessons. Never has information been so easily available to everybody as it is nowadays with the advent of the Internet. Our society is changing, and so is our methodology in our lessons. The teacher is no more the center of the lessons, it is the learner instead; our lessons have to move towards more open learnig communities where learners feel themselves an active part of these communities. Thanks to alternative assessment the students may take part in the process of evaluation, teacher and students may come to an agreement on how the subject will be graded. That will contribute to a conscious learning on behalf of the student; what subsequently will result in more autonomy. Students still think that the teacher is the only person who is entitled to correct them; in fact, students may improve a lot with the help of their classmates. Nobody is going to explain better a concept than a peer. Teachers tend to give more academic explanations, whereas students at the same interlanguage level are going to understand the flaws of their classmates better; they are at the same stage in learning.

I've also discovered new tools to use in my lessons; my students are adults, what means that, in some way, they are not so open to new methodologies and new ways of doing things. There are some students who hate technology, or feel they can do very little with a computer. My students are very shy and don't communicate easily, either because they feel embarrassed when they make mistakes, or because they don't want to share their feelings about certain subjects, such as economy, politics or religion. Perhaps just the fact that they have to register when they are using a given service, may cause they don't use the website, although it is an excellent tool to learn English.

Reading Larry Felazzo's blog about websites to improve speaking in the lessons (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/the-best-sites-to-practice-speaking-english/) I saw a tool called "the art of storytelling" (http://www.artofstorytelling.org/write-a-story) and I thought that would be a very good tool to use in my lessons. The student can choose one painting to create a short story to later record it and post it on a students' website. It is a good way to practice written and oral production, based on a picture that may help them express better. The oral production won't be natural or spontaneous, (with more mistakes) the students will be able to rehearse and edit their oral production before posting. They will feel more relaxed than in daily lessons; and as Susan Gaer states in her article "Less Teaching and More Learning" (http://www.ncsall.net/index.html@id=385.html) "The sense of doing something meaningful that will exist beyond the classroom walls," will engage and motivate the students better.

Right now I am thinking of a suitable project for my lessons using a webquest. I hope to finish it on time! I feel I need to think a little more about it.
See you next week,
Begoña
Spain

Week 4

Last week was hectic, I felt that I was behind schedule and that I wasn’t going to be able to do everything on time; too much to read and too much to do. Everything was very interesting and helpful. I’m enjoying all the articles we have to read, they address very important issues. For example, the fact that vocabulary is extremely helpful in understanding written texts. The course is making me reflect on my classes a lot, and I think I should be more careful when I choose a reading book; the key is to encourage students to read for pleasure, so it doesn’t matter the topic they are reading about, what matters is the level of input they receive to not to feel discouraged.

We had to write a technology enhanced lesson plan, something that took me long time because there are thousands of websites to visit and different technologies that can be applied to the lessons; I chose Scribble maps, an amazing tool that allows you to write things on google maps. I think I should visit more webpages to get wind of some more tools to be used in class.

Then we were asked to find problems in our lessons, oh there are so many! I thought at first. However, on second thoughts, I am very lucky, because my students are adults and motivated. They have decided to study English, so it is lucky to have students like them. The other side of the coin is that students are very demanding; they want the lessons to pay off, so they feel very bad when they don’t achieve their own goals. In speaking, those goals are harder to get. So it is a daily fight, to get them to speak fluently and correctly.

I feel I am learning and reflecting a lot. So that’s a good sign!

Week 3
This week has been dedicated to the things I like the most in the classroom: listening and speaking skills. They are necessary skills, yet the most difficult ones to teach from my point of view. Some students have a kind of intuition when they approach these skills, so for some of them practicing these skills in the lessons is natural. Sadly, this is not the case for most of our students. They make a big effort, and some of them seem to improve very slowly. We've been shown some websites where students can practice these skills. We've read very interesting articles about using technologies to enhance speaking and listening and about using authentic materials in the lessons.
I consider there has to be space for all kinds of listening in the EFL classroom. I normally base my classes on one book, the listening material which is included in it is really easy to follow. The listening exercises are normally recorded by actors who are reading a script, what means that the recordings are very clean, without any background noise, the conversation participants project their voices very well, and speak clearly and slowly. As a result, the student only has to strive for doing the task well. However, authentic materials are very difficult to understand, the speed of speech of some native speakers, as well as the accent or the background noise may disturb EFL students. Moreover, the listening activities in books have been selected to practice a certain pattern in language, so students have more context and more information about what they are going to hear in the listening activity. When using authentic materials the teacher has to devise appropriate pre-listening activities to introduce the new vocabulary and grammar structures included in the recordings, this first part of the exercises is vital to get the students engaged. I normally set speaking tasks for post-listening activities, based on the previous listening exercise. After the exercise you realize that the students only listen to English programs because they want to get a pass mark in the listening test, so the difficult thing is to show the students what they can do to listen to the radio for fun, for the sake of doing it, the most difficult thing for me as a teacher is to create the need of listening and speaking in the foreign language.
I've discovered Delicious! It is new to me, but I find it quite useful to share your bookmarks. Thanks to all my classmates for being so generous and share all those wonderful links.
I've read some previous final projects for this course, and I think it is amazing how global a learning community may be. We are teachers from very different parts of the world, and dedicated to different education levels, yet we all have thousands of things to share and to discuss about.
Begoña
Spain

Week 2
We are a lot of teachers, the learning community is working very well. I am learning a lot from my colleagues, thank you all.  This week I have discovered more web search engines,  I think it is very useful to be able to find information taking different sources. It's good to know there are "other lives" out there. I am so used to having google as the homepage of my browser, that I often forget there are more options. I'll bear it in mind from now on. I've started reflecting about my classes and my students and their needs. We started the week writing a behavioral objective, it made me think about how vague I sometimes can be when I set a goal. "Food for thought"

This is getting better. Don't miss next week's post!

Begoña
Spain

First impressions

Hello! This is my first post on this blog. There's more information coming soon. First week of the course "Building teaching skills through the interactive web" of the University of Oregon has started. This week we've introduced ourselves, and we've learned the basics about quoting, posting, participating and blogging. This is getting started! Off we go!

This is a picture of the landscape of my hometown in September. Hope you like it!
Begoña, Spain.