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