WEEK 6 REFLECTIONS

Hi Everybody

During more than I decade I have been using PowerPoint as a essential tool in my classes. I used contrasting colors, not many movements (to avoid distract the audience), an appropriate font size as well as its type. Clear enough pictures for balancing the visual with auditive learning styles. And I had the conception that it was a good presentation and I thought it was interactive too. I was far way of the correct path to have a REAL interactive presentation.

During this week I have learned how to develop interactive PowerPoint presentations through the reading Best Practices in Presenting with PowerPoint - from the UO's Teaching Effectiveness Program and the reading Interactive PowerPoint by Deborah Healey. In these reading I realize what is and not an Interactive PowerPoint presentation that could be useful especially for giving lectures to large classes.

In addition to these presentation this week has been really productive to discuss teaching large classes that it is a common problem all over the world.

I teach large classes and semester after semester I feel that I need more ideas to teach to these groups. Professor Eric Mazur has developed the ConcepTest that mixed with PowerPoint make the classes interactive. Deborah Healey proposes the use of black or white slides to promote interaction in class after a topic or to change the the theme of the lecture. Games, contests, questions are ways to intact with students in a lecture, all of this with PowerPoint help.

WEEK 5 REFLECTIONS

Non - Traditional Learning methods to Form Autonomous Learners.

During this week we read about project - based learning, alternative assessing methods and WebQuests. These methods increase student’s participation and the communicative environment is provoked to get confident students at their learning process.

In addition to these features of these educational tools, the main question during this week was the manner they transform students into autonomous learners. All the readings give us clues to determine the reasons for this occurs and the purpose of this week reflections is to recognize how they work to make autonomous learners.

Project - based learning is an approach that is focused in the interaction, participation, collaboration and cooperation among each member of the group. Each member has a part to work on during developing a certain task. If one fails, the whole group will fail too. This is one way it makes autonomous learners. The same happens when students prepare a WebQuest with is a strategy which needs to be developed by every member in the group. Facts as responsibility, intrinsic motivation, and independent work are enhanced. The result is obvious, the students take their learning process as their own and they become more independent at studying.

The way that rubrics can generate autonomous learners is well established. With a rubric, students are very conscious about how are they going to be evaluated, they exactly know the points they can pay attention to make changes to have a better work. With a rubric students can construct their own assessment and their peers' one. This is the way this alternative assessment can make students to become autonomous learners.

However this discussion, why is it important to have autonomous learners? The answer, more than obvious, is that autonomous learners are the ones with a high level of confidence, intrinsic motivation and they are proud of their learning process without any doubt autonomous learners are the ones who will not fail and this is my personal goal at my teaching practice.

WEEK 4 REFLECTIONS

On this week we are faced to the use of Internet to reinforce students' skills on reading, writing and vocabulary. We read about the influence of the Web on learning English as foreign language and for me the article "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction"of Jarek Kraika gave me a lot of new ideas to develop with my students through Internet. Here the author proposed, supported by serious research, that one of the best current tendencies in developing and improving reading and writing skills (here vocabulary is included) is the Internet. The possibilities to work with those skills and Internet go beyond multiple choice activities. Pen- pals, collaborative writing proyects, descriptions, essays and some other communicative writings are the current activities to be developed through Internet. Despite of this advantages, we have to be very careful and select appropriate web pages for our students.

In Addition, this web - course applies different techniques and strategies than the ones we use for our teaching practice. The lesson plan that we developed during this week challenged our usual way of planning. Planning every lesson is the step 1 in any teaching method, independently of the methodology we are appliying in our classes. I consider there is no teaching when we don have a lesson plan. Now I know another way to plan my classes and I am looking forward to apply it.

WEEK 3 REFLECTIONS

Hello Everybody

CALL: More than a Boom

I would like to star this reflection with that phrase, sometimes, It had happened to me, people think that CALL is just a current trend that is nothing more than “visual effects”, nice sounds and a colorful screen, but it is really more.

The help that CALL give both teachers and students is tremendous, it goes from the grammar practice to very complex forums that allow discussion and interaction. The application of CALL in the teaching – learning process is mandatory nowadays, teacher cannot be apart to the application of this tools in class.

One of the main applications of CALL for learning English is in the development of oral / aural skills.

Lindsay Miller (2011, pg. 3) points “ there has been a rapid increase in the development of Internet facilities and CD-ROMs” , this media permit the practice of the listening and oral skills due to the influence of the video and audio features of this material. The author also says “ this has been prompted, partly, but the more powerful computers we have these days and has been partly driven by the users´ demands for more interesting and innovative applications of the technology” (2011, p.3). The new features of Internet, as Web 2.0, permit the application of CALL for teaching English, here the interaction is the tool that improve the practice of oral skill. All over the Internet we have thousands of web pages where learners can practice in a very real way. Real situations are also presented, videos, sounds, songs can also be part of the practice of the language in Internet

In current world is almost impossible to think about a learning process without the use of technologies that allow the practice of what was taught in class, teacher can be blind to this fact. They must apply them in classroom to have a complete learning process .

WEEK 2 REFLECTIONS

Week 2 is almost over, and I have waited for the very last time to post my reflexions about this week, which has brought a lot of information to develop during this course.

First, I started week 2 reading about the necessity to design clearly learning objectives, which is the first step in every learning process. Where do I want my students know? What do I want my students do? How do I consider they have to work on? are just some questions that can be solved just having correct objectives in our lesson. For this purpose, the A.B.C. method for constructing learning objectives was introduced to us. This method allows us to be focused on the 4 elements that every objective must have in order to be evaluated, assessed and demonstrated because when we clarify the audience, the behavior we want to have at the end, the necessary conditions to produce the required behaviour and the degree that shows what is necessary to achieve the objective.

Other very useful topic this week was new ways for finding information through Internet. In this topic we went beyond Google and had the opportunity to explore more tools for specific research in the net. I have found new sources for my research, I worked specially with LibGuides, that allows researcher to find information mainly from libraries around the world, a very useful tool for researching purposes.

Finally we described our students, It is marvelous to find how different are our students and how common is our work. Here in Ecuador is very common to have super big classrooms that you cannot even understand how can you teach English in this conditions, the only think I can say in despite these big classes we can ( and are able to) teach English, because we love what we do. In the University I teach my students come from middle to low SES, but it is not an impediment they have their own computer at home, this is because they really want to become professionals and they recognize the importance of the technology for learning.

A week full of contributions from everybody which ensure our learning process through Webskills course