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