Week 6: Power Point, Engaging Students&Interactive Lectures

Dear friends,

Another week full of interesting activities, readings, comments and exchange of ideas is over. It has been a very productive period because it brought into discussion Power Point presentations which we all use and engaging students and enhancing interactivity which are fundamental for student-centered classes.

First, I thought that the potential of the Power Point presentations was well known and there wasn’t anything important to learn about it. But to my pleasant surprise I discovered many helpful strategies while exploring the proposed resources. Most of all I appreciated making quizzes, jeopardy games and including interactive activities: Think-Pair-Share, ConcepTest, Minute paper which can bring many benefits because they are easy to prepare for different topics and they involve all the students. In addition there are websites like www.slideshare.net that allows downloading, uploading presentations and having access to them from no matter what computer. Those who are interested in alternative applications to Power Point could try the online tool prezi.com. This software allows creating a presentation on a canvas by linking different details on a non-linear basis.Here is an example of using prezi.com to create a simple presentation:

Another issue matching our needs was enhancing lectures when teaching large classes. I found it very helpful that the material for analysis contained feasible techniques based on precise research data like the prescription to plan 2-3 minute interactive activities after each 12-18 minutes of the lecture. Also the strategies for checking feedback like using index color cards, minute paper were very welcome because they help the teacher know their students taking into account that the lecture is a type of lesson that puts the stress on the teacher.

To conclude I can say that I feel that week 6 activities brought more clarity in the way I view teaching/learning foreign languages and they enhanced my proficiency in Power Point to use it to the best advantage.    

Best wishes,

Ion   

Week 5: Developing 21-st century skills!

This week has been very “rich” from the perspective of methodology of teaching English  because it focused on something  very important for each teacher interested in new trends in education: it  highlighted the innovative strategies of project-based learning , webquests and alternative assessment.

Of course, many teachers knew about these techniques and some have used them before in their practice but the main thing was, at least for me, to discover the ideas, the philosophy on which PBL and webquests are based.

Exploring the information on the philosophy of the constructivist model on www.edutopia.org  I could see how this modern educational theory tries to respond to the challenges that schools are facing nowadays. The video fragments presenting concrete examples of PBL in American schools accompanied by specialists’ comments were very relevant in my opinion. Even if the chance to implement new  strategies to a similar extent in my country  is very  little we still can interrelate our school syllabus with small short term projects like those with which Susan Gaer started.  

Referring to the types of alternative assessment I would like to mention that I found rubrics as being a very helpful tool. This instrument is good for the student because it gives them more autonomy making them responsible for their learning performance.  Also it is a useful instrument for the teacher because it excludes the subjectivity from the assessment of such productions like oral presentations, essays and letters. I consider that to compose rubrics may be rather difficult and time-consuming when you are not used to it that’s why I appreciate websites like www.rubistar4teachers.org . Exploring its rich collection of rubrics we can analyze and compare those made by other teachers and this way we will improve our assessing approach.  

 To conclude I would say that we as teachers have to know and use the above mentioned methods to correspond to the needs and interests of the new type of students we have:      the net generation.   

Ion

Week 4: Reading will teach you anything you want to know and take you anywhere you want to go!

Dear friends,

Having finished the current week's tasks I think that they required time but they deserved the efforts.

We have focused on two communicative skills: reading and writing. I appreciated the proposed articles because I learned from them how to diversify the writing genres and how to approach them interactively and I found helpful the way the reading practice was presented with clear stages and assessment.

The multi-skill websites were a valuable acquisition for our teaching toolboxes (delicious.com): I liked each of them especially those that contained quizzes and games. They proposed resources for all levels and I easily could decide how they coud be used in my lessons. That's why I like taking part in this course: it facilitates the exchange of experience.Another good part that I find well-thought is that each new task is practiced within further activities. For example, this week we designed technology enhanced lesson plans for which we needed correctly formulated ABCD objectives and ICT linked to syllabus topics.

 

„If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job.”

                                                                                                                         (Donald D. Quinn)

The third step in our project work consisted in something very important: determining students' needs.Each student is different and if the teachers have a better knowledge of learners' backgrounds, interests and anxieties they will be able to adjust their activities to make lessons more efficient. According to the comments made by my colleagues in their posts motivation and inappropriate resources are problems affecting students from many countries. Well, it is good that we have outlined the sensible issues for the beginning, next we are going to include technology enhanced elements to address these needs because "when a man doesn't know which harbour he is sailing to, no wind is the right wind."  

Best wishes,

Ion

                      

Week 3: Communication is the key! Listening and speaking

             Well, it has been a busy, a little tiring but productive week.

We started with something tasty this time: www.delicious.com – one of the most popular bookmarking services. I must say I have not felt the need of using such a resource before but after checking the possibilities it offers I found it valuable. You can save your favourite links and have access to them from no matter which computer and the thing that I liked the most: www.delicious.com and other similar websites allow the users to share their bookmarks which is a feature that all the teachers who are interested in discovering efficient tools will appreciate. Also it is good that you can transfer easily your saved links to another bookmarking service.  Now, the participants in our course who know so many sites about teaching and learning English have a platform on which to perform an exchange of experience.
Moreover, www.delicious.com raised our interest for similar instruments that provide additional features.
This way I discovered www.diigo.com and I liked it because using this service you can highlight, add sticky notes, capture, save and share different elements of a webpage.

Passing to something that represents the foundation of teaching/learning a foreign language- developing communicative skills-we focused on two of them: listening and speaking.

Reading the proposed material and my colleagues’ posts I saw that many teachers were not pleased with the resources our textbooks presented for listening.
Fortunately we have the internet and sites like  www.esl-lab.com where listening activities are presented in a teaching sequence respecting the recommended stages (pre-, while-, post-) and are extended to speaking.

Finally, there was a moment to make another step in working on our projects. Intending to start and maintain a class blog I was very happy to discover that there were teachers from previous courses that had done similar things. The study of Camelia Pagila’s project was thought-provoking because discovering how she inter-related the compulsory syllabus with the use of technology I wondered if I would be able to do it as well. Another strong point of her work is that she managed to adapt tools to match different learning styles and skills because I think we must not consider technology a goal in itself but an efficient tool for developing communicative skills. This is my main conclusion for this rich week.

Best wishes,
Ion