Two visitors in my class

Last week two teachers visited one of my classes at night shift, they are part of the Fulbright Exchange Program. One of them is from my city and he is our PAD, a teacher in charge of articulating activities and visiting classes on behalf of the national authority in English teaching in Educación Secundaria, the other teacher was from a high school in Denver Colorado.
I worked with the video of the song 'Luka' by Suzanne Vega and posters of children from organizations againgst  child abuse. The worksheet was focused on: a first part of listening comprehension and a second one focusing on a critical comprehension of the lyrics. Then the last part was for SS to choose between two tasks: a role-play between the Luka and Suzanne Vega or describing to their class how they imagine Luka's life.
Students were very involved in all the activities and had an active participation and they liked the song very much.
About the visitors, Jennifer, the American teacher told me she liked the class and I worked in a similar way to hers, then we talked about my experience implementing new tools in class and what I have done in other classes. I told them I had started a facebook with one of my groups as an alternative tool to blogs.
To sum up, it was very rewarding to have a positive feedback from outside the class, because it encourages me to go on with what it has worked well and to try new things as I learned from experience.  

Assessment result

I'm very happy because my students got good results in their tests, only one student didn't get the minimun mark, so I suppose this is an evidence that the way we have worked has given them the opportunities to learn.

Reading comprehension

This week i proposed my class a reading activity from Braking English News related to exploitation at work.

I chose the activities from the web page and selected the True or False and the activities of synonyms and matching phrases.

Students will have a test next week so it will be a good opportunity to assess what they have learnt about Human Rights so far.

http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/0504/050415-nike-e.html

Life goes on and so does school

The course finished and though I feel more relaxed because I don't have deadlines, a tear dropped round my face when I read Donna's last post. It's amazing what a learning community produces in ourselves even when we have never seen each other personally and we probably never will.

I was very happy with my project result and feedback as well with the final course evaluation.

I'm doing an online seminar now about class research and I can't help comparing it with the 'Webskills course', maybe I want to see something of it in the seminar.

I wonder why we cannot create learning communities as we did in this course with the colleagues we work every day. Is that a kind of professional pathology?

Last week reflection

And we finally arrived to the last week and the end of the course.
 It has been an exciting ride for me and based on my peer colleagues reflections I'm sure they share the same feeling of adventure.

This was my very first experience with technology and I'm still facing a few difficulties with the tools I decided to use. However I forget these moments of frustration and soon after I'm thinking about trying something different to overcome difficulties.

My pace integrating technology in class has been slow, but I'm sure I will not be the same teacher I was before this course and for this I must thank Donna, my colleagues in this course, the guest participants, the University of Oregon for offering me this unique opportunity, and the US Embassy in Uruguay.
I also must recognise the great organization of this course in every aspect and the excellent job done by Donna as monitor.

Right now I'm in the first levels of using technology, I need time to explore in dept the full advantages of the tools I'm using and to get to know better those tools I didn't have time to use.

I only have to say THANKS, again.

Week 9 Assessment of the process

We finally arrived to the Project Report week and we had the opportunity to tell our experiences, and what we learnt from it.

The course is about to finish but I'm planning to review and explore in depth those tools I found most useful but I didn't have enough time to get to know well.

This course has given me the opportunity of joining a teachers' project in my country to share my experiences and what I've learnt.

It has also given me the opportunity to get to know teachers from around the world, get to know their realities and see that no matter how far away our countries are, we share the same expectations, goals and concerns, those that define us as teachers.

Week 8

We have arrived to the last part of the course. This week I wrote my Project Report draft, it was very stressful because I had to prepare another project presentation for Wednesday, but as this project is based on what I have learned and done in this course it helped me to organize my ideas.

Finally I managed to write it in several stages. I think I will have to add some missing information though.

The process of peer-editing has helped me a lot because reading Marsi's Project Report draft and using the checklist I realize what information I missed.

The task for this week was to create an online course or an online or offline exercise. It is incredible that we are still learning new tools after everything we have seen and tried.
I have found some of the tools before in the process of searching we have followed so far, however I have never used a wiki, HotPotatoes, Test Maker or heard about ANVILL.

I decided to create a wiki to compare it with a class blog. I must recognize it was really difficult to create it and learn how to work with it. And I barely know the basics, so I wonder if my students will find it too difficult to manage.
But that's the idea to see its adventages and disadvantages and take an informed decision.

Week 7

This week there were two topics of discussions: Learners Autonomy and One Classroom Computer.

As I work mostly with one computer (I tried to use a the library at school where there are some computers but only four of them work and they are very slow, besides the physical space doesn't allow to group work) I chose to focus on the second topic.

Reading the material about the topic I discovered many more uses for Word that I didn't know they existed!, like templates for brochures, project presentations, invitations, and of course letters.

There is also the possibility of organisation of group work while using One Computer, mostly given different tasks for groups while one is using the computer. Simple ideas that help to organise class work with the available resources.

However another thing is when technology is not available, which happens to me this week, but that's another story.

The resources I found most interesting to me were:

http://www.deborahhealey.com/techtips/may2009.html
http://www.lburkhart.com/elem/strat.htm

Week 6

This week was much better for me, I wasn't as mixed up as the previous one.
I found some very useful ideas reading Discussion Boards that can be applied also to blog discussions. My students have started posting comments on their class blog, at last!
Some of them have had problems with the link to the blog, others have had problems creating their google accounts, so we dedicated one class to use the four computers to do these tasks while I went with the rest of the students to another room where there is a LCD TV to show them how to make comments and posts. It was all an adventure!!

This week I created the Interactive Power Point for this class with the idea of fostering short discussions during the presentation and after it to set a guided discussion in pairs. So in this way I will be addressing the objectives of promoting speaking skills, preparing them for the formal assessment: discussion, and showing them a different way of presenting a topic because when we discuss about presenting their work they only think about presenting folders.

I must recognise something that Mariah told me that made the difference to me. I was stuck with the topic of values and how to face it, and ask for help on the discussion and she advised me to ask my students what values rule their lives. As my students are young adults and adults I decided to ask them which 'area' of the topic Values they wanted to work on and they came up with Human Rights. So here I am, I finished my Interactive Power Point about it an hour ago.  

Week 5 learning

This week we have been reading  and searching about Project Based Learning and Alternative Assessment.

In relation to assessment I use to assess students' work 'informally' a lot with different degrees of objectivity (or subjectivity, as you want to see it), because I keep a template to record students' performances in different areas of language learning and attitudes towards learning, cooperation, solidarity, writing comments about them and even when this will be translated in a grade at last it is a way of taking the whole learner into account.
I had been reluctact so far to use rubrics because I had seen them descontextualized and fixed to any situation or level, but the posssibility of creating a rubric according to the task, level, context and purpose has showed me the usefulness of this tool to assess students' work in a fairer way.

Project Based Learning was not new to me. I had read a book and put it into practice, but it was not a technology based project, so it was completely different.
I wanted to create a web quest to be used with the topic I have to work with my students: Values, but I think the links I got are too difficult for them, so I think the webquest will have to wait a bit and I will start working with the blog as I had planned.

Final reflection of Week 4

This week wasn't easy for me. I wasn't able to organise my time as I did in the previous weeks and yesterday late at night after I wrote  my Technology Enhanced lesson plan and clicked to post it, everything disappeared!!
I think my internet connection failed and all the work I had done was vanished and it was 4 a.m.! Then I quitted and I decided to do it on Sunday again. Finally I did it.

It was really helpful to write this lesson plan because I am a bit stuck with two groups at Secondary school, because we are supposed to work with a coursebook, but it isn't available yet. So this plan helps me to organise my teaching for nearly three weeks.

I'm starting the class blogs with my other classes. I wonder if I will have time to manage so many class blogs!!

Website to create free brochures

Something very interesting also, to create free brochures (if they are for educational purposes). Really exciting, you can print them later. It would be useful to work with tourism, places, products, business, etc.

My BrochureMaker.com
http://www.mybrochuremaker.com/account/login

MovieMaker. Great idea for writing a plot.

I was experimenting with MovieMaker to create a (cartoon) film and it is a very funny way of writing a story.
http://www.dvolver.com/live/moviemaker.html

The link to the my experiment should be
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="never" allowNetworking="internal" height="285" width="381" align="middle"

But I'm not sure the link will direct to it.

WEEK 4 Starting the blog with my students.

Today I was really surprised by the control of mind I showed and by  my 21 students' correct behaviour when we faced the ugly true that only 4 computers worked properly at the time of showing them their class blog!
However we managed to create the necessary e-mail accounts for students who needed them, to show them the design of the blog, to make them authors of it and to explain them how to get to the blog again.
I think I can feel proud of ourselves, doing so much with so little.

Another step

After all we have read this week about Oral/Aural skills and how to develop them through CALL and considering that the class I will work with in this Project has two main weaknesses: speaking and grammar (according to a group self assessment) I am thinking about focusing on the integration of these skills especially speaking as the objective of my project in the context of a thematic unit.
So I have started to search about how to learn strategies to speak rather than specific activities.

It will be a challenge for my students as much as for me, because it is the skill I feel more insecure to teach, as I have said before it is not just settting up a speaking task,we have to teach students strategies and tools so they are able to speak in a foreign language.

Tech-tutorial

I'd like to share this link that it is a tutorial with multiple entries from computer basic management, e-mails, excel, word, power point to the more advanced  topics of webskills. I found it after serching one of Ili's bookmarks, so thanks Ili.

http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/archives/techtorials.shtml

Step by step: creating the class blog for my students and crossing my fingers!

I have just finished my first class blog for my Project Class, or I should say I have just finished to start my first class blog, because they will become authors of it by themselves, I only will tell them where to do it. And then they will write their own profile as a group, to finish with a reflection on how they felt doing all these tasks, maybe as homework.

I must recognize it was quite a journey to guess which settting, formatting and comments features were the right ones for a class blog, because it is extremely important to gaurantee a safe learning environment for learning, preventing anonymous comments. So I found the permission tab where I can choose who are the authors odf the blogs and who can write comments. I hope I had done it right.

Now the next step, to set up gound rules for comments and posts and to help those students who don't have a google account to create one to enter the Blogging world.  

WEEK 3 New decisions

This week I decided not to write only one post a week summarizing it but to add posts as I am learning new things or putting things into practise and I decided  this after reading the Project Report I chose. 

The reason is that I realized I should use this blog thinking ahead, recording  my findings and progresses in a way that it will be useful to create my Project and then write my Project Report. So I will try to post more than once a week as I'm completing my tasks and joining the discussions. 

I think this should be the aim of my reflective blog.

WEEK 2 learning experiences and reflections

This week we learnt about web searches and ABCD model to write objectives. We also had our first task for the final project.
About web searches it was very useful to look at Noodtools because it was the starting point to try new web sites and then share our findings on the class discussion. However the internet still remains an infinite universe to explore and I still get lost into it.
I put ABCD  model into practice in one of my classes and even when I'm not fond of structured planning I must recognized it was useful to check if my objectives were accomplished and in what degree and also to help my stydents know what they have achieved, though I did not tell them the degree I expected from them. I am going to use the model from now on, though I'm not sure there is always a behaviour to observe.
And finally I made up my mind about which class would benefit most from this project, though I will try to apply the project 'unofficially' with some other groups.
In addition to this I will share this knowledge about ABCD model and taxonomies with a prefessor and collegue who was interested in the topic after I told her about it.
I think I did my homework quite well.

Open and optimistic

I feel a bit strange these days because of this unusual optimism about applying technologies to teach. My biggest concern about it  was that I was not sure the frequency ALL my students have access to the internet, but as I'm thinking a bit more about it, they can do it at school! after or before their classes without going to a cyber cafe or to another person's house. So I think it will be a matter of habits and getting used to the new idea and and this goes for me as well! (Maybe even more for me).

Hello everyone!

This is my first post ever! I had made two blogs for trial but this is the first time I am using a blog with a real goal.

Honestly I had no idea about what names people gave to their blogs or what type of URL they chose, so I looked at those blogs you had created while I was doing mine. I have to confess that I changed the name and the URL after seeing yours! I suppose this only proves that Paulo Freire is right when he says that the dichotomy 

teacher- student does not apply any more, we are at the same time teachers and students, students and teachers.