Week 10: Evaluate Your Use of Technology and Advice to Future Participants

Dear all,

This 10-week online training course for English Language Teachers (ELTs) has helped me to build skills in English language teaching with technology. All the contents, tasks, readings and activities has enable us to understand and use appropriate technology to enhance the learning environment and outcomes for our classes.

All the contents studied in the webskill course were interesting, useful and applicable in our classes. I liked the topic where we reflect on the importance of analyzing students´needs before planning and selected what technology tools to use. Additionally, stating clear objectives by using the ABCD method was something new for me but helped me to identify abservable learning indicators to plan my classes in a better way.

I will try to use all the tech tools that I have learned throughout this course among them:
Nicenet
Webquest
Rubistar
Padlet
Delicious
Blogger

I am impressed about the existance of the array amount of tools that are available for free, we have to keep learning new things to motivate students. I think that it would be good to look ar e- portfolios as tools for learning or evaluation.

 Best ,

Alba Vargas

Week 9: Learning Styles & Technology Connections and final project

"There is a very important and fundamental relation between learning and personality development. . . . The two interact in a "circular process." Thus, mastery of symbol systems (letters, words, numbers), reasoning, judging, problem-solving, acquiring and organizing information and all such intellectual functions are fed by and feed into varied aspects of the personality--feelings about oneself, identity, potential for relatedness, autonomy, creativity, and integration."

Barbara Biber

I can not believe that time has passed so fast, we are about to finish this amazing course. It has been a very busy week. We have read about learning styles and technology tools for multiple intelligences to apply in our classes. We also learned how to assess students and worked on the final project.

Learning styles and technology tools

The discussion in this week was about how a piece of technology can be used to meet the needs of more than one learning style, and one learning style can be reached by more than one piece of technology, as well. That is why we as teachers have to plan lessons which evidence a great variety of resources and technological tool, otherwise it is impossible to achieve good results with all the learners.

We also reflected that we have to look for appropriate strategies and approaches in order to propose useful activities that first motivate them to learn and provoke cooperative and autonomous learning.

For example we can:

• Use Photosynth for visual learners: http://www.slideshare.net/Microsofteduk/building-a-class-community-with-free-tools?related=1
• Create a collage using AutoCollage, a free tool that is available on http://www.pil-network.com/
• Use blogs (www.blogger.com), websites, wikis (sites.google.com) and other collaborative tools to promote project based learning.
• Look for opportunities to learn through audio-visual presentations (such as CD-ROM and Webcasts.)
• Books that are available on our institution libraries, e-books, stories, course books.
• Free articles available on the internet selected according to the topics.
• Audio learning: looking for podcast. Some of them are in youtube and others we could find in Itunes. Many universities are publishing their videos in Itunes,too
• Videos: Use youtube also and websites like www.ted.com/ or http://dolectures.com/
• There are some open courses (OCW) like http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/essay-and-report-writing-skills/content-section-0.

Final project

My project was aimed at motivating learners to improve reading and writing skills; that is why I created the following wiki:

https://sites.google.com/site/readingandwriting2015/

First, I want to overcome the problem that I have in my currculum desing course. My students have problems identifyining key information fronm readings and they can not also write academic summaries which makes it difficult for them to achieve the contents of the course; once students strengthen the reading and writing skills, I will feed the wiki with material about the curriculum deign course to teach my students how to plan lessons and courses and how to add free technology resources for teaching English in schools and high schools. Undoubtedly, pupils have a positive attitude towards educational technology, and are willing to use educational technology to support their own learning process.

During these nine weeks I have learned more that just technology, it has been a course where different skills were streghten, starting form organizing time for work, home and study, cooperative learning, critical thinking, innovation, curiosity and others. Additionally, I learned that teaching in EFL classes must be focused on making language learning more engaging and relevant to the digital generation. One way to achieve this goal is by introducing technology in the classes, applying leaner centered approaches, looking for appropriate strategies for teaching and evaluating learning.Therefore, I want to transmit all this beatiful experience to my students.

Week 8: Teacher Resources Online

This week we work on our project plan ( Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web) by using the Project Report Template posted on Projects page. The overall goal of the project is to plan and implement a change related to technology use in your classroom. In my case I have a group of advanced learners who struggle getting relevant information from readings, this makes it difficult for them to learn the contents of the language curriculum course.

Therefore, I planned to create a wiki to help my students to overcome this problem by setting two objectives:

1. Provided with exercises and online resources proposed in this wiki, advanced learners will be able to strengthen reading comprehension skill by skimming and scanning articles and readings, with a 90% of mastery.
2. Provided with exercises and online resources proposed in this wiki, advanced learners will be able to strengthen the writing skill by applying strategies to summarize relevant information from readings and articles, with a 90% of mastery.

It was a challenging task because we were asked to to offer evidence as to how successful the technology experiment was in addressing the original class problem , as well as how we think this technological change well help to improve our class. Then, we were asked to share our draft project report or plan with our partner by posting it on the course wiki, in order to get feedback and advice on how to make this project successful.

Regarding the Discussion & Task I use the Crossword Puzzle Games to create a crosswrod puzzle about a list of key terms related to curriculum design. Then, I created a lesson using blendspace https://www.blendspace.com in order to gather resources for a lesson titled “Language curriculum design overview” where I put some resources. The site I created is this https://www.blendspace.com/lessons/AANEM6CgXX49Yg/edit.

The material included in this site is for advanced learners who are in the curriculum course. These tools allow to emphasize student centered pedagogy and accommodating student diversity. By having access to these resources, learners will direct their own learning in a more constructivist way because they will be the ones who will manipulate the tools and study the contents to apply them in real contexts, which will motivate them.

Week 7: Learner Autonomy, the One-computer Classroom, and Mobile Devices

“One of the primary roles teachers can play in enabling and encouraging learner autonomy in a face-to-face or online context, is to provide students with guidance on recommended online tools and services”. Godwin-Jones (2011)

By reading the different articles we were able to share specific ideas about what wecurrently do and what else we could do to encourage greater learner autonomy in our classes. Basically we checked some strategies how teachers can take advantage of one classroom computer and mobile devices to enhance autonomous learning. This way learners can increase their creativity and generate their own knowledge, something that I consider a primary skill that learners need to develop in this new age, since they have to utilize their digital sources effectively in order to attain their learning goals.

Thanks to the the emergence and evolution of networked technology the concept of autonomous learning has changed and broadened in a favourable way ascribing the great value to the students’ responsibilities since students are required not only to make decisions about their learning but also they have to construct their own self- access.

We also use an intersting online tool called Padlet where we find and post resources like ideas, images, quotes, videos, and articles about common topics: learner autonomy, the one-computer classroom, or using mobile devices. I would like to share this link which presents different ways to use this tool in class:

32 Interesting Ways to Use Padlet in the Classroom

Week 6: Creating Student-centered Classes and Interactive PowerPoint

In this week we have learned how to use Technology Tools for Creating Student-Centered Classes, including Large Classes.  I think that one of the most influencing factors that English teachers face, especially in public institutions, is the number of students, which makes teaching difficult. Within this context we have researched and analyzed how to create Student-centered classes by using technology. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that technology alone it is not likely to transform traditional learning environments into student-centered ones, both teachers and learners are required to know their roles. 

In fact, Student-centered learning implies significantly change of roles for students and teachers as it is clearly stated in this video: Student-Centered Learning (21st Century Education). 

With this new approach in mind, I designed an interactive PowerPoint presentation for teaching future tense to advanced learners. I have to tell that it was not an easy task specially when I was designing the quiz because I did not have much expertise on using the different functions like macros which are available in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 to create cool interactive presentations.

I read the article provided in the course and other resources like videos and hyperlinks. For example the following site really helped me to create a simple quiz to add in my presentation to evaluate the students’ understanding of the use of will and be going to : http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/pptblog/easily-create-a-quiz-in-powerpoint-using-visual-basic-for-applications/ .

By doing the quiz, I learned that there are functions called macros that are useful to create quizzes in a ppt presentation format, so students can immediately get feedback, but it is necessary to assure that they are on otherwise the functions will not work.

I also checked my colleagues’ blogs and presentations which guided me to create this task.  I invite you to comment my blog.

Best,

Alba

Week 5: Project-based Learning, WebQuests, and Rubrics

Dear all,

This has been a challenging week, the task and the contents that we studied were related to Project-based learning (PBL), webquests and rubrics.

As for PBL, I learned that it is an instructional method that benefits both teachers and students. In fact, it is a method that makes students feel highly motivated because they get involved in active learning by solving problems, making decisions or investigating real problems; meanwhile teachers enhance in professionalism and collaboration with other teachers providing learners with essential life lessons in order to equip them with practical knowledge and experience to deal with real-life situations that they may encounter in their daily life.

This method is applicable in different contexts, especially in my class. I am going to apply PBL in my class in order to encourage my students to work in groups and to be creative and innovative proposing solutions about how to deal with discipline problems in an English classroom, for that they will work in groups in order to interview English teacher and propose solutions. This way, assessment is done based on what students can do, that is on how they apply knowledge and that is excellent.

Regarding WebQuests, it is the first time that I started to learn about it.WebQuests look really amazing and they are a form of PBL where the teacher creates a task, provides internet resources and ask learners to work in groups in order to do or produce something. I like this tool, but I do not feel comfortable yet to start using it in my english classes.

We also read and reflect on the way how to assess learning in an objective way by using rubrics. I created one using the tool rubistar, it was easy and fast. I created one to evaluate a task in which students were asked to read and summarize an article about environment analysis. These group of advanced learners belong to a reading and writing course.

The last activity was to step ahead on our project. I am going to address the lack of reading and writing skills on my students. I have decided to create a wiki where I will provide students some guidance and strategies for them to identify main ideas and to summarize information.

The tech resources that will help me to achieve this are:

• Recognizing the Main Idea http://www.proliteracyednet.org/downloads/44Recognize.swf. Here learners can identify a foundational part of any type of literature: the main idea.
• Understanding What You Read http://www.tv411.org/reading. where learners can find an array of video lessons that cover topics like reading newspapers, reading poems, summarizing and even reading medicine labels.

Please could you be so kind giving me advice on how to address this problem. Suggestions and comments are all welcome!!

Alba

Week 4: Skill-building Websites for Reading/Writing Skills and Technology-enhanced Lesson Plans

Dear friends,

Digital learners

After participating in the weekly tasks, I am ready to share my reflections on what I did and what I learned during this week. By reading different articles and by exploring some web sites, I had the opportunity to see examples of successful technology integration in teaching. This cause me to examine and revise my beliefs about the importance of implementing meaningful technology in my English classes.

I am happy that technology can equip teachers to address digital learners’ needs in an almost limitless number of ways. Thus, we cannot keep creating classes by using methods, strategies and materials that do not include media otherwise we kill motivation and creativity.


Students´opinions inn the video below 21sr CENTURY EDUCATION corroborate what I previously mentioned.

There were interesting assigments that allow us to create a technology-enhanced lesson plan and explain how it is similar to or different from the regular lesson plan format that we normaly have in our institutions and in our daily teaching practice.

Those assignments were:

1. One related to reading/writing skill building.
2. The creation of a technology-enhanced lesson plans.
3. Participation in discussions, and
4. A personal reflexion on how I am learning in the blog.

Week 3: Oral/Aural Skills and Delicious Tool

In this week we worked on a nicenet discussion about aural/oral skill-building. We create a Delicious page, read and discuss a past sample project report and wrote a weekly reflection on the blog. We learned that there are websites which have a lot of resources for teachers in order to build students´aural/oral skill. 

Additionally, we use the Delicious tool to create a web page to store some useful links with tags, categories and descriptions in a web page. I think this is a good tool to share web resources with our learners although we have to be careful with choose quality resources. This is the URL of my delicious page: https://delicious.com/abvargas where I added my favorite link:

• Ted Talks (http://www.ted.com/).- An interesting website page where we can find interesting and entertaining short talks about topics in English as well as in other languages. 
• Do Lectures (http://dolectures.com/).- A place where we can find inspiring talks from passionate, creative people that teach how to do things, thus inspiring others to do things too. 
• Between Teachers - The Movie - An educational experience unprecedented (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnaunQx66yE) .- a documentary about innovative educational experience. It’s an encounter between life and education through self-knowledge in class.

Usón, P. (2013). Between Teachers
- The Movie - An educational experience unprecedented

Finally, we read and analyze samples of projects. Among them were:

• A Reflection on & Action Research Report, Working with a Large Class of Grade 13 "Terminale" Students Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web Project Report. 
• Project Report for Graduate Students at the Jesuit University of Philosophy and Education "Ignatianum".

I choose the project designed by Nikiema (2010) tetled “Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web” in order to comment on the nicenet. The overall project goal is to plan and conduct action research, which involves a change related to technology. 

The interesting thing in Nikiema project was that the teacher promoted autonomous learning by using new technological tools in order to involve learners in active reading, writing, communicating and sharing opinions.

References.-

Nikiema, T. B. (2010). Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web. E-Teacher Scholarship Program, 1(2). Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B05v8GScCgIvZzZVOEEzTGE3TlU/edit?pli=1

Week 2 - ABCD Objectives and Web Searching engines

This week, we learned the ABCD model to write instructional objectives using a standard protocol where we define: audience, behaviour, condition and degree to place them together and come on with objectives that reflect specific, observable, and measurable learning outcomes.

In order to accomplish this goal, we had to analyze what an objectives is and distinguish the ABCD method from other ones in order to compare and see how it works and can be applied in real examples. In my case I propose the following example:

ABCD Method for Objectives

• Audience (A) – The group of learners I teach belong to seven level of the English program. There are 18 students and they speak English at a high level. The course I teach is Curriculum design and Materials.
• Behavior (B) – will be able to choose the teaching techniques for designing a lesson to teach simple present to high school learners.
• Condition (C) – after analyzing a list of ten examples of techniques for teaching grammar.
• Degree (D) – mastery (100%) at least three techniques out of five.

OBJECTIVE:

“Provided with a list of ten examples of techniques for teaching grammar, students will be able to choose at least three suitable teaching techniques out of five for teaching simple present to high school learners.”

How the teacher will achieve this objective:

The teacher will provide learners with a list of ten teaching techniques. There will be different examples, contexts and situation where they can be more suitable to use. Among those techniques for teaching grammar are :

• Analysis of examples to determine the sentence patterns or structure
• Completion exercises where clues and hints are provided for students to apply the grammar content knowledge
• Minimal sentence pairs
• Scramble and unscramble sentences

Web searching

Additionally, we learned to use a wide variety of web searching engines which offer a wide variety and quantity of information resources. Search engines are not limited to Google and Wikipedia. We could realize that there is an enormous amount and variety of search engines that enriches the Internet, making it at least appear to be organized and saving searching time.

Noodletools has a list of useful search engines to easy find didactic resources in short time since they have the option to refined to have more precise results.

Week 1- Introductions and creating an academic blog

In this first week we familiarize with the course material and the teachers community where we will participate in activities like discussion and creating a blog using nicenet and blogger. One first activity was to log into Nicenet in order to introduce ourselves to the other participants, thus creating a learning community.  With this activity I could virtually meet English teachers from different countries who shared some personal teaching experience and posted interesting quotations or saying to reflect on.

Other activity was to create a blog On Blogger (www.blogger.com) to share what we have done and what we have learned so far. I think that it is an effective an easy tool used to create blogs. Using blogs can definitely help to enhance learning in an interactive and motivating way.  They also permit to share information with the world in few seconds.

Finally, I would like to say that participating in discussions is an interesting technique that encourages participants to express different points of view and generates good questions on the proposed topic. That is helpful because all participants can deepen learning.