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.