5th Week

No longer must teachers and students be limited by classroom walls or geographical distances that separate them from a world of knowledge and experiences.

Well, this week readings didn't bring anything really new to me... PBL is something I'm used to and I had already had contact with WebQuests before in my life. I am also used to creating rubrics. However, it was good to add some website links to my Delicious page! It was nice to learn how to create a rubric online! It was great to, finally, outline a WebQuest that I will soon give life to!
As I mentioned on my post at Nicenet, I enjoyed reading Susan Gaer’s article as it meets my own ideas and much of what Portuguese teachers of English are asked to do! PBL is not new for me I truly believe it can affect student motivation as students feel they are part of the process themselves. Ss get involved in task completion and they usually want to be sure they made a contribution as the project often relates to their personal experiences. Of course, it is not always like this with every student, some of them still don’t engage on it because they just don’t want to do anything… Nevertheless, most Ss enjoy doing projects and these projects help them get aware of the need to learn English at the same time they make Ss responsible for their own process of learning. PBL can enhance a lot of different skills, such as reading, writing, speaking, listening, computer skills, …
Concerning their behavior, I would say PBL is good in the sense that Ss become more participative and collaborative. As they usually work together they learn to respect each others’ opinions and to share, which is very positive.
Now, though I use PBL often, I've never tried doing it with technology...About 16 years ago, when I started teaching, the question was still whether it was worth using computers with our students. Most teachers still didn’t even have a computer of their own and schools themselves were hardly equipped with computers… No wonder many people advocated that it was a mere fad and as such would one day, sooner than later, slide into oblivion and no more would be spoken of it. They turned to be wrong, after all… And today technology is all pervasive and at the centre of much of what is exciting and new in education! Thus, it makes all sense that we should think about PBL with technology. PBL with technology frees the lesson from the classroom and helps to build up autonomous, independent students as they have to work on their own. Students are more likely to be actively engaged in such learning activities if they realize there is a tangible outcome. They will probably learn more and the teacher can teach less. The teacher can become a guide, a facilitator. Lessons become less teacher-centred and thus the relationship teacher/student can also improve.
Now, about WebQuests… According to Bernie Dodge, “an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing.” This definition implies activities with an essentially exploratory aspect against activities where Ss only get information, which proves that its author is one of those who advocate an active learning, one of those who believes that one should learn by doing and in the specific case of foreign languages, one learns them by using (speaking/writing) them. On the other hand, it suggests that the internet is a researchable repository of information with which the Ss must interact, and only if it does not give us reliable information should we use videoconferencing.
As most schools have a limited number of computers and most often they are not enough for all the Ss we have in a class, asking a student to do some research without guiding him/her on that task may mean, especially if the student is supposed to do it at school, that he/she will need the computer for many hours, thus providing others from using it. This is one of the reasons why WebQuests are good – they help Ss spare time, since the websites they are supposed to look at have been previously selected by the teacher who has designed the project. Besides that, as they have been previously selected by the teacher they are bound to have reliable information that is also suitable for the Ss age, maturity and level of language knowledge.
Something that I also think is relevant concerning WebQuests is the fact that Ss may be assigned roles or points of view, which can make it more interesting as they usually enjoy performing!
In my opinion, WebQuests are a world to explore and they constitute a stimulating alternative to many dull activities that we sometimes, either because we lack imagination or time, ask our Ss to do.
I started creating my first WebQuest today and I had lots of fun doing it, so I suppose my students will also feel the same when they are asked to put it into practice!
Have a great week!
Yours,
Elsa