And here we are. The end of our Technology Adventure. Or maybe just at the beginning...
We had 10 weeks of work when we had the chance to learn a lot both about technology use in class and about our own practices and school environments. We could realise how different or similar things can be all over the world when it comes to teaching.
Now that I look back I can see how much I have learnt and though I'm on holidays and I wish they would last forever I'm also eager to go back to school and put everything I've learnt into practice.
I will keep this blog as a journal of my deeds and achievemets concerning technology use in class, so I would appreciate if you could peep into it sometimes and leave your comments!
I than Deborah and all the colleagues for making this course so interesting and I wish you all the best!
Yours,
Elsa
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
9th Week
It’s hard to believe that we are already at the end of week 9. Time does fly. No wonder I’m getting older!
My project is done and delivered. It was nice doing it. Something different that really makes us think ahead… Peer review was interesting and I thank Camelia for her thoughtful comment and great help.
I once read somewhere that everyone learns, but not all at the same time and not all the same way. And that’s a fact. I had already heard and read a few things on multiple intelligences and learning styles, so this week’s readings were not new for me. Still, it was nice to read them and thinking about how technology can help me cope with the multiple learning styles I have to deal with every single day. WebQuests for the active ones, PowerPoint presentations for the visual ones…
As Victor wrote “One thing is clear: technology is here to stay and we are all going to put it to good use. One way or another.” Technology can be very helpful when it comes to address all different learning styles and multiple intelligences we can have in a classroom, but as I have stressed in one of my posts it is not a solution by itself, only an aid. It all depends on the teacher. On the teacher’s attitude and on the way s/he uses that same technology.
Have a nice week,
Elsa
My project is done and delivered. It was nice doing it. Something different that really makes us think ahead… Peer review was interesting and I thank Camelia for her thoughtful comment and great help.
I once read somewhere that everyone learns, but not all at the same time and not all the same way. And that’s a fact. I had already heard and read a few things on multiple intelligences and learning styles, so this week’s readings were not new for me. Still, it was nice to read them and thinking about how technology can help me cope with the multiple learning styles I have to deal with every single day. WebQuests for the active ones, PowerPoint presentations for the visual ones…
As Victor wrote “One thing is clear: technology is here to stay and we are all going to put it to good use. One way or another.” Technology can be very helpful when it comes to address all different learning styles and multiple intelligences we can have in a classroom, but as I have stressed in one of my posts it is not a solution by itself, only an aid. It all depends on the teacher. On the teacher’s attitude and on the way s/he uses that same technology.
Have a nice week,
Elsa
Sunday, August 15, 2010
8th Week
Nicenet - how nice! And how easy! I've learnt how to create a course and now I'm on my way to creating one for each of my five classes. I'm pretty sure my students will love and make good use of it.
Now, wikis... I've used them in the past. I've created one for a group of teachers at my school who were in charge of making the school's Educational Project. And I also used it for an online training course I attended a few months ago. Two colleagues and I (who have never met each other) were asked to write an essay together by using a wiki. I find it okay, but I have some doubts it would work with most of my students... As it is about group work and I can check who did what, I fear some of them may try and cheat... They may ask someone else to write for them, so that their group mates won't criticize or mock at them... I don't know...
I'm not a big fan of potatoes, but I like HotPotatoes! :) It allows us to do a lot of different interactive exercises, which is great! It is just a pity it is a bit of time consuming...
My project... A rough draft! Yes, just that. Now I'm going to work hard on it, so...
Have a nice week!
Yours,
Elsa
Now, wikis... I've used them in the past. I've created one for a group of teachers at my school who were in charge of making the school's Educational Project. And I also used it for an online training course I attended a few months ago. Two colleagues and I (who have never met each other) were asked to write an essay together by using a wiki. I find it okay, but I have some doubts it would work with most of my students... As it is about group work and I can check who did what, I fear some of them may try and cheat... They may ask someone else to write for them, so that their group mates won't criticize or mock at them... I don't know...
I'm not a big fan of potatoes, but I like HotPotatoes! :) It allows us to do a lot of different interactive exercises, which is great! It is just a pity it is a bit of time consuming...
My project... A rough draft! Yes, just that. Now I'm going to work hard on it, so...
Have a nice week!
Yours,
Elsa
Friday, August 06, 2010
7th Week
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso
When I teach the 10th form, there's a topic entitled 'Technology' we must deal with. I often give them the statement above, by Pablo Picasso, and after discussing for a while the reasons why Picasso might have said so, I always ask my students to add a "but" to the statement and expando on it! Some interesting (and some not so interesting!) ideas always come up.
If I had to add a 'but' of my own and expand on it, I would write: Computers are useless. They can only give you answers, but then answers may be the only thing we are missing! After all, what is our work all about? Isn't it about getting the answer to the question 'how can I make my students effectively learn?'? :)
Computers may not be the ultimate solution for all our doubts and questions, but they can definitely help. And they can help a lot in a classroom. No matter if we have 28 or just 1. It is up to us to decide how to let them help us and make the most out of it.
I often use my laptop or the desktop we have in the classroom as a presentation tool and I remember a few years ago when I asked my students to write down what they had liked the most/the least about my lessons, one of them wrote "I love the lessons when you bring your laptop".
In our school, we have a projector and a magic board in each classroom, so the computer proves to be useful for technology-enhanced lessons. I use it to show films, short videos, cartoons, commercials, quizzes, and so on. Students often use it to show their projects and works as well. If I need the students to do some research, I always bring the laptops we have available at school or I ask to have my lesson in the computers lab.
Computers play an important role concerning students' autonomy nowadays, as they use them everywhere and therefore there is no way they can escape learning English! However it is not, once again, the total salvation. As Victoria said “You can bring the horse to water, but you cannot make him drink” and “In language teaching teachers can provide all the necessary circumstances and input, but learning can only happen if learners are willing to contribute.” In fact, learning strategies are something like teaching how to fish, instead of giving away the fish (just another allusion to the most worn-out of all Chinese proverbs!). And that explains it all, or perhaps not!
If students are not willing to learn ‘how to fish’, no matter how much you try to teach them or if you offer them the best fishing equipment, they just won’t learn how to do it. As Tumposky, quoted by Dimitros Thanasoulas, claims “individual learners differ in their learning habits, interests, needs, and motivation, and develop varying degrees of independence throughout their lives”, which means it is not always easy to motivate them or foster their autonomy at the time they are our students.
I always try to vary the strategies I use in order to ‘reach’ every single student, but sometimes they are so unwilling to learn, they have given up so long ago, that it becomes quite difficult to do it.
Something that usually seems to be motivating for my students is working with films or songs. Music is part of every teenager’s universe, so I try to make them work with something they like, so that they feel more motivated. Unfortunately, it does not always work out the way I expect. Most of my students often listen to American or British songs and they can understand them perfectly well, but when it comes to use that knowledge in a conversation or written text, they just seem to forget it! It seems to me that most of them don’t realize that English is a tool they will in a near future use in their daily life, so they don’t really understand the need of learning it.
Something I usually try in order to foster their autonomy is creating a Portfolio. Portfolios enable students to go further in what their tasks are concerned. They know there are core and optional texts they must insert in their portfolio, which allows them to write about whatever they feel like. Besides that, they can ask for help to anyone they want and they must evaluate someone else’s portfolio and, of course, ask some classmate to evaluate their own.
Something else I do is always asking students to work in pairs or groups. As Victoria, once again, says “Promoting cooperation in the classroom encourages the learners to rely on each other and not only on the teacher. Group work also creates opportunities for feedback from peers: learners will do things to please the group rather than to please the teacher. As well pair and group work will involve students more actively in completing the task compared to whole class work.” I sometimes give students a text and ask them to read it and then to create an exercise (Cloze, True/ False, Questions, Giving a title to each paragraph…) to go along with it. When they finish they hand it out to me, I take it home, correct it and make different worksheets with their exercises. Then I give the different worksheets back to the students and they must solve the exercises their classmates created.
In Portugal, we are lucky that films aren’t dubbed, they are always subtitled, which is very helpful for English learners.
Another positive aspect is that, though we have to work with a textbook that is not always the one we prefer or that our students really enjoy, we have the freedom to use other materials and I often resort to worksheets I create. My students always say they like them best, as I try to make them interesting and funny (as much as possible). I think they prefer them to the text book, because they meet their needs. As Luiza says “The teacher has to decide how to adapt resources, materials, and methods to the learners' needs.”
Something else my students love is role-play! They always come up with nice things and feel more at ease with using English in the classroom. I just feel sorry that due to time limits we can't do it more often!
Have a nice week!
Yours,
Elsa
When I teach the 10th form, there's a topic entitled 'Technology' we must deal with. I often give them the statement above, by Pablo Picasso, and after discussing for a while the reasons why Picasso might have said so, I always ask my students to add a "but" to the statement and expando on it! Some interesting (and some not so interesting!) ideas always come up.
If I had to add a 'but' of my own and expand on it, I would write: Computers are useless. They can only give you answers, but then answers may be the only thing we are missing! After all, what is our work all about? Isn't it about getting the answer to the question 'how can I make my students effectively learn?'? :)
Computers may not be the ultimate solution for all our doubts and questions, but they can definitely help. And they can help a lot in a classroom. No matter if we have 28 or just 1. It is up to us to decide how to let them help us and make the most out of it.
I often use my laptop or the desktop we have in the classroom as a presentation tool and I remember a few years ago when I asked my students to write down what they had liked the most/the least about my lessons, one of them wrote "I love the lessons when you bring your laptop".
In our school, we have a projector and a magic board in each classroom, so the computer proves to be useful for technology-enhanced lessons. I use it to show films, short videos, cartoons, commercials, quizzes, and so on. Students often use it to show their projects and works as well. If I need the students to do some research, I always bring the laptops we have available at school or I ask to have my lesson in the computers lab.
Computers play an important role concerning students' autonomy nowadays, as they use them everywhere and therefore there is no way they can escape learning English! However it is not, once again, the total salvation. As Victoria said “You can bring the horse to water, but you cannot make him drink” and “In language teaching teachers can provide all the necessary circumstances and input, but learning can only happen if learners are willing to contribute.” In fact, learning strategies are something like teaching how to fish, instead of giving away the fish (just another allusion to the most worn-out of all Chinese proverbs!). And that explains it all, or perhaps not!
If students are not willing to learn ‘how to fish’, no matter how much you try to teach them or if you offer them the best fishing equipment, they just won’t learn how to do it. As Tumposky, quoted by Dimitros Thanasoulas, claims “individual learners differ in their learning habits, interests, needs, and motivation, and develop varying degrees of independence throughout their lives”, which means it is not always easy to motivate them or foster their autonomy at the time they are our students.
I always try to vary the strategies I use in order to ‘reach’ every single student, but sometimes they are so unwilling to learn, they have given up so long ago, that it becomes quite difficult to do it.
Something that usually seems to be motivating for my students is working with films or songs. Music is part of every teenager’s universe, so I try to make them work with something they like, so that they feel more motivated. Unfortunately, it does not always work out the way I expect. Most of my students often listen to American or British songs and they can understand them perfectly well, but when it comes to use that knowledge in a conversation or written text, they just seem to forget it! It seems to me that most of them don’t realize that English is a tool they will in a near future use in their daily life, so they don’t really understand the need of learning it.
Something I usually try in order to foster their autonomy is creating a Portfolio. Portfolios enable students to go further in what their tasks are concerned. They know there are core and optional texts they must insert in their portfolio, which allows them to write about whatever they feel like. Besides that, they can ask for help to anyone they want and they must evaluate someone else’s portfolio and, of course, ask some classmate to evaluate their own.
Something else I do is always asking students to work in pairs or groups. As Victoria, once again, says “Promoting cooperation in the classroom encourages the learners to rely on each other and not only on the teacher. Group work also creates opportunities for feedback from peers: learners will do things to please the group rather than to please the teacher. As well pair and group work will involve students more actively in completing the task compared to whole class work.” I sometimes give students a text and ask them to read it and then to create an exercise (Cloze, True/ False, Questions, Giving a title to each paragraph…) to go along with it. When they finish they hand it out to me, I take it home, correct it and make different worksheets with their exercises. Then I give the different worksheets back to the students and they must solve the exercises their classmates created.
In Portugal, we are lucky that films aren’t dubbed, they are always subtitled, which is very helpful for English learners.
Another positive aspect is that, though we have to work with a textbook that is not always the one we prefer or that our students really enjoy, we have the freedom to use other materials and I often resort to worksheets I create. My students always say they like them best, as I try to make them interesting and funny (as much as possible). I think they prefer them to the text book, because they meet their needs. As Luiza says “The teacher has to decide how to adapt resources, materials, and methods to the learners' needs.”
Something else my students love is role-play! They always come up with nice things and feel more at ease with using English in the classroom. I just feel sorry that due to time limits we can't do it more often!
Have a nice week!
Yours,
Elsa
Sunday, August 01, 2010
6th Week
I am poor in words, ideas and feelings, and when I sit down to write this poverty will be revealed. Henry Mathews
This was not a good week for me. You can see it on my comments on Nicenet. You can see it on my PowerPoint presentation. You will see it as you read the text I'm writing.
It was my last week before summer holidays, which meant loads of work that had to be finished. It has been terribly hot - 35º to 40º every single day. And on top of everything: some personal problems. I'm everything but inspired...
What techniques might be useful to create a student-centered environment? Well, first of all I think the only way of doing it is by motivating the students to participate, to be 'there'! Now, how can we do that? Personalizing learning tasks to make the lessons more meaningful for students seems to be a good way to do it. I don’t usually use the textbook often because I always think it was created for an anonymous audience, and therefore I try to choose things I know will reach my students best. Both the materials and the activities I try to use aim at doing so. As Janet poses it “the tools we covered last week (webquests and other project-based activities) are one way to approach this. Teachers can use technology to help design a course that does not have all the students follow in lock-step with one another throughout the course”, as it allows the students to do tasks on their own at their own pace.
I've read somewhere that "Presentation is the 'Killer Skill' we take into the real world. It's almost an unfair advantage" (sorry, I don't remember who said it) and this seems to support the need of the PowerPoint! However, I have finished reading David Lodge’s novel Deaf Sentence just a few days ago and there was a sentence in the book I just recalled when reading "Best practices in presenting with PowerPoint", the narrator mentions and mocks at those who use PowerPoint presentations and just read what’s on the slides as if the audience couldn’t do it by themselves, something that is strongly discouraged by the supporting texts we had to read this week, besides being too boring for those watching and listening to the presentation. Just imagine Al Gore giving his presentation of An Incovenient Truth using a bullet-pointed PowerPoint presentation mainly with text and charts. Do you think he would have won the Nobel prize that way? I hardly believe he would... If we use PPT presentations as a teaching aid they should be all but something to just look at or to read, they usually take time to create, so as Janet said they “should be incorporated into the lesson so that we do have time for discussion, thinking, anticipating, writing and summarizing throughout the presentation.” I don’t usually use PPT presentations, so I had never thought about how to use them in a profitable way. The readings we had to this week together with all my colleagues’ ideas were great for me to learn how to do it.
I loved Janet’s ideas about the hyperlinks to make activities collaborative or competitive. Azhar’s suggestion on using action keys also sounds very useful and motivating, so I decided to try it with my PowerPoint presentation. I started with something simple, which can be used with any of my classes as it is about the British Isles, which they usually seem to know so little about (can you believe sometimes I ask them where England is and they dare to say it is the capital of the USA?!)There isn't interactivity about it, but I think it meets what it is supposed to as there are images, buttons and it isn't just about looking at or reading it loud.
Considering my project plan, I must confess I haven't had the time to give it a deeper thought. So, I'm sorry I won't be able to fulfill task 4 this week. Maybe tomorrow I can add something... This week I'll just have to apologise and wait for my 'punishment'!
Have a nice week.
Elsa
This was not a good week for me. You can see it on my comments on Nicenet. You can see it on my PowerPoint presentation. You will see it as you read the text I'm writing.
It was my last week before summer holidays, which meant loads of work that had to be finished. It has been terribly hot - 35º to 40º every single day. And on top of everything: some personal problems. I'm everything but inspired...
What techniques might be useful to create a student-centered environment? Well, first of all I think the only way of doing it is by motivating the students to participate, to be 'there'! Now, how can we do that? Personalizing learning tasks to make the lessons more meaningful for students seems to be a good way to do it. I don’t usually use the textbook often because I always think it was created for an anonymous audience, and therefore I try to choose things I know will reach my students best. Both the materials and the activities I try to use aim at doing so. As Janet poses it “the tools we covered last week (webquests and other project-based activities) are one way to approach this. Teachers can use technology to help design a course that does not have all the students follow in lock-step with one another throughout the course”, as it allows the students to do tasks on their own at their own pace.
I've read somewhere that "Presentation is the 'Killer Skill' we take into the real world. It's almost an unfair advantage" (sorry, I don't remember who said it) and this seems to support the need of the PowerPoint! However, I have finished reading David Lodge’s novel Deaf Sentence just a few days ago and there was a sentence in the book I just recalled when reading "Best practices in presenting with PowerPoint", the narrator mentions and mocks at those who use PowerPoint presentations and just read what’s on the slides as if the audience couldn’t do it by themselves, something that is strongly discouraged by the supporting texts we had to read this week, besides being too boring for those watching and listening to the presentation. Just imagine Al Gore giving his presentation of An Incovenient Truth using a bullet-pointed PowerPoint presentation mainly with text and charts. Do you think he would have won the Nobel prize that way? I hardly believe he would... If we use PPT presentations as a teaching aid they should be all but something to just look at or to read, they usually take time to create, so as Janet said they “should be incorporated into the lesson so that we do have time for discussion, thinking, anticipating, writing and summarizing throughout the presentation.” I don’t usually use PPT presentations, so I had never thought about how to use them in a profitable way. The readings we had to this week together with all my colleagues’ ideas were great for me to learn how to do it.
I loved Janet’s ideas about the hyperlinks to make activities collaborative or competitive. Azhar’s suggestion on using action keys also sounds very useful and motivating, so I decided to try it with my PowerPoint presentation. I started with something simple, which can be used with any of my classes as it is about the British Isles, which they usually seem to know so little about (can you believe sometimes I ask them where England is and they dare to say it is the capital of the USA?!)There isn't interactivity about it, but I think it meets what it is supposed to as there are images, buttons and it isn't just about looking at or reading it loud.
Considering my project plan, I must confess I haven't had the time to give it a deeper thought. So, I'm sorry I won't be able to fulfill task 4 this week. Maybe tomorrow I can add something... This week I'll just have to apologise and wait for my 'punishment'!
Have a nice week.
Elsa
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