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