Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web : The End. Week 10

This has been an incredible program, and I had the privilege to work with a great instructor as Robert Elliott, and meet great teachers from around the world,my course mates.

 I will miss the weekly stress, but chances are open to stay in contact with all trough the web. 

Regarding the program: 

In order to  help the  students to take advantage of technology, you must start setting clear objectives  for your activity or program, the  ABCD Model is a practical and accurate tool that describes:

The Audience, desired Behavior, Condition (Academic Context), and Degree (Accuracy and grading). 

Once you have the problem defined, you may plan your CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) program or activity, you may focus on one communicative skill: Listening, Speaking, Reading or Writing, and/or on any sub skill: Grammar, Pronunciation, and Vocabulary. 

It is very important, when possible, to include the activity as part of the course curriculum, this Integration will help you with your planning and with the overall goals achievement. 

Keep in mind, that resources available on the Web and the way to use them are thousands, but there are less available resources planned toward Speaking, due the fact that Speech Recognition systems are expensive.

When planning your activity or program, probably you will need an online environment to interact with the students, this is the Platform, it will allow you to interact and organize the students’ activities, we have explored tools like Nicenet, Googlesites, and ANVILL.

Using the technology as part of the learning process has a number of benefits:

• Help your students become autonomous learners, and be responsible of their language acquisition
• Change your class environment, motivating students and making it more appealing
• Approach different learner styles and different intelligences through different resources, tools and ways to use them
• Increase English practice, changing your six-sides classroom for the Web
• Carry out parallel projects to help students reduce their weaknesses in terms of communicative skills, so that the Web gives you extra time that is not available
• Sharing Rubrics at the beginning may help you to motivate the students and drive their behavior toward the desired performance
• Consider your students’ aim to learn English, how are they going to use it in the future? Technology may give a meaningful content to their practice, and according to your students’ profile a  PBL (Project Based Learning) program may help them for their future requirements
• Large classes? Use technology to help the students, and help yourself  managing the group
• Look for other teachers' experiences with CALL activities, there are Blogs, Sites, Facebook Pages, Groups, Twitters, where many colleagues share their experiences, and there is always the possibility to contact your class mates. 

Luis

Cluster Bombing Week 9

Week 9 has left a lot to apply to teaching English:

How Gardener has developed the theory of Multiple Intelligences, there are 9  intelligences  by now,  and no one is black or white in terms of fully belonging to a specific kind of intelligence or learner style.  

The idea or suggestion in the article: Technology and Multiple Intelligences, is that you may use a different technology to approach different learners/intelligences. Applying different technologies implies a second benefit, changes the learning environment, making it more effective; this environment is defined as background in the article: Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits, by Benedict Carey, and according to him, changing it helps you achieve your teaching or course goals as human brain relates the content with the background.

Finally, if you apply the different technologies in different moments but on the same topic, giving a break from one to another, you will help your students to benefit  of the process of “forgetting and learning”. Recalling the information after some days will help your students’ brain to retain it for a longer time. Cluster bombing comes to my mind, as you can apply different technologies to reach different intelligences, at different moments.

This week, was the deadline to present our Final Project Report, my project American Holidays, accomplished the objectives with the second group of students after failing with the first. The process finished with three Power Point presentations through Skype for a group of students of the CBA Sucre. We have the final week ahead, and is time to start processing all the huge amount of information, tools, and experiences we got in this course. 

Preparing the Project, doing the tasks, and reading was demanding, you could feel like under a bombing, but it is worth the experience and all knowledge acquired. 

Luis