WEEK 10... THE END OF THE COURSE AND A NEW BEGINNING

So this is already the end? These ten weeks flew, it always happens when you are engaged and motivated and this was exactly how I felt in the course. What a great opportunity for new learning and experiences. Every single week was a surprise box or a tool box to open and discover. I enjoyed a lot reading such interesting texts on creating objectives, learning autonomy, learning styles and the different approaches and strategies to teach reading, writing, listening and speaking using technological tools. I was aware of some of the tools, like power point, some sites to practice English and blogs; but most of them were completely new to me: Webquests, ANVILL, interactive PPT and they are still a challenge because I think the journey didn’t finish here, it’s just starting, I see it like a new beginning for our professional development. The learning has been enormous but now it’s the time to travel the road alone, or at least without guidance because I think it would be very valuable to keep in touch with the participants of the course and continue sharing knowledge and experiences.

Thanks to Janine for her valuable and encouraging comments and thanks to my classmates who took some time to read my reflections and leave a short message.

Best wishes to all of you.

WEEK 9.. THE END IS NEAR

This week we reflected on Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles. I learned there are several ways of classifying learning styles and there are many learning styles inventory quizzes on the web that we can use not only with our students but also to check our own styles. The way we as teachers learn is very relevant in the way we teach, for that reason it's very important to refect on own processes in order to understand our students better and for the benefit of our classes and lessons. It was very interesting also to read about the introduction of technology for different styles of learners, there are excellent ideas in the texts assigned for this week. 


This week was also very important because we put a final period to our projects, we published our final report in which I am sure all of us did our best and are anxious to implement it in our classes to see what happens.

WEEK 8: A VERY BUSY ONE ...

The end of week 8. This has been a very busy week because we have been working hard in the draft of our project and the peer review. I have peer reviewed Ilham's project and it has been very interesting to see that despite we are so far away, she in Morocco and I in Colombia, our students share similar features with respect to the attitude about learning a language. We both focused our project on improving their motivation and autonomy. We had a very interesting guest, Jeff Magoto, who is the creator of the virtual lab ANVILL, and has kindly shared with us his valuable knowledge. Thanks Jeff. Getting to know ANVILL has opened my eyes to a great range of possibilites to use technology in my English classes. What a wonderful tool! I'm just getting familiar with it but I plan to become an expert and use it as much as I can in my lessons. Something that is very good about ANVILL is that it promotes learner's autonomy in a very interactive and appealing way. Certainly this has been a very productive week.

Week 7 is ending… we are very close to finish our trip. This has been a very busy week, we have been working on our weekly reflections and discussions and also in the final Project. This week I have got wonderful ideas to work with a single computer in the classroom. The most important thing for this is that all students can work or do something in order not to waste time. For this purpose, the strategy of working stations is very useful, the idea is that small groups of students rotate to work at the computer station for some minutes, while the rest of the group is working on something else. I’ll try to put this strategy into practice and see what happens. We have also read some interesting material about learner autonomy. Something that has made me reflect a lot is the concept of teacher autonomy which is very important for developing autonomous learners effectively. So, we as teachers have to analyze our teaching strategies and beware of possible changes we have to make in order to construct learner autonomy in our courses.

GROWING...

This week has been so productive and as well as in the image, our ideas are growing day after day. We have been working around the topic of engaging students through interactive activities, either using technology or not. A very interesting conclusion we have drawn is that technology is “one” tool not “the” tool and even such a good alternative can make harm if it’s misused or overused. We have worked on making interactive presentations using powerpoint and this has been a fantastic experience because many of us have learned a new use of this program, which in the past we used just like a transmission tool; and I say past because from now on we will take the most of powerpoint interactive features to make our presentations not only more appealing but better teaching instruments because students will interact with the material not only watch it, read it or listen to it. Some of the participants have even created a Jeopardy game, a very entertaining activity to change the mood of the classes and reinforce topics. I have also read about cooperative learning, another interesting strategy to engage students in their own learning. This is an approach which remarks positive interdependence and individual accountability of the group members, in order for everybody to work together for the group’s good result. I have a lot of things to learn about the cooperative learning approach, which is not a new one, but a theory we have to learn and manage in order to implement it appropriately in our classes. As somebody said in the discussion board this has been” a week of treasures” for us. We have discovered wonderful tools which certainly will help us in our purpose of becoming better teachers every day.

Well, this is the end of week 5. We are already in the middle of the course... time passes so fast. This week we have read and reflected on a very interesting topic: PBL (Project Based Learning) which I see as a great tool to promote students motivation to participate in the classes and do their assignements more enthousiastically. The essence of PBL is to get students involved in the creation of their own knowledge, so the teacher's role changes drastically and this is the paradigm we have to break now: teachers are not transmiters of knowledge, we are facilitators and guides, but students must participate actively in the teaching process. Besides, we have read some materials about rubrics, as a tool to assess students in a formative way. We have discussed the advantages and benefits of using rubrics, such as better results in the student's perfomance and a way to evaluate them more objectively, with enough criteria. Some of us have discovered the concept of Webquest, which was new to me. Webquests promote project based learning by using technological tools and if they are well planned, according to the students needs and preferences, they are excellent sources of ideas. This is a brief summary of this week, it has been so productive and the most fantastic thing is that we are learning so much from people we don't even know personally. This is a wonderful experience.

This week we have reflected on the use of the Internet for teaching reading and writing skills. So far we have completed analyzing the teaching process of the main four skills in a second language: listening, speaking, reading and writing. The most important I have learned is to understand the great possibilities that the use of the internet has in the EFL classes, especially to tackle with the problems that most of us have in our teaching environment: the lack of time to deal in class with the different abilities and the difficulty to integrate them in a balanced and coherent way. We have explored wonderful resources in these areas and we have realized that the Web should not be used all the time but rather a teacher should spice lessons with the Net component when it is really profitable for students, so it's very important to have clear objectives and to be really well prepared for our on-line lessons.