REFLECTIONS ON WEEK 8

This week I have found it particularly interesting because it provided us with different kind of tools such as sites for building up exercises, tasks, tests and the like. I always appreciate a tool that helps me to reduce my effort on building up my plan for the week. Once you get to know the tool it is easy to work on as it is manual and handy and easy to construct.

I particularly liked Anvil and was thrilled at the fact that I could record my students’ voices or can picture a short dialogue for others to watch or listen to. I feel my students would like the idea of working with this. I feel they will be delighted as they like to be seen on the screen or heard on the net. It adds spoken language to discussion and you can practice pronunciation. Besides it encourages multimedia communication. It is a form of oral language that is been introduced and with that students and teachers can profit out of it.

But the project took me most of the time as I had to read it and re-read it in order to hand it in. I also read Mustafa’s work and found it interesting, appealing to the students’ interests and motivating.  Then I had to check and write about the project. I liked the idea and got some interesting ideas for my job at school. One always profits from somebody else’s job. I hope I can read all the others but it is a busy week and will have to postpone it for later time.

Elena

 

SECOND IDEA ON AUTONOMY

Many people think that when teachers promote learner autonomy they are in fact promoting students work in a lonely environment away from the teachrers’ job. In fact this is not so as teachers’ work is much more complicated. They have to assign tests, rubrics for students to evaluate themselves and they have to provide activities that generally always demand too much reading on the part of the teacher.

But I think that the most thing is that it prepares students for future life as it helps them to learn about the core of democracy where everyone has to be responsible for the decisions he/ she takes. Students learn to take charge of their own learning and they accept the responsibility of their job. If somebody decides not to do  homework, he knows what the result will be.

In the same way when you vote somebody then you have to learn that if your decision was not right next time you will have to learn better about candidates before voting.  

One interesting activity I generally organize to develop their autonomy is to assign homework and through this you foster responsibility on the students. But it is not only that. It helps students to choose their own learning activities and it involves students in activities where they can discuss a topic, analyse it and then present it to the rest of the class for them to judge.

Moreover students can do collaborative work in small groups and they can keep a record of the job done. They can even engage in their own evaluation progress and be respected by teachers in reference to their decisions.

I believe that learner autonomy helps students to grow up and become responsible adults.

 

Elena

Reflections on Week 7- learner autonomy

You can visit my wallwisher and see what I think about it


http://padlet.com/wall/ftk5qjyq45

I really liked this tool. I see that it is very useful and handy for children. They can enjoy from it and they can set their own projects on it.

At schools learner autonomy helps students to grow up as they become less dependent on teachers and rely more on themselves. Of course the autonomy a student has largely depends on what the student can do with language. At early stages students will be more dependent on the teacher but as timer goes by things will change easily and so they will grow less dependent on her.

But learner autonomy depends on using the type of language the student can understand because if like Krashen said i+1 is instead i+10 then the student will not be able to do it and drop out of the activity.

The activities proposed have to be interesting enough so that they like the idea of doing them and so they become motivated.  Besides these activities have to allow students to think critically and so activities like those include discussions, opinions, etc. In this way they will be able to learn more and learn how to be an adult

Elena

PROJECT WORK

Dear all, sorry to dissapoint you Robert but classes have not started yet. They do on Monday 18th so I will keep the record for next week

But to show you that I am not wasting my time I decided to come to a spa because after so much work ahead and so much work done I thought I needed a rest and as a way to celebrate my birthday . Thus I will take the card you have sent us as a birhday present.

Regards

Elena

Reflections on Week 6

I find power points particularly useful for reading in the case of students as this allows them to deal with stories. It sometimes happens in Argentina that not all students can buy two or three readers for the English class. They buy the textbooks and activities and so teachers cannot ask parents to spend more money on a subject when they have other subjects to buy things for.

So this way of dealing with Power Points was fine for me and proved to be very useful as children can enjoy themselves with them.  When they enjoy themselves they are absorbed by the activity, they want to go on and they are not always aware that they are learning language.

Moreover, through grouping in case of large classes, students will get more exposure to the language and more chances to practice it. They will develop more positive attitudes towards learning English since they will associate it with something pleasant and enjoyable.

Children are curious and active. They like to interact with people. This helps them to construct their understanding of the world in which they live. They do this through physical activities and experiencing things at first hand. So activities like making things, action songs and the like provide excellent contexts for language learning. They learn through doing. There is also a clear purpose for them in using the language. The listen and do activities are very useful for young learners. These activities allow pupils to be actively learning and participating. They are also being exposed to meaningful input.

 Bye,

Elena

 

Reflections on Week 5

I have been reading about project work and I feel happy about that because I like them a lot. Projects allow us to integrate all language that has been learnt throughout a period of time.

PBL help students to develop their four macro skills and at the same time allow them to develop other skills through the use of tools like the internet and other abilities such as cooperative and collaborative learning.

Through PBL work students are constantly recycling, using the knowledge they have acquired and the one they already have. It is a looping way of learning things. Students get academic and social benefits. Academic benefits include knowledge of the language and social ones include the ability to exchange ideas with others and at the same time respect other people’s ideas and ways of learning.

The social interactions among students are not simple. The children are educating themselves. They are creating strong, extended, meaningful, positive interpersonal relationships between teachers and students that foster increased student motivation and, in turn, stimulate improved learning outcomes for students.

In groups students learn more as they can help each other and can solve problems. The teacher is no longer the center of the class or of the activities. It is a student centered development when each person learns from the other. And this is how it is in real life as well.

These projects allow us, teachers, to provide with another way of evaluating students, a much more relaxed way of testing our students. And at the same all the skills are integrated and evaluated at the same time.

Assessment takes an active role in the teaching and learning process but it is far away from the way traditional assessment was carried out as there are no formal tests.

Connected with it, rubrics also find another way of doing things. Students can measure their performances, their drawbacks and their abilities. Moreover, parents through the net can have a direct access to their children’s performance and so they are more aware of how their children are learning.

But the most wonderful experience was about reading Web-quests. On we-quest students learn by doing, that is to say, they do things like learning in a different way and so our lessons improve in quality and motivation. They can be long term projects or simple ones. Moreover, they involve group work and so there is division of work among students in the same way as it is in society. And children spend more time on activities rather than on looking for information.

Elena