Week 5

Week five already!… Uau!

Who would have said we were going to get here so fast!

Now things are getting really hectic! I`m preparing my project but I don`t know if my students are going to finish it till the end of our course, I’m getting a bit worried about this… I`m trying to implement a medium or long term project based on their final project for English 10, so things aren`t going to be so immediate, even though we`ve already started the activities that will lead to the final product! Let`s see next week how things are…

This week there was something really new to me: building a WebQuest! Even though I had already read about it and even seen some examples I had never built one myself! It`s been a great experience and right now I’m trying to complete it little by little, to see if I can try it out with my students.

This type of web resource is, from my point of view, invaluable for students since it promotes their independence and responsibility and at the same time it represents a challenge to be overcome, which normally pleases students, motivating them as well. For me they are "projects in action", and have a great advantage: their structure - the division in parts allows teachers and students to define, organize and guide their work, whether it is on-line or on paper.

As for Project Based Learning, I, like many others from our course, have already worked with projects, especially short term mini-projects, like writing about a famous person, talking about traditions and so on. I also have access to a lot of project suggestions in the course books here in Portugal, normally at the end of each unit! I had already read about this topic but the material presented to us here at the course (theoretical and practical) has completed my knowledge about it, since I consider it of great quality.For me there is no doubt that project-based learning, together with WebQuests, as they are learner-based, are priceless because they make our students more autonomous and promote learning by doing. In this type of work the teacher guides the students and acts as a facilitator, and counselor. When they do the projects, the students feel more motivated and are aware that they have a large degree of autonomy within the work they are supposed to present.

This has really been a great week! I`ve enjoyed a lot reading my colleagues` comments and projects and visiting their WebQuests! They are all doing a great job!!

Learning, Unlearning and Relearning! That`s the spirit!

Susana

Week 4

Did I say I had had too much to do last week? Well… I guess this week I`m running out of time to complete all of our tasks! But at least there is a good reason for that! This weekend (Friday through Sunday) is the 24th APPI (English teachers Portuguese association) Congress under the topic - "Highlighting key skills in language learning", in Guimarães, a city 50km from where I live! Here is the link to the blog!!This means travelling a lot during these 3 days! Being there all day long and having little time left…

I have been lucky to hear Key-note speaker Prof. David Crystal, yesterday! It was an amazing lecture, as well a great plenary session by Rod Bolitho!

Afterwards, it was very rewarding for me to meet Abigail Dressel, the representative of the Department of State from the American Embassy here in Lisbon, together with Gergo Santha who made a presentation about the American English teaching arena, where I discovered all the potential of practices and products the American Department of State has available for teachers and even students through their embassies and Regional English language offices throughout the world. I advise you to check on your American embassy`s website!

Besides this I was also able to speak a little about my experience up until now here with you this Spring in Oregon, and of course I had to tell them the time I was spending there at the conference was preventing me from being able to finish this week`s tasks in time! I guess it is for a good cause, and I think I’m still going to finish everything!

As for today at the conference I was present at the excellent communication entitled “,Challenges, trends, and aspirations for the TESOL Profession” presented by the president of TESOL, Brock Brady, with whom I had the opportunity of talking for quite some time about our e-course and the work we are doing here this Spring together with Deborah! Then, later on I once again had the pleasure und luck to listen to Professor David Chrystal, a true speaker, fantastic! At the end of the day it was time to hear Scott Thornbury and his “Six things beginning with R”, very good, indeed!

Now comes the part about my week here in the course…

The articles on writing and reading were very interesting and the lesson plans very useful, I got some very good ideas with Decoder (making small flash movies) and Quandary, a free software to build on-line challenging quests or mazes (from the same author as Hotpotatoes), these were the ones that appealed to me the most and I’ll probably use them with my classes. The lesson plans the colleagues have been presenting on Nicenet have given me lots of ideas for my classes and now I’m thinking about what I’m going to do with my students in the project!!

I must go now and have some rest… tomorrow will be the last conference day, and I still have to travel there!

Susana

Week 3

This week I really felt we had a lot to do… and so much content to review and read…! But I guess I’m managing it, it`s already Friday and I guess I’m just missing one post on Nicenet, I`m going to wait for some more comments and then I`ll do the second one. Together with my schoolwork and the teacher training course I’m teaching, these have been (and I guess will continue to be!) quite hectic weeks! But it`s totally worth it!

As for Delicious, I had already come into contact with it, but hadn`t explored it properly yet. It`s a wonderful tool, especially when we have to work with different computers, I guess now I’m really developing my own database of truly important sites that can help me in my work. The more specific we are when we write the tags the more effective it will be, because, if we are not careful with the tags, and are too general it will end up being very complicated to select the bookmarks we need or are looking for, when we go there in search of something specific!
The articles about CALL for listening, speaking, or pronunciation skills, and the lesson plans were very rich and interesting and managed to highlight the importance of technology in my classes and how it could be helpful in improving my students' aural/oral skills. In fact I’ve been studying this carefully and I guess that, together with Randal`s lab and Real English, they all have given me pretty good ideas of how to promote listening and speaking. As I mentioned in my posts I`ve selected some activities from these two sites to use in my lessons, and I think they will be perfect for my students.

I`m already a fan of podcasting, and I’ve used podcasts from the books we`ve adopted in my school, I’ve also created my own podcasts and have helped my students do the same. Even though the texts they record aren`t perfect, far away from that, the students commit themselves to the recording and thus train and take extra care with their pronunciation! They even cooperate more often with their colleagues, especially to ask for the help of those who are better or speak English better! It is really worth it! I normally do this after I’ve corrected the written comments the students leave on the blog, and then I publish the recordings on the blog as well. The video casts are another of my, and I guess the students`, favorite ways of learning English, and the closer to real life they tend to be, the better, and don`t forget the use of films (the one`s we watch on TV or at the cinema), these can be even more motivating for the students and we can easily prepare some exercises based on them. In Portugal most English course books suggest films according to the topics we are studying and there are already those books which include activities and exercises based on parts of the films they suggest!

Now I guess I’ll continue to read some more of your opinions and experiences!

Let`s keep on learning, unlearning and relearning!

Susana

Week 2

Week two came and I`m really enjoying it! I must say I was a bit suspicious about analyzing and exploring search engines and portals… I guess I’m a Google fan (specially the scholar part!), but now I see what I’ve been missing…! Noodletools really exceeded my expectations and Twurdy was a wonderful surprise, since one of the problems our students have when they search the web is not understanding what they find and therefore many times, simply copying without reading, so the leveling of the sites according to their proficiency is essential!

I focused on “Askkids” and I really found it to be an excellent website for my students, young learners, to find what they need in a simpler and more objective way.
Another thing I’ve valued a lot are Deborah`s Tech tips related to web searching, I am in fact going to pass them on to my students, since they lack this type of knowledge when they are online.

At the moment I`ve been talking about the technological world we live in and the Internet with my 10th grade students, so the research I’ve made with the search engines and the objective I prepared for our task were directed to this class. Probably next week I will expect my students to perform the activity for which I prepared the objective I shared with you, the mind map about the Internet and global communication. Then I’ll tell you how it went! I will probably also suggest them to try out “Twurdy”, which will be good, since I have different levels of proficiency in this class, and some of my students are easily discouraged, when they don`t understand everything they read.

As for the ABCD model, I think it is truly useful and objective and it really helps us to put our activities into practice, I confess I didn`t know this model and I think I’m going to continue using I in my lesson plans, even in Portuguese. Something else that really got my attention this week was the expansion of Bloom`s taxonomy to the digital area, essential for us as well, since it is no longer possible for a teacher nowadays not to include the digital world in his or her teaching practice.

Truly a rich week! I`m really learning, unlearning and relearning!

Susana

Writing specific instructional/learning objectives

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Writing specific instructional/learning objectives

View more presentations from Ashley Tan.

Blog Assisted Language Learning

Here is the article a bout BALL I mentioned in my post, since it is no loger available on the web I leave it here for those who want to read it!

Week 1

Blogging… well, this is not new to me, but still it is the first time I’ve fully built a blog using blogger because up until now I have always worked with wordpress and It`s been quite challenging since the two are very different.

So, this week I’ve learned how to work with blogger but I think I’ll have to spend some more time exploring all its potential so I can create something a little bit more different… As for the readings I found some new interesting articles to add to my list of bibliography related to blogging, and I think the discussions about blogging are developing well and all the participants are enjoying very much discovering all the potential of blogs.

When I specifically think of our classes and the advantages working with a blog can bring, I immediately point out the fact that students get a real audience, since their work is published for the others to read, (classmates, friends and family and the rest of the blogosphere as well) This promotes responsibility on the part of the students who will, normally, be more careful with what they do in terms of the content and the structure they use, this way improving their English proficiency.
I`ve worked with 8th grade students using a blog with podcasts in class (if you like you can check it out here), because many didn`t have access to the Internet and some did not even have a computer. This was a b-learning system which had very good results since in the end I concluded that students not only improved their writing and reading skills but their listening and speaking abilities as well thanks to the production of podcasts based on the comments they had written on the blog, and in fact they had better final results.

Let`s continue learning, unlearning and relearning!