Technology to provide feedback - Week 14

RATE: 5

Feedback in the teaching area, is a helpful information or criticism that gives to someone what can be done to improve an activity, task or skill. This is an important thing in the process of learning, due to, it could be a guide for the learner to follow the correct way, but how technology could help us to do this? Well, the article for this week show us what useful could be technology to give feedback to our students.

 The article presented different ways to give feedback for example:  screen capture, students can sent to the teacher a paragraph and teacher can open it and record himself to providing feedback. That could help to do this work with less time, especially with those cases in which teacher doesn’t has enough time. Something that I guess it’s important is the fact of help students with lower levels given the feedback in their native language to improve their process. Also, this could be useful to give feedback to all the group of class, sometimes there are common mistakes in an activity, teacher could make a video to give feedback of that, and send it to the all class.

 In my opinion I really like that kind of feedback, because as teacher  seems to be an easy way to check improvement, but I think that it’s could be difficult for students, I mean students just will play the video of his teacher give him feedback, but he couldn’t be able to ask questions to the teacher if he have them, I think that the interaction between Teachers- Students is important and maybe is something that we could lose.

project work - week 13

RATE: 4

Project work is defined as a planned piece of work that has a spaecific purpose, usually that take a long time, sometimes is a big challenge for students. Projects is a word that excites some, but scares others, due to most of the time those activities become in something to heavy for students, however, those kind of activities could be useful for our learners.

The article for this week described that those projects are structured to maximize language, content and real life kills. Something that I really like are the effects of the use of those project in students like, increase of critical thinking, motivation and engagement, improved social skills, etc. the article gives us good examples of activities that can be used to work with our students, also, something that calls my attention was that projects have to be design to engage students to do it and also, those project need to have real purpose, that means, that they have to be connected to the learning needs of our students. many of those project make students to be aware of their knowledge and pushes them to look for their own techniques to development.

Getting students to participate in classroom - week 12

RATE: 4

Student’s participation is a way to have interaction between teacher-student. The article for this week discuss about a variety of benefits that come from student participation. These were the best for me:  Participation adds interest. Students can give their opinion about a topic, due to hear another point of view help to a better understanding and engages students. Participation can be use to develop important speaking skills because this gives the opportunity to the students to practice using different vocabulary.

The second article explained 2 ways to increase student interaction the first one is called think-pair-share which is a technique that gives to the students, time to process their thoughts and this a benefit for them, because they learn to reflect in their answers, also this is a benefit for teacher, because this gives the chance to discover if his students understand the topic. The second one is called circle chat this is an activity in which students share their opinions about a question or topic, students are changing pair and talking with different classmates. This activity changes the traditional dialogue. Teachers have the learning process in their hands, therefore they need to design activities that really help students to improve their skills

Online collaborative writing using wikis- week 8

Wikis as knows as an online resource of information, those are websites in which anyone can write about something specific and share publicly, one of the best know is “Wikipedia”.

The article for this week, describe a little project in which a teacher organize his student to collaborate and contribute with writing ideas to create groups in which the objective was create their own “wiki site”. The teacher divided the class in six groups; each group had a topic that they had to write one page of the document.  Teacher Took a week to checked what his students had written, also students had the chance to checked their own work and their classmate’s work with the objective of improve grammar and lexicon, and finally, the work was posted.

On my own point of view, I think that this was a good idea to promote collaboration and team work; also it was very useful to improve writing. I really like the fact in which students checked their work and the work of their classmate, because that helps to improve their spelling and logic in a document. I really like the fact in which students learned how to create a appealing and professional writing task , I think that this could be a good experience to improve writing skills.  

Internet for reading and writing classes- week 7

As we had already discussed, internet is an extensive tool in which teacher can chose and acquired their own materials to perform an English class.

 One of the articles for this week was focus on literature which is something that helps to the development or improvement of vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension and writing.  I think that The main point and the most useful advantage of using internet to literature is the practice outside the class time, as we know, the time for an English class is around 1-2 hours, and most of the time, it’s difficult for a teacher present everything that was planned, however, teacher can provide to the students the downloaded resources, and students can have their own reading at home. 

Something that I really like from this article is that it give us a list of different ways to performing a reading, with the objective of become more attractive and successful, between these activities are: have students create their own story in English and write summaries of the chapters that they read, as a student, I have seen many of these activities in the coursed that I took and that really help.

On the other hand, the second article describe the use of internet to writing classes, which said that involve web are a good way of motivating students to use English outside the classroom and to make English the part of their daily life. What I really like form this articles is that it explained different types of writing document like, essays, biography and others, this article presented many websites that could help to integrate different materials that help the development of the students and also, I like the way in which it suggest that the web should not be used all the time, internet have to just a way to enrich the learning of our students.

CALL for speaking class- week 6

Computers, as we have concluded are tools that prepare users for real-world. The articles for this week describes the use of computers as a tool for motivate and improve the speaking skill. Those articles explains that CALL help to improve pronunciation, due to, they have multimedia products which incorporate relatively natural speech, that help students to know native accents and recognize sounds. Others include an electronic dictionary.

Something that I really like from this article was that it promote the advantages of CALL, among which are a motivating and interactive environment for learners, it’s offers a private workspace in which students can experiment physiologically threatening in a classroom  or real communication situation, which is interesting. In addition, they contain a lot information to support contextualize interaction. Also, many CALL materials can offer spontaneous feedback.  And the best for me, computers enhance the interaction between the user and the target language content by putting learners in touch with native speakers  of the language, also with many resource free from restriction time and distance.

However, everything have two point of view, CALL can’t give real and verbal interaction with the target langue, they can just, create a model or prototype, we can see that, in some of the software in which the voice of the speaker it’s with a mechanically quality which is difficult to understand. Also something that I don’t like is that many of the resource are not completely reliable. Once again, I concluded that teachers need to be careful with the tools that they use to teach, I think that we can use computers, but also, we have teach as the old technique, Teacher-student as it was in the past. we can use all the resources as we can, but we don't have to forget that our prority is the learning of our students.

Critical thinking and technology- week 5

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing and evaluating information acquired by observation. The article for this week talks about how technology can help to the development of critical thinking and how we (as teachers) can help students to be active intellectually.

 The process of learning is describing as a something nature, humans beings learn through the capacity that God give them to think and reason, to take advantage from this ability, we need to teach them the logics of our disciplines and not just dictate information to them.

Something that calls me attention was that the article mentioned is that “we should do less telling and more acting” for that technology provides many different ways to engage our students through learning, due to, the different personalities, we have to consider the kind of learner that we have, some students like visual information, to them we can use pictures, diagrams, charts and films. Others prefer auditory for them we can use podcasts, videos and others things and like those, there are others more, we have different ways to perceive knowledge.

Something that I really like is that the article presented proposal to use of computer in the classroom as a way of rich the acquisition of knowledge, Due to, it gives us more materials to improve the environment of our students.also it help us to give them the chance of take control of their own process of learning by looking for they own materials and resources. we can decide between, the way in which we want to teach, we can decide what kind of resources we want to use, but we need to look for the best way to  help our students.