Week 7 Power point activity

Hi everybody,

I posted my power point on my wiki. It is called MYSTERIES.
I really enjoy creating power point activities as I find them attractive and useful for students. Power points are less boring than just reading texbooks activities. They also allow us to mix different techniques and mix at the same time different learning techniques that are nor always taken into account in the textbooks or are not so attractive.
There is nothing better than illustratring what you are talking about.

Raphaël

Week 7: Use of Power Point in class.

Hi everybody,

This was a real brainstorming activity.
Many teachers I work with find the use of Power Point activities wonderful but they do not analyze the impact they have on students. As mentioned in some of the reading materials, the use of technology can be really productive but what is important is how it is used.
This week, I had a good experience of the wrong use of technology. One of our teachers asked for an overhead projector for his class. He was given the material but when checked over the activity he was developing in his class, I was puzzled. First the teacher asked for the overhead projector in order to play a movie.
The movie was more than the class time. When asked (during the class) about his lesson plan, he could not present any because he had not clear objective for his class, except passing an hour an an half watching a movie, eating popcorn and drinking softdrinks. The movie had nothing to see with any topics studied during the month. It was subtitled and for a basic level group (6 months of English).
First more than an hour and an half of video is unconceivable.
I try to find videos of three to four minutes maximum.
If you play a video, it is to reach the target language not to play it with subtitles (students just read in their language).
If you do not have post activities with a specific objevtive as for example to check their comprehension by asking specific questions, or by asking a summary (in this case a 6-month English group with a one and an half hour of video seems an impossible mission), or by asking about opinions, etc.

I do not overuse the PPT in class but when I feel it will be worth and have a good impact on my students then I use it. My PPT sessions do not last for hours. Ten minutes or maximum fifteen. After that, I know that I do not get my full student's attention.
I you use technology like PPT, first think abou the goal or objevtive, relate it to what is seen in class and try to mix different learning styles in the same activity.

Waiting for your comments

Raphaël

Week 7: Technology in large classes

Hi readers,

It was again a challenge this week because in my case I have never taught large classes.
In my opinion it is anti-pedagogic to teach groups of more than 25 students as it is a real challenge to try to reach all students. In large groups, you find all kinds of learners and it is not easy to sastify all of them.
Now after reading the material that was provided, I saw some ways to reach all my students but I still have some doubts about how successful it could be until I have the opportunity to be in that situation.(Maybe you can send me some of your own experiences)
I know that in our institute we do not plan to increase the number of students per class. On the contrary, we would like to reduce it to 20 which would be wonderful.
I just remember many years ago when I started teaching English for a National University here in Peru and I was in charge of the Grammar groups. I had to teach groups of up to 35 students in classrooms without any technology ( a portable radio- cassette player). Those classes were really boring and just a monologue. The classroom was so small that it was really impossible to have any interaction in groups, nor any kinds of real student-centered class. I was the only one talking and the students were listening to me.
Another problem was that workshops were scarce and of really poor quality. Just thinking about how I was teaching at that time, I feel shame.

Now that where I work we are fitted with a lot of technology in our classrooms, I see that slowly my dreams come true. The only thing we have to take into account is that not all teachers adapt quickly to technology and that we should organize workshops for them in order to ensure they can adapt and use the new technology properly.
This is our duty to share with our colleagues our new knowledge and help them.


Thanks for your comments.

Raphaël

Rubric week 6

Hi everybody again,

This was a really useful activity for me.
I searched the net for as many rubrics that I could, analyzed them and started thinking about one that could be useful for me and everyone else doing the same kind of activity.
It has already been a long time that we talked at work about preparing standard rubrics for different skills so that all our teachers would use the same system in order to get the same results. Finally this course gave me the opportunity to start it at once and as I got nice comments on what I did and also I found really good rubrics you all posted. All these rubrics you created will help us a lot to make this job faster than we thought.

Thanks to you all.

Raphaël

WEEK 6: Reading on Enhancing Learning

Hi everybody,

Thanks for the nice comments I received on my post, I really appreciate.
This was also an interesting topic. It took me some time before delivering my post as I wanted really to read about it, think about all the possibilities and check my texbooks in order to really find a good use of technology for different activities we have in our books.
This course is so interesting that today we (coordinators) were presenting a workshop to our respective groups of teachers (in- training workshop) and I had to refer to all what I have learned so far in this course. Our workshop was on integrated skills. As I already mentioned in previous posts, we are going to organize workshops for our teachers to open their eyes on own useful technology can be to improve and make their classes more attractive and interesting to students.

See you soon

Raphaël

Week 6: Learning styles

Hi everybody,

This is already week 6 which means that time is running short before our final project. I try to make up some time to work on our weekly tasks and also think about my final project. This week is again interesting. The learning styles were as some of you mentioned not new for most of us but I found it really interesting to refresh my mind on those different styles because we sometimes forget that we are not all the same and that we should not only take into account the learning styles we like but also the ones our students like. Not all our students like the way we want to teach them and this is really important. Just imagine that you attend a workshop and the trainer is a traditional teacher just reading his lecture to the audience and that's all. If you are an active learner who at the same time is a visual learner, you will just get bored, fell frustrated or maybe fall asleep. So we have to keep in mind that what we do in our classrooms must be for our students and not only for us because we like it that way.

Great topic that makes us reflect on our way of teaching.

Thanks and see you soon.

Raphaël

WEB QUEST

Hi readers,

I have just finished posting my last task. It was a great week again. As I mentioned before, I had never heard about Web Quest Zunal. Yesterday night, I started looking for all the possibilities it offered me and I finally created a simulation of what I think could be a useful one for the group I designed it.
All these new possibilities to use the internet to improve our students skills are really interesting. It will take me some time to develop different programs as I am teaching different levels each month which makes it difficult to me. I will have to slowly develop activities for each level I am teaching and also try them (as nobody is perfect). It will be a try and error. I am an optimistic and I think that I should be able to develop e-activities for most of my groups this year.

See you soon

Raphaël

Week 5: WEB QUEST ZUNAL

HI everyone,

Some others comments on the WEB QUEST ZUNAL.
I opened my account and surfed a little bit. It looks really interesting and I found a good use for one project of high intermediate group I am teaching.
I should try it but as I am still learning the different possibilities as well as I am updating my delicious account, soI think I will try to first analyze all my options using maybe a combination of Delicious.com and Web quest ZUNAL before starting it with my group. As teachers, we should first be in control of the technology we use before starting using it with our students.
Waiting for next month before trying it seems to be a wise decision. AsI am working with a month session, it is not a big deal.

See you soon

Raphaël

Week 5: Another wonderful week

Hi readers,

This week again has been interesting and productive. I have learned about a learning style I didn't know about: PBL.
I was already using technology my way but I had never heard of PBL. I found it really intersting. It opened my eyes on some problems I had when assigning presentations to my students. They were coming up with presentations they sometimes didn't understand themselves because they were just copying something form anywhere in the interent and presenting it to the class. Now by assigning and guiding them intelligently I think it will be much better, much more productive and also my students will learn much more form their presentations.

I think PBL is a good choice to improve our students skills.

See you soon.

Raphaël

Week 4: My learning progress

Hi everybody,

I would like to share with you what I have learned and what I have done this week.

First of all, I would like to mention that this week has been quite crazy for me because as I mention in one post I had to deal with the end of the month exams and reports, the days of enrollment and the first days of class and as a coordinator and teacher it is quite a lot of job. So I have been able to start immediately this week session as I wanted, on Monday as soon as I got the material to work on, but I had to wait until Thursday to be really okay to start.

I found again this week really interesting and productive and I see more and more opportunities to introduce what we are learning in our academic program.

I am adding more and more interesting websites I found or you guys mentioned in your posts on my DELICIOUS:COM webstite which is RAFGOGO and that I invite you to visit.
I do not only add websites about English teaching but also about interesting stuffs that could indirectly be useful for my students. As all those websites are in English, it is indirectly a way to make them read in English.
I already gave my DELICIOUS.COM website to my students this month so that they could consult it and maybe find helpful websites.

Now I see so many uses to improve my students skills that I think that workshops should be organized in our institutes, universities or schools in order to make our colleagues aware of the potential the Internet could be in improving our students level in English (or any other languages) and the necessity to adapt to new technology.
We have already programmed a workshop for all our teachers for June-July.
I also think that working as team is the best. Everybody could contribute to implement an e-teaching system in his or her school, universtity or institute and very fast it could be implemented.

I also find the use of technology very useful as it could reduce part of the time we spend in class for some activities like writing and assign those activities as homework to our students. This would give us more time for some other activities like for example grammar that requires more the presence of a teacher to be well understood. It would also make our students more skilled with technology.
Reading and writing in class are time consuming. We can reduce that time by assigning it at home and then checking it in the classroom. For example, a reading activity could take up to 15 minutes and then you start checking their comprehension which takes also 15 minutes. If you assign the reading at home and then you check their comprehension in class or through an e-mail or blog, you can save those 15 minutes to dedicate to other important activities as for example speaking.

So these are my comments on this again very interesting week.
See you soon

Raphaël