Week 15: Advantages of technology.

Technology offers a great variety of visual and audios resources like images, videos, etc, and they are a great tool to implement during the teaching process. Technology offers great advantages while implement it during the learning process, for example: students become responsible, they avoid anxiousness, they can practice as much as they want.

Technology is helping us as teachers to help the learning process of our students and make it more meaningful, for teachers as well is a great advantage, because they can create their own test, they can create practices to help students understanding and practicing about a topic.

In conclusion, students and teacher need to get familiarized with technology, because it is a great resource to be used in an meaningful way to help the learning process.

Rate: 2

Week 14: Projects

Using technology and projects has become useful in the educational field.

Is a great resource if we want to get and keep our students motivated in a class, besides that it contributes to maintain a positive attitude hence students will become through time autonomous. 

Working on projects  make students more responsible and as we have been reading  the teacher instead of being the source of all knowledge, is a collaborator who helps students themselves gain the information and skills they need to succeed.

Project using Basic Grammar: Students will work in pairs they will be given a list of 10 verbs in past tense and they have to  create a story. After creating the story, students will have to record a video, telling the story. In order to do this activity, students can use a cellphone, tablet or  a camera.


Rate: 4

Week 13: Having students active

we as teacher need to keep motivation and curiosity on what we are teaching, we must pose questions, topics, activities that intrigue and fascinate our students. when students participate in class, they are forced to pay close attention to the lecture and think critically about the subject at hand. This is a great way to remember the information you learn over the course of the semester. Classroom participation is important because learning is not just between the student and the teacher but part of the whole classroom experience. When students participate, they learn from each other and internalize the knowledge better.

Besides that, the activity on NiceNet was really interesting, as far is one of the activities I have enjoy the most, not only because it was about an interesting topic, but also because I had the opportunity to interact with my classmates and notice that not only for me is important to have students interaction in classroom.

Rate: 3

Week 11: Drawing tool

As we have been reading, students are totally different and they have different learning needs and styles, but they all have something in common, is that they are attracted to technology. Today students are fluent in the use of technological devices and social networking technologies and teacher can take advantage of this knowledge to enrich the learning experience.

 Introducing mobile phones into learning experience might sound a little bit wild, and at the very first view might appear some concerns like, what if students gets addicted to cellphones? or what if students misuses that technology?. But if we pay  close attention, cellphones are a great tool to explote during class time, our students can access mobile applications wich are available for example:

• Calendar helps to keep track of class dates and mark important submissions,
• Phone’s camera cal help students to annotate assignments with pictures,
• Photo viewer, audio and video player can help to disseminate and assimilate know led in a fun and easy way.
• Calculator as a great resource

As teacher, our duty is not to restrict the use of cellphones, but to encourage a productive management of it.

Rate: 5

Week 10: Enriching vocabulary.

We know that reading and vocabulary are some of the hardest part in learning because we as teachers cannot evaluate only how faster a student read a book, but also how much they understand about this reading. But technology offers a great resources and strategies for integrating technology to develop vocabulary as part of reading and learning. Something I learned in this article was that to encourage students, teachers need to be very creative and the best part of this is that technology is helping us a lot.

There are many websites that let students to verify how well they are doing with their vocabulary and also to learn more vocabulary. For example, http://www.lexipedia.com , lexipedia is an online visual semantic network with dictionary and thesaurus reference functionality, I have used it before because it is very useful and it not only give the definition of the word we are looking for, but also it provide what category the word is and some synonyms and antonyms. 

There is also another page that is very complete, creative and useful, is a fun educational website dedicated to help teacher to build reading, phonics, or English language skills,  http://www.vocabulary.co.il is an excellent vocabulary website that offers hundreds of amazing games and activities to teacher vocabulary.

 The quote that most cough my attention and that I think it summarize the information I have read is:  “Vocabulary is one of those things where the rich get richer.”- Dr. Eli Hinkel (Editorial Board 2009)

Rate: 5

Week 9: Writing with technology.

Today's students are totally different , they have different learning needs and styles. Teaching writing in the old fashioned way is just boring to them. They are used to new forms of text like images, videos, because these are the main components of their digital worlds and as teachers we need to make sure we include these components into teaching not only for writing but any other skill.

With writing  we need to engage our students in interactive and social processes of planning, drafting, and revising texts of different genres that will serve authentic communicative purposes. It is also important to increment awareness by exposing our students to some model texts so they begin to identify the features of different genres, for example persuasive, expository,  cause and effect and narrative texts.

But with technology and Internet we have an advantage that  can be used in a variety of ways to support process writing as students develop their writing skills in various genres.

For example, blogs are an ideal resource for the teaching of writing because it makes writing easier to share, and receive  feedback, and collaboration for peers. Also  web-based social networking tools offer excellent opportunities to plan the pre-writing, drafting, peer review, and revising steps of the writing process. 

To conclude, I just want to share something that I am learning through this course and it is that blogs are almost essentially designed to encourage writing and that is the purpose for which they are created after all, I think. As I have said before, we as teachers need to get our of our confort zone and why not creating a class discussion blog and turn it into an online writing workshop for the whole class as we are doing it and  also remember that most of the  students are already familiar with those kind of tools.

Rate: 5

Week 8: Fostering to practice.

There are some things the teacher can do in order to make  the reading experience more productive for students. As we have been talking, technology is a great tool to increase learners motivation and reduce learners anxiety, engage learners and promote learners autonomy.  The key element here, is to  foster more practice  outside the classroom and finding enough variety of materials so all students can read something they can understand. 

Is really important that we as teachers encourage our students to see their reading o as a source of questions to think about rather than answers to accept, also to encourage students to have their own ideas about what they read, and to encourage our students to exchange their points of view with other students  and respect the differences.

There are some sites  that provide a wide range of materials, topics, difficulty levels and sophisticated illustrations and sometimes accompanied by oral readings with animations, that we can share with our students so they can practice more time by their own.

The main point of using these sites as resources is to increase student practice time outside the classroom students doing assigned or volunteer reading on their own making the learning experience more productive.

Rate: 4.5