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

Week 7: Trying something different.

Today students are fluent in Web and social networking technologies, educators can take advantage of this knowledge to enrich the learning experience. With media, instructors can foster collaboration and discussion, create meaningful learning environment of exchanging ideas, and boost student interaction.

We have learned from our experience of being students or being educators that a way to create a meaningful context for teaching, is through the use of media, which can be a variety of print, audio and visual formats. There are ways to develop activities where teachers can integrate media such as television shows, newspapers, magazines, videos, etc.

Many times it is difficult to get out of the comfort zone and try new ideas that can be really successful , but for easement or fear we dare not to do it, for example: videos; which is one of the most successful tool to integrate into classroom activities as visual and auditory tool.

So, I encourage my future colleagues, to get out of the comfort zone, and get creative to involve and engage our students into a meaningful learning environment, Rather than search for a video online, create your own video, with the most important and meaningful aspects that you want them lo learn.

Rate: 4

Week 6: Creating a good learning environment

“Don’t think about covering the material. Think about uncovering it so your students can better understand it.”  I want to start with this quote, because it has so much power and reason on its own.  We as teacher need to think on what we can do to help and encourage students to think critically, to have them interested, and to arouse their curiosity, and at the same time, think on how technology can help us to accomplish what we want to teach our students. Instead of asking how  we are going to integrate technology into a lesson, we should think about what we as teacher want our student to learn, and if it certain technology will helps us to transmit and achieve what we want, it is all about prioritization on teaching. 

A belief of mine that was totally confirmed, is that technology can help us to the accomplishment of the learning objectives we have for our students. Technology will help us to make our students to feel comfortable and to believe in their capacity to learn. We need to remember that we as teacher will deal with  different learning personalities, some students ( and will include myself also) like visual information  and other will like auditory inputs. so, why can't we integrate technology to provide our students a good learning environment?, we can use pictures diagrams, films or podcasts as a resource to keep them interested on what we are teaching.

To conclude, 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.

Week 5: Integrating Internet

Internet offers a variety of benefits to everyone who is willing to use it. The enormous amount of information available and the many uses one can have through the internet have made it the most valuable tool. The available material, programs, websites and other services of the internet offers, allows to ease and transform people’s life and increase their knowledge.Something  to point and I think every teacher should remember is that the use of internet in education increase learners motivation and reduce learners anxiety, engage learners and promote learners autonomy.

I would like to talk about two important factors where we can integrate internet this week. First, the Internet as tutor, can be use for advice, facilitate analysis, or conduct activities. Traditional activities such as gap-fill, multiple-choice, and matching exercises allow students to learn through practice and through trial and error.  And second, the Internet as tool, he Internet can be used for a deeper level of student engagement and interactivity by helping stimulate creativity and it can also foster communication and collaboration, I think that this two factors come hand by hand because both of them should be importan and take it into account into English Language Teaching (ELT).

I will like to conclude with this quote: ‘’On the Internet, students of English have an authentic context in which to share their lives.”  

Week 4: Training to succeed with technology.

The use of technology has become increasingly important in language teaching and learning. The successful use of technology, however, requires that language teachers have the necessary technical competence and pedagogical knowledge under to take advantage of how they are going to apply this sources in the educational field.

What surprised me about this article and really make me want to read more is that  teacher training programs have emphasized the importance of equipping teachers with the necessary skills and expertise to develop CALL materials. But, why is this so important? we need to remember that with technology, teachers play the role as facilitators, that must in many ways know and be aware of a variety of material available for improving their language skills and more important teacher learned how to use the material effectively.

The integration of technology is seen as an important goal for students and teachers. Like for example in the article is mention that  students now meet in a computer lab for each class period, thereby minimizing the barrier between class and CALL. Another example is podcasts, that  could be used as a supplement to textbook materials, and as authentic listening material, so in this way  students gain and acquire information on specific aspects of the language such as idiomatic expressions or grammatical constructions, and besides that, as a way for students to communicate with each other in other countries, like a real-time communication. 

Thus, it is the responsibility of those who are in well-equipped to demonstrate that CALL can be integrated into study programs with the necessary technical competence and pedagogical knowledge to train teachers in order to provide quality and efficient integration of technology to educational field.

Week 3: Encouraging autonomy

Something I want to remember from this articles is that autonomy implies students being able to take responsibility to their learning process; being able to self-regulate. But, is important to remember as well that teachers as facilitators have to be able to respond to the needs that students have, should also encourage students to create autonomous attitudes and promote self-evaluation and self-monitoring to help them get to get to know themselves as learners.

As we learn in the previous article the importance of a CALL pedagogy is to  anticipate learners’ needs. So, it seem that it demands more responsibility of students, to be more independent and self-motivated. So, from this, I want to share and remind to teaching colleagues that the role of the teacher is to offer support and preparation, this means, and is better explain with one of my favorite quotes from this article, “ the role of the teacher implies being aware of what is to be done, the reason behind it, and how to make it happen.”

To conclude, I might say that infusing technology in the classroom may contribute in a huge way to the growth in learners motivation, autonomy and thinking skills.

Week 2: Technology fully into learning process.

Something that made me want to read more about this article and that I consider that it  is really important is how technology is involved with education, it might be seen as something simple and insignificant, but if we really take advantage of the resources that internet offers us, we can make incredible things.
Noticing how computer assisted language learning (CALL) was divided in order to help the learning process, from behaviorist to communicative, and finally to integrative. Which for me it just incredible, because it seeks both to integrate various skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and also integrate technology more fully into the language learning process.

Having technology as a tool to teach, teachers became  facilitators, and we need to understand and to remember that as facilitators teachers must in many ways know more than the directive givers of information, also need to be aware of a variety of material available for improving their language skills and more important teach learned how to use the material effectively.

To conclude, I want to share with you this quote: “ Teachers as facilitators have to be able to respond to the needs that students have, not just what has been set up ahead of time based.”, that in effect is a belief of mine that was confirmed and that is something  that every teacher should take into consideration.