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