OUR LAST WEEK

Wow, here we are in the end of week ten, the last week of this amazing course. During this week we have reviewed the integration of technological tools in our class, and it is not like in the past, but in a different scenario, since our students are motivated and we have so many tools we have to incorporate in the class. I am ready to share this information with teachers in my community, since the tools are so useful that I would like everybody in the teaching field would know these strategies. 

During this course I would like to highlight that we have benefited from each and every activity we did so far. All I can say to my Dear Participants is that I am grateful. This is my first experience of an online course, and honestly I did not know how many tools and strategies and learning experiences you can learn out of a great course like this one we are just finishing.It is so great we can create our own material, being creative and dynamic.
I wish all the best to all us


Juan 
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Juan 

End of week 09

Week 09 was very motivating and I think all participants agree with me, since we studied about Learning Styles and the way we teach. Most of us feel enthusiastic about all these tools we have to teach, and as Samira said, " the question is when we should use all these tools?". It is time to reflect  on our situation as teachers and on the models we are using, hence we can make right use of them. We read and reflected on LS and MI, in order to find the most suitable situation to teach and use the information we have received in this course.

There were very encouraging comments like Mohini and Julio`s the made it short in details about all the participants comments and that was awesome since all of us were discussing the same info while they highlighted good posts. That was motivating.

There are more things to learn and practice though. A BIG THANK YOU to the University of Oregon and our great mentor-facilitator Janine.

Juan Garcia

Week 8th. Reflections

Greeting.

We have been discovering many sites on the web, and we have come across with interesting tools, helpful tools indeed, which will make our teaching learner-centered, and that is great since we must promote autonomy. ANVILL is a website really good, specially for listening and speaking skills. This one is a computer super tool, which allows you to create a class with audio, and videos, and multimedia.

We gave our first draft of the project, so we were working on that, and we were supposed to check our partners draft.

In my own experience students feel motivated when we use technology, it promotes communication.


We were creating online exercises and that was fantastic, there are some tools where they provide you the printable material just ready to give away. I can see all teachers in this course are very creative on doing these type of exercises online and I have learned many things from them.

Above all, we have too many new things to apply.

Reflections on week 7

Today is the last day of week 7, and I have to admit that a lot of information is still in my head, very interesting ideas participants shared, and new things learned. During this week we learned about  implementing  autonomy in our students so they become responsibles for their own learning process, and therefore we as teachers can provide the tools for reaching that level. As for one computer classroom, it is a great way of introducing technology into the classroom, if you dont have a lab equiped with all facilities, you can use your own computer as a learning station, to foster the use of technology.
This week I also had to create a lesson using only one computer, and I am happy with the result: playing some videos, teaching new vocabulary, ppts, etc. There are so many things we can do with only one computer in the classroom.

Now we are working on our final project, and we have to work with a partner, which is great, so we can have a feedback and support.

So let us continue learning and applying this new ideas to our classes.

Juan Garcia

WEEK-6 NEW THINGS TO LEARN AND PRACTICE...

Greetings.

Life is full of new things to discover, new things to learn, new things to teach,  thanks to the amazing, intelligent and unique dynamic Creator; God. So I consider we are in the proccess of learning day by day.

One of the task was on creating power point presentations in order to mix some skills in the classroom and in order to add technology to the classroom, however I found it pretty challenging since I created some power point presentations a few years ago, and honestly I dont use them quite often. I have to admit however that the tools provided in the web site they are so useful, they provide you a step by step criteria in order to add interaction to the presentation.

The readings about power point presentation were really good, they provided in detail how the use of this very important tool can help you as a teacher in order to catch students attention, you have to be carefull though, since if you dont know how to manage or control some of it, students can easily get bored. Certainly these readings have been very helpfull so we can interact with tech and classroom, and therefore we can analize our methods of teaching and we can rectify if necessary.

I will start using all these new techniques in order to make my teaching more effective, to get motivated not just me but students as well, I like the way we are enhancing technology in this course, which is really good since sometimes not always, students know more than teachers.

Another task was on describing the implementation of our project, and I have applied some tips as for reading, and use a very simple power point presentation, so I have to admit I am slow learning about technology, but I am stepping into it,

Introducing Technology in the English Class.

This has been a very interesting week for me.


Honestly I have been working with rubrics for a short time, I am feel so motivated while reading your experiences and very good ideas you came up.


I have many things to say as for WebQuest, first of all it is new for me, so I will take it easy while experimenting with it. When I started working on my project I was thinking on something that really help me with the problems I have encountered such as reading, speaking ang listening.I can tell some students are studying to get a certificate, or they do not feel really motivated to learn the target language, since they dont see the necesity to practice it outside the classroom. So I am there, I need to overcome this issue, as any other teacher could say, it is because of the material, or blame someone, or any other validity reason. The point is that finding a culprit is not difficult, since I am not that kind of a teacher, I am doing my best in order to enhance technology in the classroom, here I am researching what I can do to motivate my students, and the best tool WEBQUEST. This will help my students to read in a different way, with power point presentations with images and sounds, so they can practice the weakest points. I want to see what happens next.

NEW THINGS TO PRACTICE RIGHT AWAY !

Working on the final project this week has been so meaningful, especially reading about different lesson plans and new strategies to practice in order to develop different skills. However I noticed we as teachers need to focus on an issue, which is oral production, students need to practice speaking, since most of my students were absorbed in silent reading, eventhough we tried to read aloud, since some previous teachers practice a little bit of pronunciation, therefore it was a challenge for them to say a word in english. Unfortunately I could not help on that regard, but I do my best to help them.

Fortunately technology is offering a solution to this issue, new opportunities for teacher to tackle this problem.There are some web tools which are very useful  regarding motivation and speaking skills.

I personally need to buy out time in order to select the best web sites to fill the needs of my students.

Juan Garcia

New things to learn

New things to learn.

We all have learnt new things in this course. Through this week, we have focused on one of the most difficult teaching and learning language, oral/aural skills. The articles we have read are new ideas, new techniques and suggestions for the EFL, student`s pronunciation and speaking.

How can we develop aural and oral skill on our students?
To start of we need to focus our teaching on what we want our students to lean, however we need to be selective on the material we use for teaching. Teaching speaking is like a cycle, they need to listen carefully, in order to repeat as they hear, and they need to read in order to have a good lexic, wich will help them with a rich vocabulary to use in every day conversations.

As for foreing accent, they may be accepted in order to enhance students performance.
This new perspective will motivate students to feel free to use the language, breaking the barrier of using it.

We also have discovered many sites and links so we can use and share with students and teachers as well, so everybody can be helped in developing listening and speaking skills, including mine.

Juan Garcia

SECOND WEEK

The Search Engines.


I must confess how I felt when I typed the web page www.noodletools.com. It is amazing to know how technology opens so many doors to everybody, and how huge is the web. I feel more confident when I do my search since 2 weeks ago, if I did not find what I was looking for in one or two of my favorite sites I just gave up. Now I have plenty of them, and each one very interesting, with different tools so I can search, pretty accurate, I have to be very careful with key-word though. My next task would be how to manage effectively the websites and keep them updated. So I need to find the way to choose the best one, so I and other teachers from Nicaragua can start using them.


Writing the Objectives this week was great since I have learnt a lot from all the participants, since they all vary, since our way to do it varies from school to school, I can tell it was challenging for some of us. However I agree with the ABCD, frame, since describes the whole teachin learnig  process and what we expect as teachers at the end of the session, or course, from our students and ourselves. It was also really great to describe the class, since it is a background of each one, so we can move on from that point.


I am going to learn more things in the days to come.


Thanks
Juan Garcia

FIRST THOUGHTS

FIRST THOUGHTS

Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web

I am so happy.Taking  online courses and blogs for educational purposes are new to me. I am so blessed to be part of this great staff of great teachers from different parts of the world, with lot of experiences to share and dedicated teachers in the job of teaching.

Furthermore I can learn how to use the blogs for sharing all the ideas in real-time online learning. It`s a great idea of sharing ongoing discussions on the blog and also learn how valuable to get a constructive feedback from great teachers as each one of us are. I want to learn how to teach online and take full advantage of this great course online, In every daily life situation, in every song and expression I learn in english I try to teach them to my students and think the way they can learn from mistakes and how I learn from my own mistakes and from theirs.

 Therefore this course is what I need to continue teaching, it will be a challenge though but I will not give up, eventhough it is my first time and my first blog. So I will take advantage of every one of these new brilliant ideas you have to share.