Pecha Kucha: a Challenge

Good morning everybody! I am preparing, together with my classmate Anto, the final exam for this subject. It consists on a Pecha Kucha, which is a presentation in PowerPoint. However, the special thing about it is that you have a constraint of 20 slides in 20 seconds and for me, it is a real challenge!

It implies not only memory, but also going straight to the point because you can't waste time. It also requires a lot of reharsing, especially if you are working with a partner! We decided to talk about all the topics we have dealt with in class so we also needed to do a summary of the whole year, which is no mean task! 

Hope everything goes well this afternoon, wish us luck!

Blended Learning

Hi you all! The last topic we are going to study is blended learning, but…. What is it? As I wanted to give you a clear and useful definition I searched in the web and this is what I found on http://www.christenseninstitute.org/blended-learning-definitions-and-models/ :

“The definition of blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns:

  1) at least in part through online learning, with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace;

2) at least in part in a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home;

 3) and the modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience. “

Once I read this I realized that in most subjects during my own training programme this is how I have been learning. I think that it not only provides students with support when studying at home but also helps to take fully advantage of the academic year, even to go faster through the syllabus and teach a lot more than in the traditional way. There are some different models that you could consider if you are interested in applying this to you practice that you can see in the link I left above.

However, I couldn’t avoid thinking that it would be quite difficult to use it in some secondary public schools in the place where I live, the Santa Fe province. The main reason for this is that students are simply not used to consider technology as a tool for learning, for them is all about leisure and fun, so the first obstacle would be to show them how this system works and that would take quite a lot of time.  The second difficulty we may encounter is that depending on the school we are teaching in, pupils might not count with the necessary gadgets for doing blended learning.

All in all, it is my opinion that it is a very interesting possibility that could make our teaching richer, providing many opportunities for students to learn at their own pace. It is a quite flexible system that could be adapted to a wide variety of classrooms, but we need to be aware that it maybe won’t work immediately in some contexts, nothing that couldn’t be solved!

A didactic sequence including Web 2.0 resources

Hello everybody! Lately, a couple of peers and me have been working on the last PW of the year that is about the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. What we had to do was to create a didactic sequence, that is to say a complete class, around a topic and a grammatical item, employing one of them and then asking our students to create something also using this kind of tools.

As our job was to introduce countable and uncountable nouns used with food we decided to create a video using a very simple programme called Windows Movie Maker. It is about an apple pie recipe and in that way we began our lesson.

Then, we planned to do a brainstorming asking our students other foods or ingredients they know, and while we wrote them on the blackboard under two headlines: countable and uncountable. Another very interesting resource we included in the lesson was wordles. They are word clouds that you can make on this page http://www.wordle.net/. If you are a creative teacher you can find a thousand ways of using them. In our case, we would ask pupils to divide into groups and to create a recipe with the ingredients they could find in the word cloud, no matter how crazy it is!

After a couple of quite traditional listening activities for introducing there is /are and some quantifiers, we would ask our students to create their own recipe in the format of a video of any  food they like and then share it on Youtube in order for them to experiment with Web 2.0 tools.  This is just one example of what you can do with these technologies in the classroom as they are very versatile. Hope this sequence inspires many more and better lesson plans!

Web 2.0 - My experience

Hi there! Such a long time!

This semester, I’m doing my teaching practice in a secondary school in Santa Fe, and as we had to use the Task-Based Approach, my students and me have been working on a final project. It is a video following the “Draw my Life” format, but telling the routine of a fictional character and then we will share all of them in Youtube. I couldn’t help to relate this personal experience to Web 2.0 tools and apps which is the topic that we are dealing in my ECO II class at this moment.

In case you don’t know what Web 2.0 technologies are, just watch this video that explains that quite clearly.

While I was looking for that video, I found another one that deals with Web 3.0. This really surprised me and put me to think how fast technology advances, especially because it´s not a new concept and I had no idea it existed! If you want to know about it just click here.

In my opinion, the main implication for these new technologies in the classroom is SHARING. Being able to create something and then to share it with everybody could be a very motivating factor for our students, and also gives them the chance to use language in an authentic and contextualized way.

Last but not least, I want to show you a video I’ve created to work with my students. I haven't used it yet, but maybe on my next post I could write about if it worked. I know it isn’t perfect and that it could be better, but it’s my first attempt with this kind of technology and while I was doing it, it made me realize the wide array of possibilities this kind of tool offers and its implications for teaching. Hope you like it!

The Y Generation, the students in our classrooms

As I told you on my last post, I am interested on this whole Y Gen thing or Millenium Generation and guess what? I realized I'm part of it! So this is what I found out on this webpage.
This term refers to the people born between the 1980's and early 1990's, after the so called Generation X. Some of their characteristics are:

• Tech/Web savvy: These people were born surrounded by technological gadgets and as a result they're constantly plugged into it and has become an essential aspect of their lives. They prefer to communicate via email, social networks or text mensagges and want to work for companies that apply this.
• Family oriented: They stike a balance between work and family. They want to find the best blend between and enjoyable life and a fullfiling work.
• Ambitious: They're confident and ambitious and want to take important roles in organizations as soon as they begin.
• Team players: They prefer regularly team mettings and collaboration with peers, they also want to feel included.
• Communicators: Communication is key for them, but it has to be in the right terms. If you send them an email or text message you're more likely to have a quick answer than if you call them.
• Like to be loved: Constant feedback, gratitude and telling someone they are doing a good job is something you will always get from a Generation Y.

Now, all these characteristics are what we must take into account to improve the way we teach this new generation. Although I'm part of it, it was really useful to read and learn about it, especially to consider the needs students have and how they may have an influence in our classrooms. If you want to read more about the topic, just go to the link I included in the first paragraph.

Selfies: a technological trend in the classroom

Hello hello! I know it’s been a long time since my last post, exam season was very hard (but successful ;) )!

The first day of this second and last semester we got to attend a workshop delivered by a woman called Mathilde Verillaud about the use of selfies in the classroom. I must say that for me it’s a great idea since adolescents are all the time taking photos with their smartphones, it’s part of their lives! Besides, it encourages them to discover themselves and to show their peers what they really are or what they want to be. I imagine that this would be a great project in a class where the students are not very familiar to each other, to foster some sense of class-identity and to value the differences and similarities among them.

She provided us with some activities that she used with her students (this project was carried out in a classroom in China, by the way) but I think they will need a great deal of adaptation if we want to use them in our classrooms in Santa Fe.

She also talked about the Y Generation very briefly but I would like to know more about it so I’ll do some research and make it the topic of my next post.

SAMR & TPACK

Hi everyone! This time the topic of this entry has to do with the use of technologies in the classroom and the place that they occupy in it. For analysing this, we have seen in our ECO II class two very interesting models that are, as you have seen in the title, SAMR and TPACK.
SAMR was created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura for describing four different levels of technology integration. The following picture describes very briefly  and clearly each one of them:

The other model, TPACK, which stands for Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge, focuses in the interaction among these three for creating a learning environment enhanced by technology and of course set in a context. The next picture clarifies what this model is about:

Relating all this to our future teaching, I think it is very important to take into account what they state, because sometimes technology could be very useful and enhance a great deal the topic or theme of our class. However, it could also be very time consuming, especially as regards the preparation of materials and the final aim of it may not be so important, or it does not occupy a crucial role in the development of the lesson. An example of this would be spending a whole afternoon preparing a presentation in PowerPoint  or Prezi that will last only a couple of minutes, and for which we have to install a projector, which could last more than the presentation itself. So, what's the point of it?

As a conclusion, we must be aware that all these new technological devices are not always good and enriching for our lessons, so we must be really critical and use these two models for analysing if including technology in the classroom is worth the effort.