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.

Effective use of Powerpoint presentations

We have all been bored by a Powerpoint presentation at least once in our lives, but this does not mean that we shouldn't use it. Instead, it is much better to learn how to use it in an effective way and to take advantage of all the possibilities it offers. Searching on the web, I found a Powerpoint presentation that gives tips for using Powerpoint properly (funny ah!). Click here if you want to have a look at it! (it automatically downloads on your computer).
Office webpage also offers some very useful advice as regards this. If you want to read them, also click here.
I think that as future teachers, we have to give good presentations so as to keep our students' atention and to teach them what to do and what not to do when creating and delivering presentations. Powerpoint is a very good tool for the classroom, although it is quite underestimated. It can be a very useful material if we know how to use it.

First PW: Analysis of Websites

Hello everybody! We have been working on practical work N° 1 at this subject, in which we had to deal with some websites and some guidelines for analysing them. First, we divide into groups, and then explored a list of webpages; some of them were really great and some of them not so much. Later, we "dissected" only two of them following guidelines like responsibility, authority, currency, appropriateness and relevance, etc. and last we made some sample activities and introduced them into a hypothetical lesson.

My conclusion of all this work we made is how important it is to teach our future students how to realize if a site is reliable and provides correct information when doing a research. In my opinion, it is a very necessary skill, especially nowadays when the information is no longer found in books and encyclopedias but online in webpages and wikis because they are faster and easier to access. It is highly important to show that “copying and pasting” information is not beneficial. The best that we can do is to read using our critical thinking and our reasoning, selecting what works for the purpose of the research at that moment. Not all the things that we can find in the web are good and we need to learn how to realize that.

Digital natives - Tech kids

First of all, this is a very interesting and extensive theme to investigate if one wants to do research - there are lots and lots of things online. Actually I'd like to start with a little fun video I found of the hillarious Ellen Degeneres talking about this.

 

Of course she goes a little beyond our subject, but it left me with one thing in mind : How are these kids going to learn to spell?? 

After reading the information on the topic, I reached the conclusion that it is very important we realize that we are teaching kids and adolescents with new characteristics that define how they learn, and the most important one is their natural predisposition to technology. However, we must not forget that although they may handle these digital tools better than we do, they may lack the scrutiny, for example, to differenciate a reliable website from others like  the famous "Wikipedia" or to use the nigthmare of all English teachers: "Google Translator". What we should do is teach them through technology but also how to use it correctly, employing their critical thinking. We must not let technology do our job.

Hello you all! As you must have read in the title of this blog this is going to be my learning journal so as to reflect and to put into words the things I'll learn at ECO II. We'll be dealing with a lot of new technology hopefully!
Hope you like it...
                               Meli