Thank you!

"The teacher is no longer just the master of their subject. They are much, much more. Their classroom is no longer defined by four walls and a blackboard, but stretches far beyond the physical boundaries of their school. We are global teachers, ethicists and moralist, masters of our subject and students of the world."

Andrew Churches inGlobal digital citizen - The role of the teacher

So many issues have been covered throughout these weeks and they were all so relevant for my teaching practice that it is impossible to choose a favorite. Besides, although I may have enjoyed ones more than others or felt more comfortable doing some tasks than others, everything we did was purposeful, meaningful, useful.

This course has gone beyond all the expectations I might have: I have learned a lot, I have become more aware of students’ needs, of my own strengths and weaknesses, I am a better teacher now, I think.

Week 2 brought lots of surprises with all those sites for web searching that I had never heard about. I use them all the time now and my life has become much simpler. Trying to write ABCD objectives was challenging, as it was something new to me and it made me reflect a lot on what exactly I want my students to do.

Week 3 introduced me to delicious and now I wonder why I had never tried it before. I became a fan and I now have some very nice stacks full of interesting stuff. This week was also great as we discussed aural / oral skills and how to help students develop them. There are many great ideas I have kept for further work with my students, as I want next year to engage my 8^th graders in a project on listening and speaking.

The following weeks were great and I felt really good dealing with reading and writing (two of my favorite things), discussing PBL, one-computer classes or teaching resources. I don’t want to seem immodest, but I think I am quite creative and I love planning a good lesson using interesting materials and tools. Sometimes my head is swarming with ideas and I can’t wait until I put them into practice, so this course was fantastic for me, because the contact with other people and new tools allowed me to take my creativity and my ideas even further and I have countless plans for future activities.

And I shouldn’t forget week 5 with the rubrics and alternative assessment, an issue it is important to reflect on and use in class, as our students need to be assessed fairly, according to the tasks or assignments they are expected to do.

Now that we have the whole picture, we notice that there is a meaningful sequence in the course, leading us every week to a new level so that we can now integrate technology effectively in our professional practice.

In a collaborative way, and with Robert’s precious guidance, we have built knowledge. And that's why I have chosen this short video to finish this post. It's called Thank a teacher and that's exactly what I want to do: to thank all the teachers involved in this course, the ones at Oregon University, but also all the others participating in the course. Without you it wouldn't have worked so well! Thank you!

My style

“How much a given student learns in a class is governed in part by that student’s native ability and prior preparation but also by the compatibility of his or her characteristic approach to learning and the instructor’s characteristic approach to teaching.” (Felder and Henriques, 1995)

While doing this week’s readings this was a sentence that caught my attention. I have always been interested in learning styles and read a lot on the subject, and the above quotation clearly shows that styles are not just about learning, but also about teaching. It’s important to know about our students’ learning styles, but it is also paramount to know what our teaching style is because we will have to work on both if we want to be successful.

This is me!

Reading about the different activities and tools that we can use for each of the learning styles or for combined styles was very important, too. I know it gave me a more complete insight into what I can do for them, it refreshed my mind and my head is now full of ideas I can hardly wait to put into practice.

I must confess that when I saw this week’s topic I thought our task this week would be to plan a lesson where all the styles would be addressed. I even started thinking about what I could do, but fortunately there was no such assignment, which was good as time was scarce with the final report to finish and tests all week. Still, there has been a good deal of sharing going on in the discussion board.

I do feel a bit relieved now that I have uploaded my final report. Maybe I could have worked a bit more on it, but I think I had got to that point of exhaustion: if I read it one more time, I would delete it. I thank my peer-review partners - Natasa and Ricard - for their valuable feedback that helped me improve my work, but I also thank all the others in class and, Robert, of course, because all these discussions have helped us throughout the different stages of deciding and developing our projects. This is quite a nice group!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Here I am again, including literature in my posts, but the truth is that these last weeks have led me through paradoxical situations and feelings. Some days everything was going great, work was flowing and I felt like I had a million-dollar project. Other days it was quite the opposite with students getting lazy, an overload of tasks to accomplish and the hours evaporating before me.

I’m better now, though. I’ve finished my report (there will be changes, certainly, but minor ones, I hope), I’ve read and reviewed my partners’ reports, I’ve participated in the discussion and I’ve created a quiz and a crossword puzzle. And now, before I get down to work preparing tests for six of my classes, a little time to reflect on the project and this week’s tasks.

The topic this week – online tools – is great, as I use them a lot and I also enjoy creating my own resources. I have some experience with HotPotatoes, Quizfaber, JClic, ActivInspire, Google docs and moodle, but I also use all the possibilities that Microsoft Office has to offer and I often create handouts using online tools. I think we have to take advantage of everything available in order to make our work easier and more motivating.

Different types of exercises and activities also appeal to students because they enjoy variety, it arouses their curiosity and it can foster their creativity and willingness to learn. Besides, everybody knows that students learn in different ways, they have different learning styles so, the more tools you use and the more varied they are, the more you will help those students learn.

This week Anvill also has an important role in our discussions. I think it is a great project and am sorry I cannot give it all the attention it certainly deserves, but there are mid-term meetings going on in my school and I’m at school almost all day. When I arrive home I have my own project to work on: kids are back on track sharing their penzu entries regularly and posting to wallwisher. I deactivated the chat and am now trying to set up a forum. And these lessons on error analysis and correction have to be well planned. Most of the students are really engaged and making quite an effort to improve. I hope they will!

Mission accomplished

I was getting used to being a regular here, but this week has really exhausted me. Dealing with three tools and activities at the same time isn’t easy. There are all those penzu pages to read and comment. I have to be often online to see who is in the chat and move things a bit and there’s wallwisher to check and notes to take down.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I decided to use some classes to work on error analysis and correction and it worked so well! I really came home yesterday with that feeling of “mission accomplished”! The students got incredibly involved in the task and by the end of the class they were already able to spot a lot more errors and find out how to correct them. They even asked for homework, so I gave them some more texts and excerpts to try and correct at home. Today I shared my dictionaries, vocabulary and grammar stacks with them, so that they can have some websites they can refer to in case of doubt. And then we’ll do the rest in class. Isn’t this the dawning of learner autonomy?

Today I received a penzu share that I really appreciated. 

The image is here, but maybe it will be difficult to see, so let me explain: one of the students went back to the page she had corrected in class, she edited it marking all the mistakes she had made and then she wrote the corrected text below. I think it was fantastic. I’m sure that after dealing so much with some of the mistakes she has made, she will probably remember what not to do next time. I think that this type of attitude towards work not only shows the student is involved in her own learning and working beyond the initial task, but it also makes the teacher feel that they are turning the assignment into something useful, relevant, real! Thank you, kids!

Week 7 - Sighing

This week there are two interesting topics for discussion: just wish I had more time to be there, but this project is really time-consuming, for the students and for me. I have already had to make some adjustments, as the way I had planned to correct students’ mistakes didn’t really seem very effective. I cannot simply correct or even point them out to students. If I want them to develop some critical thinking and some more autonomy I will have to let them find and correct their own mistakes. It’s important that they understand why it is wrong and try to find out how to correct it. Of course they will need support, but I expect this way they will learn and remember much more.

Tomorrow we will have a completely different lesson: I’m going to take some examples of their Penzu pages and some transcripts from the chat and, in pairs, they will try to find the mistakes they have made. I hope they will be able to recognize and correct many of them. Then I will help them find the rest and with the use of our course book, grammars and dictionaries, they will try to correct those as well. I know I’m going to get behind in the syllabus, but I have informed the school board and besides, I don’t think this is wasting time, quite the opposite, I will be gaining time in the long run if they learn to write better and to apply the grammar structures and rules they have already learned to real situations. I hope that seeing their texts will also make them aware of how important this project can be for them. I also hope they will feel more committed to their own learning and will learn to be more autonomous at writing. In fact, I think that this Writing Extension Project fits quite well into one of our topics this week.

The week has also been a mixed-feelings week. The first days were terrible and I was almost getting depressed with so little feedback from students, but maybe I was expecting too much: after all they were on holidays and it’s usual for people to spend carnival with their families in the nearby villages. Today things changed completely because they’re back to school and suddenly remembered what they had to do. 

Hope.com

Life’s not so grim after all. Little by little students are doing what I expected them to do. Some haven’t still done anything, though. Three tests this week? Fear of the unknown? Sheer laziness? I don’t know, but I don’t want to force them. Let’s wait and see. Still, the ones that had started by complaining a lot are now really involved. I knew they would be!

And the first conclusion to be derived from these first days is: their writing really needs to be worked on. When they write in class and in tests they are writing about something they have studied, they have prepared, and so you don't really see many mistakes, but here, at least in their personal journals and in the chat, they are writing about whatever they want and often on the spur of the moment and all those problems and mistakes appear. I had never imagined the situation was so serious or maybe I had, otherwise I wouldn’t have decided to do this type of project.

Here are two examples from their personal journals:

“Ok, so im starting my journal. I dont know what to say. Well, there's a thing that i can say: i think that all theese links that our English teatcher gave us mean that we ( my class, i dont know if she is doing this torture with other classes.......) are going to actually WORK!!!!!! OMG! I am not ready for doing any work. I DONT EVEN LIKE TO WORK!! But what can i do??...............”

“Today, is the first day that I am write there, but I have already writen in the wallwisher and in chatzy, it's a start! I'm not very good to write in English but, I'm trying.
Tuesday, we had a english class. There we knew the most of works that had did for english teacher, she are crazy! But is a form to win more capacities in writing.
The teacher don't like my reation about this, and now I agree with her! But, in the moment, I have thought that don't had time to do so things!
SORRY, TEACHER! :)
This project can better very notes in class and I hope be one of them! For this I have to work very much and I'm going able.Thank you teacher for leave me to do part of your project, and now the class project!”

You can also have a look at the first Wallwisher http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/ClassDMovies.

And all this data that I am collecting has already made me adjust the project. I first thought I would email them my comments and their mistakes, so that they could edit them, but now I’ve changed my mind: I’m going to use some classes, even if I have to set up some extra classes, to work with them using their own texts. Understanding why errors occur is essential to recognize them and learn how to correct them. And the more you do it, the better you’ll remember it next time you’re writing that structure. It’s going to be real hard work, but it’ll be good for all of us.

Passion

It’s not even 9 a.m. and I am already tired. This project I got myself into is nice, but it’s all-consuming. Kids are always posting things, emailing me with requests for help, doubts, things they want to correct… Then I have to be online all the time in case someone shows up for the chat. I know I should have set up specific times, but that’s not possible with some of them, so I’d rather be around.

But today I just want to talk a little about all the rest: large classes, how to enhance students and interactive presentations. I don’t really have oversized classes, but sometimes teaching 25 kids can be exhausting and trying to keep their attention and concentration high for 90 minutes is not an easy task. Of course there are all types of warmers, fillers and focus activities I use. There are some very good examples in our readings but I also the ones listed at http://busyteacher.org/. They can be really fun, motivating and they always add content.

I also enjoy presentations, but one has to be careful about how to create an effective presentation. We have all talked about it in the discussion board. Still I would like to share with you this presentation “Death by PowerPoint” and also a short video, which is just an excerpt from one of Don McMillan’s talks: “Life after death by PowerPoint”. They teach you a lot using humor.

As for Prezi I really like it and even if you are no expert, there are already many presentations online that you can use. I’ll just leave here an example I used at Halloween and that can give you some ideas on how to use Prezi:  http://prezi.com/nfpshjpths5a/happy-halloween/.

Although I think Prezi is a great tool that both teachers and students like to use in presentations, I think it doesn’t really allow a variety of interactive activities as other type of presentations or as Interactive White Boards do. I’m a great fan of IWB. There are so many things you can do!

Just to finish today I would like to remind you that what really motivates our students is passion, above all our passion and our ability to make them find that passion for learning within themselves.