It's been such a pleasure...

In our last lesson with Letizia ( our teacher of ECO Material design) my classmates and I shared our pecha kuchas. I was particularly quite nervous since I was worried about keeping up with the time constrain. Speaking for 20 seconds in each of the 20 slides seemed to be such an impossible task to achieve. I would say that is the hardest part. However, I think we did a good job :)

Preparing it was a really motivating experience. I enjoyed a lot searching for pictures that could clearly state my point in each of the slides. I believe we could get our message through which was that we as teachers or future teachers need to be open-minded to answer to our students' needs and not the other way around. Applying technology in the classroom in a relevant way is the key to engage your students and help them learn while playing.

These are some of our slides in our Pecha Kucha presentation... I am going to share with you the ones that I most enjoyed creating

How are we (teachers to be)  going to plug our students

in?

Moodle: Web 2.0 commmunity tool. Will you apply it for your future lessons?

The images used in this slide are related to the feelings that we normally experience when we forget the website from which we took some important information. Keep calm and use DELICIOUS ;)

Finally, the tool that we saw as a nightmare at first... Pecha Kuchas! 

Now that you know a little bit more about this tool, you can give it a go! 

It's challenging and remember that challenges are always worth trying them ;)

Web 2.O Included in the Classroom

My classmates and I have been working with 2.O tools in our last lessons. We have been inroduced to plenty of new tools that I didn't know of until that moment. For example, Voki, where you can create an avatar and put your voice in it by recording yourself.

From my point of view, if  Web 2.O are included in our future lessons as teachers, it would make them more engaging and entertaining.

What Web 2.O do is to allow visitors to "speak back" to the website and at the same time the visitors can have the chance to share with other visitors any generating content through social media such as Facebook, Twitter or any other community Web 2.O tool.

While surfing the net, I came across a tool called Smilebox, I found it quite interesting since it allows visitors to create collages or cards. I thought that it would be a useful tool to be implemented to create Halloween cards since this celebration is getting closer.

You have plenty of models to choose from. Besides, I believe your students would love to work with this motivating tool. Let their creativity and imagination fly!

Another important thing is that it is not necessary for you to download the program to make your creation, you can give it a try if you want online and share it on Social Media.

Let me tell you that this subject ECO II is opening my mind and helping me to innovate and start thinking about my future life as an educator.

SELF-ASSESSMENT OF MY LEARNING JOURNAL

ASSESSMENT OF MY LEARNING JOURNAL

After reading the instructions Letizia has given to us I started to analyse my blog thoroughly. I began posting the 24^th of April and since then, I tried to update it as frequent as possible.  There was only a whole month in which I did not post anything. As you will see, I have posted six entries until today. As far as I am concerned, I have always tried to use my learning journal to reflect upon what we were dealing with in our lessons. To be honest, I was not used to blogs, not even in my life outside the teacher training college. I have learnt how to search for information that can be considered taken from a reliable source. It was extremely useful for me to learn how to analyse website and from that moment that Letizia taught us the components of digital literacy I tried to apply it to search for information not only for this subject to post entries in my blog, but also to investigate for some other subjects that I have at the teacher training college.

I remember that whenever I decided to post an entry, I always tried to devote a lot of time and effort on looking for reliable information so as to create my own reflection on my readings. I also wrote and edited most of the entries before posting. I re-read them before posting so as to be sure of each of the topics that I investigated together with my opinion. As regards commenting on other blogs, I believe that that was my weakness; I commented on two blogs but I would have preferred to comment more. I just got in some of my mates’ blogs and, as I am not quite organized, I forgot to write a comment.

So as to finish with this self-evaluation, I would like to share with you that this assignment gave me the opportunity to analyse all my process in my learning journal and to see my strengths and weaknesses. To reflect on all this, it helped me to understand what is that I have to improve on if I want to include a learning journal in future lessons. 

I am going to include this picture below because it clearly shows the real use of learning journals in school lessons. Hope you all like this. 

See you

PREPARE FOR THE NET GEN

Going back to one of the previous posts about the 21st century students, I would like to make references to these students who are also called Gen Y, Net Gen, the Millennials. According to the magazine English Teaching Forum: Exchanging Ideas and Experiences Vol.50, there is no indication of the exact origin of the Gen Y. It does not matter when it began, this particular group make a huge part of today's population. Thus, it is of paramount importance for English language teachers to be informed on the nature of this generation and to learn some strategies so as to involve them in the lessons.

 One of the main questions in this article is: How can teachers compete with the stimulating entertainment that their students get at home? Many surveys carried out have revealed that the major percentage of students quit school because they feel that all the lessons are boring. I believe each of us (teacher's to be) should look for ways to change this reality. Prensky recognizes the Gen Y as digital natives, ( topic dealt with in previous posts) the ones who have never known life without computers and the Internet. Therefore ELT professionals should find ways to integrate technology in the classroom in a significant way. For instance, teachers could include the use of Wikis using Webquests or implement video-based activities in the classroom, or use Blogs, it will all depend on the objectives stated for the course. However, as it has been proved most of the teachers are digital inmigrants. This means that they do not actually know how to significantly apply technology in the lessons. Thus, teachers should be guided on how to use new technologies such as PowerPoint presentations or Prezi which may make your lesson more dynamic and stimulating.

To conclude, I would like to say that all the topics dealt with in this subject will eventually help us to design materials for the classroom that will be enganging for our students that is why this subject is really useful for us to be well prepared for the GEN Y. Let's take huge advantage of this opportunity we are given. 

What to teach in the 21st Century?

Nowadays we are bombarded with plenty of information; sometimes we even have the feeling that teachers are no longer needed because if we want to cultivate our intellect, we only have to google what we want to learn. As a result we need to ask ourselves as future teachers the following question: What is the role of the educator in this reality after all?  
I would say that one of the roles of the teacher should be to provide students with elements that can help them to develop critical thinking towards the world they live in.  According to this video taken from YouTube titled “Teaching in the 21^st Century” (video below), the educator has to guide the students and help them search for information that is reliable, meaningful and relevant in their environments. For example, teachers may give the students a list of links -analyzed before suggesting them- that they can visit so as to complete a task given. After that, teachers can ask students a series of questions to help them be critical towards the information. This is mainly the role of the educator in this process of surfing the web.

Another question that is also important to be answered is: What are the aspects that a teacher should consider when evaluating a website?  I clearly understand that the teacher should provide the students with reliable links. Now, the doubt is what makes a website reliable? Taking into consideration what we -my classmates and I- mentioned in our lessons, I would share with you  a list of items to consider when evaluating a webpage:

• The authors of the page.
• The lay-out: how the information is presented in the page.
•  The font chosen.
• The images used.
• The appropriateness of the language for a school context.
•  If there are evidences that the information in the webpage is gradually updated.
•  Pay attention to the purpose of the webpage.

These are some of the most important points to bear in mind before suggesting a link to the students.

Thanks for reading,

I will be posting soon J

Do we have what it takes?

Hi everyone! I am going to share with you a video that I believe will make us feel aware of the teacher we should be in our not-so-distant future to fulfil our role effectively in the 21st Century. We have to be open-minded enough to understand that we will arouse the students' interests by using the media that they are so acquainted with. We are preparing our students to their future, are we really able and "equipped" to do that? To make them active learners to communicate effectively in this digital world that moves at a rapid speed? Let's think over what we will do for these digital native students.

A Useful Resource to Store Links

This is a resource that I learnt to use a year ago; and it also appeared in the video Networking students (meaning students who use online platforms regularly for school). I find it really useful since it helps me to save all the interesting websites that I would like to use to increase the amount of information about the topics that we deal with in our lessons. Doesn't it happen to you that you find a website that you feel it may be valuable and then you forget the address? Well this is a good tool to avoid this. You only have to create an account and you are ready to start using it. Here you have the link to the website: Delicious. Hope you find it effective, too.

See you around. :)