A day to be grateful...

Having the opportunity of being part of this course and meeting you is a very important reason to be grateful for.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

Week 7: Reflections

This week was a total mixture of feelings...
At first I was really thrilled at the opportunity of looking for and finding my partners for peer reading! It was a great pleasure to form a group together with Ildikó and Ahn Hye Yeon. The three of us happen to have similar projects so I guess this will be an advantage for us, because we may be able to come up with more concrete pieces of advice.

It was amaizing to keep reading about the teacching experiences of my classmates all around the world. I can't avoid having great admiration for those who teach large classes and still manage to include webskills in their lessons. Way to go! Here's an interesting article about The One Computer Classroom topic, go to the links embeded at the end of it, you'll some thought-provoking information.

Later on, technology played a little dirty trick on us and we were unable to to fulfill the tasks for the week. This made me feel kind of frustrated because I really don't like when I can't accomplish my objectives, but I know we don't have to rely entirely on technology; we can't let it rule our lives =)
I'm glad Robert thought about a plan B and this new week we'll be using a different tool to interact. I'm sure this will help us include another resource to our huge list of technological devices. Although I already know Google Groups, I don't close the door to new knowledge I may acquire this week thanks to my colleagues and the instructor.

Week 6 Reflections

This week, as the previous ones too, has been of great growth.
First of all I was really amazed at the large classes some of my classmates teach. Here in Uruguay, language classes don't have more than 40 students, and in my particular case, the largest class I teach is 18 students. It was really enriching reading about their experiences, their resources and strategies.

Then, it was great to read the material about PPTs. I've been using them in class for some time but I had never read any specific text talking about its benefits. It was great to confirm that I'm on the right road.

I couldn't start implementing some of the resources I chose for my project because my students had a test this week, but I'll definitely start working on it this following week. Can anyone suggest any other ideas? I'm working woth a group of teenagers in a basic level that don't risk to produce almost any spoken language. I'll try to use VOKI (in my previous post I shared an example of it) and NanoGong in our Moodle class webpage. Robert suggested voxopop and anymeeting, I'll check them out.

To finish, I'd like to share with all of you this funny but not so unreal picture.

Have a nice week!!

Greettings from Uruguay

Week 5: Reflections

 Hi everyone! As always, every week is a new opportunity to explore new resources and go back to some tools I already knew but I've stopped using. I invite all of you to click play on this Voki, a tool I knew but I've forgotten about, it's the one I chose as a potential solution for the speaking issue I have with a group of teens.

RubiStar, as I said in my post on Nicenet, is a very useful and easy to use tool. It offers many already prepared rubrics for different purposes and it also allows to customize them or create new ones, using as many rows and columns as necessary.

I got interested on exploring and trying out PBL. I don't know if I'll be able to do so this year, because we're coming to the end of the courses here in Uruguay (classes finish the first week of December) but I may make an effort to have a project in at least one of my classes for the last unit. If I have the opportunity to do it, I'll let you know!

Let's keep up the great work!