WEEK 9

When we reflect on the importance of teaching accurately the four English skills listening, speaking, reading, and writing there is a big wish of developing that chore as good as possible. We need to apply lesson plans to get that aim. If we want to teach any subject, it is necessary to do it organized and focused in specific objectives because we are going to deal with many other skills such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and spelling and all of them play a role in effective English communication. The amount of attention we give to each skill will depend both the level of our learners as well as their situational needs. Generally beginners, especially those who are nonliterate, benefit most from listening and speaking instruction with relatively little work on reading and writing. As fluency increases, the amount of reading and writing in our lessons may also increase. With advanced learners, up to half of our lesson time can be spent on written skills, although our learners may wish to keep their focus directed toward oral communication if that is a greater need.

WEEK 8

I red an article about the pedagogical reasons why doing lesson plans, it was written by Dr. Bob Kizlik. It mentioned that planning lessons and write them efficiently is a skill that teachers learn as any other skill. It helps us to own our subject and teach it organized and proficiently. A well-prepared lesson plan makes us aware about our objectives constantly. Preparing lesson plans has no the aim of taking done ones from the Net and adapting them to our needs. By the time we are able to elaborate our own lesson plans in a competently way, we go forward and start owning not only the class preparation, but also the whole content of the syllabus.

Good lesson plans not guarantee that students will learn the content fast or well, but they contribute to do it for sure. Lesson plans are a way of communication and we cannot deny that this age of education is dedicated to develop communication skills. Besides, lesson plans help us as new teachers and inexpert ones to unify content, materials and methods.

                                                              

http://www.adprima.com/lesson.htm

WEEK 7

We are in-trainig teachers, so in the future we are going to elaborate professional works to develolp our name as teachers. We must learn to show PowerPoint Presentations as professional as possible to increase our style and to present information with clear levels of comprehensionable content. So here I am going to post many tips to get a very proficient PowerPoint Presentation. They come from a useful website: 

            http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-tips-for-preparing-a-professional-presentation/ 

1. Compose Slides

You must center all your attention on the content of the slide. It shall not distract the audience but it needs elements and details to show it inductively, so decorate it scarcely but well.

2. Use Consistency

Be consistent on font sizes, colors, logos, pictures and all the elements that are related to the topic. All the slides must have combined representations avoiding wide variety of flashy colors and features. Instead of that choose simple and basic colors that show significance.

3. Use Contrast

Simple text in black is always the best option, but take into account that it could result boring to listeners. It is necessary to implement more colors, but trying to keep just the needed ones to get the information highlighted in our audience´s minds. 

4. Apply Brilliance

Highlight the important parts of the text, but avoid using too much color on them because you could get weaken the whole content of the presentation. Use the common colors that you are managing, for example the colors of your company´s logo. 

5. KISS

Keep It Straight and Simple. It means that we never have to include complete sentences or worse, read them. If you read your slides and if you do it slow and badly, the audience will get bored and stop listening. Instead of that we shall include just keywords to talk freely and naturally. We must be aware about the goal of PowerPoint Presentations, they were designed to support you on a lecture, not to replace your talk.

6. Take Home Message

A Take Home Message is a memorable note. We must communicate the main one during the whole presentation expressing it as a personal summary.

7. Add Images

It is recommendable to use more images than words in your presentation because they help to reinforce and complement your exposition. Use images to explain not to decorate.

8. Don’t Be Silly

Use animations just with academic and serious purposes, to emphasize your Take Home Message or to clarify facts with effects that calls people´s attention.

9. Keep Your Audience In Mind

Take into account what your audience knows previously and what do they need to learn. Your aim should be to cover their expectations with your presentation shaped by images, key words, and animations which are attention getters and keepers as well. Remember if you lose the attention of your audience, everything will be lost.

10. Practice

A good lecture will contribute to keep audience attention. During the presentation it will be obvious if you are aware enough about the topic you are talking. It is advisable to practice your presentation in order to know your slides´ order and as a result of this, speak freely and confidently keeping a good rhythm and tone of voice. Maintaining eye contact is fundamental to convince your reliability.  

WEEK 6

Edmodo offers educators and pupils a safe place to join and team up, share content and learning presentations, and contact schoolwork, results, class debates and announcements. Its aim is to support teachers connection, the influence of collective media to convert the classroom for each and every student.

Learning is seen as essentially a social process, requiring communication among learner, teacher and others. This social process cannot effectively be replaced by technology, although technology may facilitate it. (p. 35)

Bates, A.W., & Poole, G (2003). Effective teaching with technology in higher education: Foundations for success. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Technology provides a wide and extensive variety of tools and sources to teach and get students attention easily. We must take advantage of this fact teaching according this current age. We have to use new applications and innovative network in order to live and develop our students capacities and quality of results.

WEEK 5

       Week 5 was dedicated to evaluate and share our acquired knowledge about UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers. It was a document that was posted in UNESCO´s official web page. It was a long and complete file, so our teacher gave us specific parts of it to expose what we understood.  

       The second part of this week we started to use a very useful tool that allows us to keep our information safe everywhere. It works as a memory flash controlled by the net, so it is not physical, but electronic. We created new accounts to belong to the wide group of people who use it around the world due to its usefulness. We saved there all our Power Point presentations to start shaping our Digital-Portfolio. For more information and extra tips of how using Dropbox, I will left here the link of a very useful video I found.
                         

Dropbox Tips

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK6u83lzQtw

      We took a look over a very helpful website called BBC British Council. It has many innovations for teachers to do their classes easier to understand, organized and funny. Students can take advantage of many spaces there, as the varied sections for self-evaluation and practice. Teacher Wilma recommended us to use a very functional webpage identified as ESL-LAB.com

She told us that this website offers us many exercises to practice our listening skills. We can use it with our students as well due to a wide variety of levels and graded drills. This web page counts with the corresponding written scripts for each dialog, so we or our students can practice our speaking and reading skills as an appropriated complement of inclusive learning process.

        In conclusion, Week 5 was a fruitful period that left us the thought that there are much and uncountable tools to develop our students´ acquisition and our own knowledge by using technology and traditional basis as well.

WEEK 4

We learned many things and we made some clarifications about our blogs and our comments on them. We started a new discovery this week. We started running a very useful tool like DIIGO. This is a powerful information capturing, storing, recalling and sharing network instrument. We can save important websites and go into them on any computer as well as classify them by titles, notes, keyword tags, list and groups. It is so useful for professionals that you can search through bookmarks to find desired information very quickly and so other functional uses that we will learn through time with our teacher´s help.

I have made some research on this topic and how we can use Diigo as teacher or even in the classroom, so I want to share with you what I have found. According to the web page called Student Learning with Diigo which is a Google Site there are many cases in which we can use Diigo in the classroom. For example, students can review their favorite websites using their Diigo account. Teachers can do the same accessing their Diigo lists to get the best exercises and relevant information posted on the net to share with students.   

SOURCE:      https://sites.google.com/site/team8project9440/using-diigo-in-the-classroom-2

WEEK 3

WEEK 3

We took our first quiz. It lasted 8 minutes because it was easy to solve. I got a good score that made me feel I am going in the correct way through the first steeps of this subject. We started a new forum to discuss in pairs. The main topic was PLAGIARISM. We red some web pages that illustrated us about citing and giving credit about good thoughts we use but are not ours. I developed this assignment with Natasha. She helped me a lot because she reads efficiently and quickly, so we finished very fast. Teacher Wilma told us that we must investigate about APA Style and make a Power Point Presentation to explain to our partners what we get. She organized oral lessons for next class, so there were three volunteers and she chose one more on Thursday. I participated with my presentation because I got a very useful video on You Tube that helped me a lot. I will put here the link for you to watch it.

APA Referencing: The Basics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOEmM5gmTJM&feature=related

This week we learned the basics of APA Style as a tool to mention author´s when using their phrases and citations. It is so important to give credit to someone else to avoid offending and commiting a crime such Plagiarism. Our papers must have citation to show that we researched about any topic, but we must mention the authors of everything that does not belong or come from our mind. Here I place another link for you to see a video about keeping our papers good presented and free of Plagiarism as well.

Avoid Plagiarism in Research Papers with Paraphrases & Quotations

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1t0G7ZnRG8&feature=related