WEEK 7

It's been a great week in the course. We read some very honest articles about autonomy where the conclusion made us realize that fostering autonomy is very hard. I have to admit that I have always thought that I encourage my students to be autonomous but i don't keep track of students' work outside the classroom. I try to guide my students to independent learning, since I am a self taught myself, but I only ask them informal questions about what they do outside the class and I don't really provide a space in my classes for students to reflect on their learning process. Reading about autonomy I became aware of the fact that I have to go beyond and really make sure my students are doing more that fill in the blank activities on line, they have to decide what to look for and not only follow my instructions to work outside the classroom. They should be taken into account in the decision making process and be active participants. Besides autonomy, we learned about ways to work with just ne computer in the classroom and saw all what we can do with the computer and the roles students can play in classes with one computer. With a little bit of creativity we can get the best of technology with limited resources.

WEEK 6

Every week is a great learning journey in our Webskills course. I have read so much about pedagogy that what I usually feel when I read a book is that somebody is explaining to me something that I already know, either because I read about it somewhere or because of the classroom experiences. But every week in our class I feel like I have an epiphany that is going to change the way I teach radically. This week's epiphany came with the readings about interactive PowerPoint presentations, because despite the fact that I always try to make my classes as student-centered as possible, whenever I plan a class with PowerPoint is very teacher-centered. I am one of those teachers who writes questions that only the teacher answers and even worse, I explain tips that need no explanation, elongating my talking time. I also learned that a large class is not a class with 55 students. This week, Naglaa told us about her 300 to 400 students and I decided to stop complaining about my not so large classes.

WEEK 5

This week we read about alternative assessment, rubrics and project based learning. Alternative assessment and rubrics are not new to me, since they are both part of the way we assess students in the institution I work with. I assess my students through oral presentations, interviews, portfolios, role plays, games, etc and I design rubrics to assess every single task. What was new to me was the use of an on line tool to create rubrics. Working with Rubistar made things really easy and I have to admit that even though I am a fan of rubrics because they make the assessment process more clear, creating a rubric for every task I assess is extremely hard and exhausting. But now that I learned about Rubistar I am sure things will flow more naturally. As for PBL and WebQuests, I am definitely going to try them at school. Of course, I have to adapt the idea to my needs and my students, but I am pretty sure it will work.

WEEK 4

Week after week our class gets more and more intersting, the discussions jucier and the resources more productive. This week we had to write about the problem we want to solve in our project, it is becoming real. Besides our course project we worked on some sort of mini project when writing our lesson plans and I must say this was the task hat I enjoyed the most because it made me think of every aspect of the class (the topic of the class that I was going to write about, students' learning styles, skills that I wanted to addressed and the criteria to assess students' performance in the activity) and the use of the tool chosen to meet the goal. The other assignment for this week was to write about Reading, Writing and vocabulary I wasn't expecting much because most of the websites I knew for practicing reading and writing before this week were to plain for my taste, meaning boring. But this week I explored different websites for writing that I enjoyed very much, like Dvolver.com to create a movie, Kerpoof Studio to write stories with animations and Lauri's ESL website to write crazy stories taking the different parts of the speech into account. I am still exploring the websites to find one with cool reading comprehension exercises. I know that what's really important is that the tool is useful, but if is also entertaining, even better. Aside from what happened in our course, this week I presented the workshop for the ELT conference about technology in the classroom that I wrote about in a previous post, and it went great, especially because one of the attendees was David Fay, the US Deparment of States Director of the RELO for the Andean Region and after the presentation he was kind enough to introduce himself to me and give me some feedback. I am just glad he approached me after the workshop and not before: Had i known who he was I would have panicked, I know. After I finished planning my workshop I realised that you were right in your comment Robert, what I have learned throughout this four weeks gave me a lot of material for my presentation. I am very happy with what we have done during this whole process and convince that what is happening in our class is going to have an impact in a lot more people than we can imagine.