Week 7 Learner Autonomy and the One-computer Classroom

 Hello Everybody

The topic for our week  discussion was Learner autonomy and After reading some information about this . It is quite rewarding to understand How we as  teachers could help our students to be more confident and get greater autonomy. The fist aspect mentioned and according to the constructivism  is to help or guide our students in a way they can discover their own knowledge by exploring, experiencing things by themselves  and being active participants in their own learning process Providing them some  guidelines or acting as a facilitator we can let them to set goals, material, tasks and methods so that they can recognize the best way to reach new  knowledge.

To get an effective self-directed learning. It is really important to take into account some learning  strategies like the cognitive and metacognitive strategies  . With the purpose of enhancing  learning students can use repetition translation, use of dictionaries, note taking deduction,, contextualization, inferencing and asking questions for clarification. The metacognitive strategies  on the other hand are skills used for planning, monitoring and evaluating the learning process It means the way as they learn something. Using these strategies they can ask themselves questions to get ideas about their performance and with this they can have the opportunity to  change goals or reflect about their learning.

As teacher a good way to motivate students to be more autonomous is to start working with activities and rubrics where after finishing any exercise and checking it they can understand and recognize things they did well and errors they made in this way they will start reflecting about their performance and getting aware about aspects they need to improve.

 

This week we also reflected about some strategies to take into account while designing  a one computer classroom lesson. It is really important to consider that there are many activities we can deal in a classroom using only a computer and a projector. With the purpose of practicing  some topics (simple past, prepositions and vocabulary) we have studied on the last 2 units  my plan was designed to work with some crossword puzzles from the web. Using a computer and the projector I will introduce the activity to the whole class. For this activity I will form groups of 6 people, each group has to read the across and down guidelines and enter letter to complete the crosswords puzzles boxes. The groups with a 100 % of accuracy will be the winners.

Referring to the activities of my project this week has been quite difficult to work in because of the carnival holiday in my country and some cultural programs at school. I only saw my students on Thursday when I could guide them to form groups and chose a topic  for the oral presentation  (touristic places in Ecuador)For the presentation  they  will investigate the information they need and they will be expected to speak, introduce the topic and  answer  the audience questions. I really hope to start with the oral presentation next Tuesday.

Vilma