Week 10: The End of Our Wonderful Experience

 

I can not believe  how the time has passed so fast. It has been  a wonderful time to be part of the  webskills class with our dear Core Instructor Janine Sepulveda who always was there to give us the required support. With a depth sadness in my heart I can see the closer end of this fascinated first online experience in my life. I remember how the afraid
involved me at the beginning trying to understand the weekly  assignments, readings, tasks and weekly discussions, however now I feel proud thinking how much I have learned from the course.  I have to say that  the past nine weeks have been a great  opportunity to learn a great deal of online resources, techniques , strategies  and other meaningful tools that are going to help  make my English  classes more  effective .  I have learned a lot about nicenet, blogs,  webquest, rubrics and  sites to practice listening, reading , writing and even speaking, Making comments and reflecting  about  topics related with teaching and learning pedagogy  were appropriate to learn how to overcome  possible issues or difficulties on our students performance.  Reading my peers comments, thoughts, opinions and insights  has been so constructive to expand my knowledge, apply new practices and do the best in my everyday work. All the material and the information provided thought the links were quite meaningful in order to  incorporate the new  computer based tools  and  make the best use of the technology in class. With the purpose to build a new learning environment, the use of some tools like emails,   blogs, webquest , audio labs, interactive power point presentations in a one computer classroom have been already introduced and  incorporated  in my classes and as a response students feel quite motivated to work using  online activities and exploring  tools that have not been used before.

This webskills course has been the best opportunity I’ve ever had thanks to University of Oregon  and the American English Institute  for this  wonderful experience. I am so exited to share all this knowledge with my future students and with my English colleagues at the whole school.

Week 9 Learning Styles and the relationship to Technology

This week was very rewarding for me. I started reading all the comments and  recommendations  made for our partners, and taking into account  these comments  and making some improvements I finally completed the final project report in which I had to specify some categories like  the learners, sitting, the goals of the course,  the students needs, issue and problem that started my project, initial solution and expected response, response and reflection, changes made, conclusion and resources. It was a nice experience to make know all the activities and the new online application  we have done in classroom and how technology can be used to facilitate and get an enjoyable learning environment. Reading our peers comments and also some insights of other projects I have increased even more the expectation to use new online resources in classroom. I have to say that reading the weekly discussions and comments has been a really meaningful experience. I have learned a lot from my partners ideas and thoughts, and I am sure I will apply and share all these ideas and knowledge in my future classes,  and with  all my English colleagues in the school.

The discussion for this week was related with learning styles and the relationship to technology and after reading the material provide for this week I'd like to comment that it was really meaningful to learn more about the 7 intelligences that Howard Gardner developed as a practical way to address individual differences and  that we as teachers need to know to help our students become more successful while learning a second language. It is so important to recognize the intelligences that our students have to design in this way a range of activities and  tasks for them  and chose the best online resources according to their abilities and preferences. We have to know this not with the idea to treat each students separately, but most the time with the idea to combine the resources and give the opportunity to make all of them shine in what they actually can and like to do.