Learning through teaching?

Last Thursday my group and I presented our microteaching which actually dealt with the way in which a school report is mainly structured. The task of creating and developing a microteaching consisted of doing it addressed to students. In this case, we chose students from 1st of Batxillerat. As it is, we divided our microteaching in five main lessons

1. The first one was focussed on the explanation of the main sections of a newspaper so as to put students in context, there were some activites they must complete as well as the introduction of the main parts a report should have

2. The second lesson was done to teach the main connectors students should use to write a school report and therefore to express agreement and disagreement, there were also some activites they must fullfill.

3. The third lesson was mainly focussed on the full knowledge of the connectors they must use. For doing so, they were given some activities in which connectors should be use, and therefore they became aware of the meaning these connectors posses as well as knowing when to use them

4. The fourth lesson was made to write the report, in this lesson the teacher was giving feedback to students' work.

5. In the fifth and last lesson students were thaught to upload the report into a blog.

As it is, there are a great number of aspects I learned after doing the microteaching. However, the most important thing I learned was the way in which activites were to be adressed to students. In order to creat a good atmosphere in your class, it is crucial that activities are dynamic and that these activites call students' attention from the very beginning of the class. Students will know if they like what they are doing from the very beginning, that is the main reason why teachers must catch their attention doing something they feel attracted for, so that they pay attention to the rest of the class.

There are a great number of strategies English' teachers can use to make their classes enhancing and charming so that students understand the content they are exposed to.

New tools, different perspectives

These days I have been going through a great number of different websites to discover whether or not there is enough information about education and if relevant tools are provided to teachers. For doing so, I have visited two different websites which I consider of great importance when it comes to share knowledge.

One of them is "mural.ly" and altough it does not specifically deals with education it gives the opportunity for thousands of creative teams and individuals to use it as a tool to organize, share, and develop their own ideas. I consider it very impotant due to the fact that organitzation is very important in my life. Things must be organized and teachers must show organized work to their students so that students see it as a model to follow. If things are organized, teachers will explain and communicate it better to the whole classe. Moreover, content must be well-organized so that it remains clear.

The other website I have added to my symbaloo today is "thinglink". I have discovered it in our today's class and I think it is quite easy to use. This website is mainly used to creat interactive images and videos for social and advertaising porpuses. Images and videos must be creative and original, and make them contain a story which enhance the audience. I believe it is also a very important tool to share your opinions and points of view of the world in general, it is very important to share the way you percieve the world, because everybody percieves it differently and it can be applied in classrooms too. Every single teachers percieve classes in different ways and it is something positive that teachers provide students with their own perspective of the contents of each subject.

 

Noise creates noise

Today's post is going to be focused on the microteaching presentation my classmates presented today. There were two different presentations and both of them have been highly interesting and well-done. 

The first presentation was about the meaning of 'hot food', at the beginning it seemed to be related to words such as 'spicy food', 'sexy food' and so on, however, they gave us a poem to analyze and our perspective changed a lot. They built a classe and they structured it in a very organized way, the timing was perfect and the activites were explained in a very clear way so that the class these activities were adressed to would have understood it all. I would say they used strategies to enhance the audience. Moreover, they delivered it in such a convincing way that we all get amazed by their presentation from the very beginning.

The second presentation was about the bones and muscles and each student had to fill in the gaps with the specfic words of each part of the body. They did also a great job because they showed they had been working on it as it was very well structured. Nevertheless, I would polish a tiny detail which comes to be the beginning of the presentation when they asked us the fill in the gabs. As it is, I actually do not know all the parts of the body by heart so I should have placed a box with the vocabulary needed.

Apart from that, after having finished with the presentations, we have been dicussing the way teachers should speak in front of their students. Should day shout? Should they speak out loud all the time? Shoud they shut up while students are talking? Should they leave the class? We have been learnt that the best way to do it is by wating for silence, if the teacher speaks louder it means she is making more noise, and noise creates noise, so teachers should project their voice without screaming. At first, I get shocked because it does not seem to be an easy task, nevertheless, after considering it, I arrived to the conclusion that it is indeed the best choice, because teachers are a referent, or at least they should be so, and being a referent means behaving in your best way.

What do we know about teaching tools?

Teaching English is not an easy task, and it gains difficulty when it comes to adolescents whose main interests are related to video games, computers and mobile phones. So, what happens when we have to roganize our classes in order to call their attention? We live in a society in which everything is connected provided the fact the main tool we use to communicate each other is our mobile phones. Therefore, I consider teachers should adapt their classes to the changes we are experiencing. 

To be honest, I have never been extremelly intresed in this field. I am not very good working with my computer and I prefer to do everything as we used to. However, yesterday I realized that using internet tools in my classes is a must. I was on my 'Tutoria i Orientació' lessons when our teacher showed us hundreds of websites and platforms related to education. There exist a great number of education platforms but today I am going to focus on three of them which are the ones that mostly called my attention.

Issuu:

Issuu is a social platform in which anybody can publish any kind of article or piece of information related to issue. It is quite easy to use, you just type what you are looking for at the top of the page and then hundreds of articles, magazines and newspapers appear. 

Here I add the link to one of the magazines I chose. I is about how children use their tablets and for which porpuses.

http://issuu.com/tempomedia/docs/tie-4-2013

Tiching:

Tiching is a website about education which is full of tools teachers share and use to organize and prepare their lessons. You can share your own expiriencies and use other teacher's materials to teach. I consider this website very useful because sometimes teachers get confused and they had too many things to think of, so it is very important to know how to organize themselves.

http://es.tiching.com/

Educared:

Educared is another platform related to education which is mainly focused on the publication of updated information about education practice either in schools or high schools. I would say that this platform has called my attention because it has the most updated versions of education in our country and therefore you are aware of the way it works, being aware of the education situation in our country is very important in order to be a good teacher; because the more you know about it, the more you can work on it.

http://educared.fundacion.telefonica.com.pe/

In short, I have shown you some of the websites internet offers to the audience to work with. They are tools we can use to improve the way we teach. There are some occasions in which teachers may think there cannot go on with the porpuses they had at the beginning of the course because they don't work. My advice is not to get nervouse; look for information, you will be rapidly informed about how to organize and structure your classes and, what is more important, how to call your students' attention.

How can we improve students' linguistic skills?

After today's class, I have decided to talk about it on my blog as I have found it truly interesting. It is a universal truth that student's linguistic skills are quite difficult to improve if you use the traditional method, what is to say, the teacher going through the book and students doing one exercise after the other. 

However, today I have learnt a new method of teaching the content of a subject just using different styles. Today it has been Shakespeare's turn, we have seen different types of exercises to do with our students to ask them about Shakespare' characters and plays. For instance, Isabel gave as different cards with some quotations of his plays, and after that she showed as different images and we had to match the images with its corresponding fragment. It was very interesting and I would say it is a very dynamic activity because students are constantly focused on what they have to answer; they have no occasion in which they can get distracted.

As it is, I have also discovered one of the most important aim of the class which was to make us conscious that one of the most relevant thing when teaching is getting students' attention focused on listening, they must have a purpose to fullfill during the lesson, and the teachers mus constantly remember students in what the purpose consists of.

Last but not least, today I have also been aware of the existance of Book trailers and Glogsters, I would say both of them are modern and useful material to use in class; in this way, students realize they are the most important element in the class, because they both participate and acquire new knowledges at the same time.

New tools on my blog!

The second topic I would like to talk about in my blog today is about new tools to use in your blog. It is a kind of technique called 'pageplugins' and it consists of having the opportunity to create any sort of flash tool, for example, clocks, calendars and countdowns.

In my case, I have decided to use this post to use one of this sort of flash tools. Since I was a child, I have always loved the fact of celebrating my birthday, what is more, as it is in December, I have my own countdown from November onwards until the day of my birthday. So, here it is, the countdown of my birthday.

Although my birthday has no direct relationship with methodology issues, I have chosen it as the topic of the countdown in order to see how it works so as to use it in my future posts properly!!!



<center><embed src="http://www.pageplugins.com/generators/animated_countdown/show.swf?clickURL=http://www.pageplugins.com/&flashLABEL=PagePlugins.com&skin=http://www.pageplugins.com/generators/animated_countdown/skins/a14.swf&text=Happy%2022nd%20Birthday%21%21&untilColor=16737792&textColor=0&datesColor=10053171&year=2014&month=11&day=10&hour=0&minute=58&second=13&x=6&y=77" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="300" height="200" name="countdown" align="middle" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></embed><br><small><a href="http://www.pageplugins.com/">Myspace Countdown Clock</a></small></center>

Guidelines when using a blog properly

In today's post, we will give you a few pointers on how to keep your blog's personal information safe as well as a few tips on how to make a good post.

-The first thing to take into account if we want to keep our personal data safe is not to write down your surnames. Just write the first letter of your first one.
- Do not add people you do not know without your parent's permission.
- Use a safe password that does not contain any personal information such as name, surnames, date of birth, etc.
- Let students know that plagiarism is a crime.
- Make sure they understand that they have to be proud of any information they publish.
- Do not offend anyone on your posts. Treat anyone the same way you would like to be treated.
- It is essential to double read your post and check any grammar and spelling mistakes.
- Make sure everything you write is relevant and factual.
- Keep your posts educational-oriented. Avoid to write anything too personal, such as gossips, etc.