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.