Choosing to design our own material...

Hi! First, I share with you a phrase I've really liked since I read it for the first time. And I think it is closely related to the topic I'll be writing below.

Teaching materials are an important part of any teaching and learning process. Although there is a great amount of teaching material available on the Internet, books and magazines, some teachers still continue to produce their own material, spending time finding, selecting, evaluating and making material for classroom use.
In their article, Jocelyn Howard and Jae Major states the advantages of teacher-designed material that may be the reasons why teachers decide to produce them. Some of the advantages are:
Contextualisation: designing and adapting their material enables teachers to take into account their particular learning environment and to overcome the lack of "fit" of the coursebook.
Individual needs: they can be responsive to the heterogeneity in the classroom. They provide the opportunity to select texts and activities at the right level for particular learners, to ensure appropriate challenges and levels of success. What's more, teachers can take into account the learners' cultures, learning needs and their experiences.
Personalization: tapping into the interests and taking account of learning styles of students is likely to increase motivation and engagement in learning.
Timeliness: teacher-designed material can respond to local and international up-to-date events, relevant and high interest topics and tasks.
They also suggest some factors that teacher should consider when designing material, such as the learners, curriculum and the context, resources and facilities, personal confidence and competence and time. These factors are closely related to the advantages described above.

In my last post I talked about my practices, and that I had to prepare a didactic unit that had to "fit" with the group of learners. For this I had to evaluate and reflect upon all the factors that Howard and Major describe, and I have to admit it was a hard work to do! But I think it is the best way, especially to motivate students to learn the language, since many of them can't see the purpose of learning English and have a really negative attitude towards it.

I'm Back.

Hi! Such a long time! Well, since this term I have started to do my practices in secondary school, I would like to share with you the materials I used or I'm going to use during my teaching practices. I've taught only one lesson so far, so today I'm sharing with you the materials I prepared for delivering it. Before uploading them, I would like to explain that the final project of the unit is to create a trip journal where students, working in pairs, have to write their experience during a weekend in a famous city of the world. They have to imagine they've been there and write and show where they went, what they did,etc. For this, they're going to learn about tuorist places, holiday activities and means of transport. The first lesson was focused on presenting what a trip journal is and what are trip journals use for. For this, I looked up on internet some examples to show students, but I only found one example that I thought it was appropriate to use, so, as I needed two different examples, I made an entry of a trip journal using the Picasa computer programme, creating a collage of pictures and writing an imaginary description of what some people did in that city. Here I show you both, the entry I downloaded from internet and the one I made with Picasa...

                           

I have to say that students really liked the material since they were coloured pictures and they are not used to work with coloured copies.

LEARNING IN EDUCAPLAY!

Hi! Today I've been dealing with this platform called Educaplay! This is a platform in which you can create and share educational activities. You have to register yourself to create the activities and your students need to be on-line to solve them. I tried it and I have to say It was very easy for me to create the following activity. This is only one example of what you can do, but there are lot of options such as word search, crossword, quizzes, etc. I'd like to use this platform one day with a group of students, I think they'd feel very comfortable working with this kind of tasks.
Now,  Let's see if you can get the correct answers!

TEACHING IN THE NEAR FUTURE!

This video shows us how will be our classroom in a NOT so distant future.

The last question "how are you going to help" made me feel worried about my future as teacher. I really don't like to deal with all these things, but I know that I cannot be the black sheep in this neither, and that what is the most important thing is to help our students to learn English by all the possible means. And that includes ICT in the classroom.

Hi people!

Welcome to my updated blog! Here I will write about Material Design and reflect upon the use of new technologies in the English classroom.
Here I share a video that shows us how 21st century education is or should be...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O35n_tvOK74

This video called "21st Century Education" tells us all we need to know about teaching and learning nowadays. And it made me think about Marc Prensky article, which I read a long time ago, and I read again yesterday, about how education and students have changed.
Prensky says that "today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach" and that a radical change should be made in the way we teach to them. He speaks about two opposing concepts related to people and technology. He uses the concept of "Digital Natives" to describe the "new" students of today, saying they are "native speakers" of the digital and technological language of Internet, computers, video games and mobile phones. They are used to receive information really fast, they like socialising through networks, they prefer games to "serious" work, they like working with many things at the same time, etc.
On the other hand, he speaks of "Digital Immigrant" teachers who assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and think that the same methods that worked for them as students will be effective now with their students. These Digital Immigrants don't think that learners can learn in a successful way while watching TV or listening to music because they themselves can't. That is why Prensky states that we as teachers should confront this issue, especially the ones who feels as Digital Immigrants, and reconsider both our methodology and our content. Just as the video suggests us to do in this technological era.
I have to say I feel as a Digital Immigrant, since I'm one of those people who don't like spending too much time in front of the computer, not for working neither for chatting, playing games or reading any texts. I just prefer books or copies. Or I prefer a hundred of time spending time watching TV instead of being surfing the Internet. So, I need to say that this question of having a blog is a BIG challenge for me and I hope to learn lot of things.