Week 9

This week's classes were extremely interesting.  Our classmates taught us how to use a website called "Story Bird" for Digital Story Telling.  It seemed hard at first, since none of us knew about the website, however, after we started working on it, it became easier.  

We created an account and created a story, they have lots of themes we can choose.  It is important to have the idea of what we want to create to make it easier, if not, it takes longer.  We all had to create one right away, so mine was mostly about how I felt in the moment.  I believe mine was very cute and I liked it a lot.

We also gave the teacher the first part of our final project, which was to evaluate and set the background of the group of students that we will be using for it.  The group of students that I selected are my students at this moment, which made it easier.  I believe my idea will help them a lot, it will be mostly focused on listening and speaking.

Digital Story Telling

http://storybird.com/books/whenever-life-gets-tough/

Week 8

We only had one class in week 8, however, we learned a lot in it.  Our classmates gave us a presentation on how to evaluate websites.  Evaluating them serves us (while teaching a second language) to select material which can be useful for our class' approaches.

During this evaluation our classmates gave us a website, we entered and had to find the goals, presentation, appropriateness, outcomes and evaluation that this website offers us.  We also had to describe it in the post under this one titled "Evaluating Websites".

I believe that learning how to do this through our teaching processes will help us a lot.  There are millions of applications, websites, podcasts, wikis and many other tools on the Internet, however, what we have to ask ourselves as teachers before using one is: what does it offer my students? What do I need it for? What will they learn from it?

Evaluating Websites

We evaluated the following website in class:

http://www.weebly.com/?lang=es

The most important factors while evaluating are:

-Goals: what can the software or web site do and how does this meet pedagogical goals?

We can use this website to create a blog for our students and share important information about the class.  We can post text, pictures and videos for them to practice the skills that they are learning. 

-Presentation: how does the software do it? Is there context? Are the exercises, quizzes, multimedia presentations or something else? Is this appropriate for the students and goals?

It is appropriate for students since we can post any type of information related to the topics we are teaching, we can also post links that may take them to quizzes or exercises.  I don't think we can post them directly, however, they can just click on the links and practice.  I believe it can be very useful to reach the students' goals.

-Appropriateness: how will students be able to use the software to meet goals? Can students understand it? Is the level appropriate?

First of all, it depends on the level of the students that we are teaching.  We have to select material from here which will be useful for them, not too hard (because they may suffer), not too easy (because they may get bored). 

-Outcomes: what do students produce with only the software or website? What could students produce with additional documents?

They may check their teachers' website everyday, the teacher will have the compromise of uploading information whenever it is possible for them to visit.  We can upload there videos related to the class, reviews of the class, images and maybe also make a forum for them to practice their writing skills.

-Evaluation: what kind of appropriate feedback and evaluation does the website offer?

Teachers can give feedback through posts or in class, it is important for the teacher to make the time to do it, if not, students will get bored and will not participate anymore.

Week 7

During week 7 we had very entertaining classes since they were practical.  Our classmates gave a class about dictionaries, we learned some useful websites containing the most important dictionaries on the web. 

We entered to the dictionaries' websites and explored them, then, our classmates gave us an activity, we had to look for some words using all of the dictionaries and post the definitions in our blogs.

It was fun and (as I mentioned before) entertaining, time passed really fast while we were busy looking for words, comparing definitions, choosing the best one and posting them.

I really like this kind of classes, because we do not feel time pass by, it is also fun and good because we practice using these important tools.