FINAL REFLECTION

Before I enrolled on this course I didn’t know many kinds of New Technologies there were available for use within the classroom.

Thanks to this subject, I have learned new ways to incorporate technology into my future classroom, how to make things easier for me as a teacher, and how to use technology as a medium to help students learn English in different ways.

I believe that to be a teacher you need to be open-minded to new ideas in technology. So if something new comes out, it is important for a teacher to look at that tool critically, and see if it would be positive to use in the classroom.

Finally, on the other hand, I appreciate the skills I have been provided which makes easy the teacher’s work, for instance through excel program that make possible to mark students, and which personally, from my point of view, is especially time-saving.

And on the other hand, I am pleased about knowing many programs to create activities and devise tasks.

REFLECTION 8 - 23th of December

This week, at the beginning of the session we finished the excel spreadsheet. We learnt how to hide some information, in order to publish the students’ final mark.

And at the end of the session, we created two accounts. One in edmodo which is a web page that helps the teacher and his or her students get connected and stay organized in an online classroom.

There you as a teacher are allowed to create groups of class, and then you can invite your students so that they can see all the documents you upload, because one of the advantages of this web page is that you can create a library online and folders inside. Moreover, you can alert students in order to notify them that they have to deliver any homework.

And the other account which we created was in survey monkey . It is a web site where you are able to create online surveys. If you click in this link you could see an example of a survey created by me: https://es.surveymonkey.com/s/LRRL6CT. You have the possibility to select different type of questions (open-ended questions, multiple choices with one answer or more, short answer, complete the blanks).

If you send the URL the system gives you and there are people who answer the survey, you can see the results and analyze them.

REFLECTION 7 - 18th of December

During this week, on the one hand we created an account in "Podomatic" which is a website that allows you make podcasts. First of all, we were surfing on the page watching and listening to the most interesting and popular podcasts which they were divided into topics (Education, Arts, Music...) Later on, we had the opportunity to create one. To see it, you only have to click in the following link http://nerea-279.podomatic.com/entry/2014-12-18T03_37_47-08_00.  I recorded a brief presentation about myself through Audacity program and I introduced a picture, then I uploaded it to Podomatic.

And on the other hand, we learnt about how to create an evaluation sheet with different formula through Excel program. I thought it was going to be more complex but it’s simple and very useful in order to get the final mark of students.

I think I will use this program in my future as a teacher because it is very practical. Here you can see the example of my evaluation sheet.

From my point of view the most advantage of this program is that it allows you to colour the number automatically, I mean if the mark of the students is negative (less than 5), automatically it will appear in red. And another interesting thing is that you can block the first column, so when you move from left to right or vice versa, you will know whose the pupil of that line and you won't have to go back.

REFLECTION 6 - 11th of December

This week, firstly we listened to our classmates talking about including new technologies to improve our pupils' pronunciation, and secondly we were taught to edit a wiki.

First of all, I will point out some interesting facts about the article called "Podcasting: and effective tool for honing language students' pronunciation?" 

The article said that while some teachers feel there is often not enough class time to practice pronunciation, including intonation or prosody, others may not enjoy nor know how to teach pronunciation, or they may believe that students simply find it boring.

But the thing is that pronunciation plays a significant role in comprehensibility and podcasting may offer a possible option for practicing speaking skills outside of class. Podcasts are easy-to-create audio files that can be uploaded to the Internet and to which users can subscribe.

Technology has been used in many ways to improve students’ pronunciation and using podcasting in contextualized language learning can be useful in that it allows teachers to contextualize pronunciation and create meaningful tasks, rather than simply have students repeat and practice lists of words or sounds.

In this section, I will talk about the wikis. I have to say that I had never created or participated in the edition of a wiki before. 

I think it is a useful tool for collaborative writing in primary school so that learners can recieve for example spelling feedback from their classmates, students can be more motivated because that "piece of paper" can be seen from their house, and the teacher can devise interesting ideas for writing so that pupils can adquire a taste for it.

We had the chance to edit and create a story which had to start and finish with a sentence given by the teacher. But I am sure there are plenty of ideas so as to write in a wiki.

So I would like to find interesting and creative ideas to carry out with my future pupils.

REFLECTION 5 - 4th of December

That week, first of all my group and me did a presentation about the Interactive Whiteboard. 

On the one hand, we pointed out the range of benefits that the IWB have, since you could you use lots of materials, you have the facility to maniulate them, using the IWB increases learners' motivation and participation, you are able to save resourcees (not only from lesson to lesson but also from year to year)...etc.

On the other hand, we said that there are many interactive games to practice English on the web or you can create it. 

From my point of view, the most advantages are that you can colour the lesson with sound, video and images, and that you have instant access to material.

And after the presentation, we showed three activities which we created:

The first one was a crossword to review the food vocabulary. You have the possibility to play in this blog or you can click on the following word "crossword" and you will play in the original web page where it was created.

CROSSWORD

The second one was a mind map and the third one was a food pyramid:

Devising these activities, we found out some interesting programs such as Educa play in where you are able to create crosswords, mind maps, slide presentations, alphabet soup, video quiz...etc. I think this web page is very practical, useful and very easy to use and I believe I will use in my future as a teacher. Finally, I would strong recommend it..

Personally, I would like to learn more about programs in order to create activities to carry out to the classroom.

REFLECTION 4 - Internship

First of all, I would like to contextualize that I did my internship in Jose María Huarte School and in order to write the reflection clearly and in an organized way, I am going to answer question by question.

    -  Which new technologies have I seen my tutor use in the classroom to teach?

Although the school had a computer lab where there were 25 computers, the classes from 3º levels to 6º levels didn’t make a lot of use of it because of the interactive whiteboard which there was available in each class and that consequently they used every day.
According to the article, since 2009, every each fifth-pupil will be provided with a notebook computer and their classes will have an IWB. In my school, they didn’t have any notebook computer, but they had an IWB as I said previously.

Having an interactive whiteboard in the class had the advantage of having a blog, so most of the tutors created one in order to upload projects which could be seen by the families and educative resources so that students could practice contents taught in class at home.

In addition, we used the interactive whiteboard to search interesting facts on the internet, to know the meaning of words, to watch videos from YouTube, to make projects such as creating a photo story, to do exercises prepared by the teacher or to write documents and upload it to the blog.

    - Which new technologies have I seen my tutor use outside class to prepare things he is going to use in class?

I have to say that my tutor tried to make use of the new technologies to teach and to prepare things for the class, and she was always interested in knowing new programs. Also, she was doing a course which attended one day per week so as to improve her knowledge. The course includes a wide range of practical ideas and web resources that teachers can directly use with their learners. 
According to the article, the teachers of fifth graders will be provided with training, and in my school the teachers from the third levels were provided with training couse.

On the other hand, from time to time my tutor created her own activities in http://www.educaplay.com/, which is a webpage in order to create drills such as riddle or crossword so that students could learn the vocabulary in a funny and attractive way. Moreover, she made use of the web page called http://quizlet.com/ to devise flash cards. This web allows you to play there or print them for the class.

And on the other hand, at times my tutor searched on the internet useful resources.

    - Which new technologies have I seen my tutor use for organizational purposes (not for teaching the subject)?

On the one hand, my tutor used Excel programme and Educa to register the students’ results and their assistant.

On the other hand, there is a school’s email to be informed about when the meetings are, and also the school used Dropbox to upload and share with the teachers important documents about the school.

  - Which new technologies should my tutor use which I think would improve teaching? Why? mention specific technologies you would use and how

I would use the followings tools or programs:

• Animoto in order to create online videos from photos.

• Google Calendar in order to manage office hours for parents’ students, exam dates, delivery jobs, etc.

• Although my tutor created interactive activities in educaplay, I would strong recommend her to use hotpotatoes.

To sum up referring to the article, I think the school and the teacher tried to includes the promotion of ICT.  And it was considered as a key competence and is covered in all subject
areas of the curriculum

REFLECTION 3 - 2nd of October

This week we have worked on many aspects. First of all we analyzed some Mind Map tools.  I saw it quite interesting because you can know more programs so as to create mind Maps.  I had to say, until now, I only knew Cmap tools.

I and my group had to compare with spiderscribe which, from my point of view, is more complete due to the tools which offer to the users. I think I’ll probably use it again.

Secondly, we read some texts and I would like to stand out one about the different types of evaluation are there, which is called “recetas para acabar con el 50% del fracaso escolar”

We were used to memorize all for exams, and be corrected by only this method. According to the text, rote learning is useful for some topics but is not the only way to check if our pupils have learnt.

For example in maths, there could be students who know the formula of something but they don’t know how to apply it, and there could be students who don’t know the formula but they know how to apply it. So we can make different types of exam: one exam with support and another one without it. I mean, you can provide students the formula of something to solve a problem, but if you want to know if they have learnt the formula, you won’t provide it.

Another type of assessment of the student’s works is the rubrics. In my opinion they are important in teaching, mainly because if students have to evaluate their classmates, they know what the items are and how they are going to be evaluated. Moreover, they can evaluate the members of their work group.

As we are going to do the internship soon, I will observe and explore the way of evaluation that teachers apply. I think I will use it in my future as a teacher.

And finally, we have learnt a little bit more about whiteboards. I didn’t know a lot about this, at first it looks difficult to use but they have lots of advantages and it can result very useful in English teaching, since you can create lots of practical vocabulary activities or real tasks.

For instance, you can move all you write around, make it bigger, smaller, it allows you to do lots of vocabulary games guessing the words.

Moreover you can create fill activities, put pictures from the internet or from your own gallery, in order to match pictures with words...etc. and at the end it is possible to save the work and go back in the following class or when you want, which is very valuable. I would like to know more about whiteboard, so I will explore more about this.