OMIŠ

Hi everyone!

 This week's reading was very enlightning. I found some of the online and offline tools very helpful.

I was already familiar with Hot Potatos, especially for creating word searches. What is a real revelation of this week is:

 

http://www.toolsforeducators.com/

because it made making crossword puzzles, board games, word searches... so easier than with Hot Potatoes. If you want, you can chech some of the made exercises on the Class wiki.

https://sites.google.com/site/webskillswikifall2012courtney/week-8-resources 

Easy test maker http://www.easytestmaker.com  can be extremely useful. There are so many different types of questions, and is surely one of my favorite tools of the week.

There is also  4teachers, it can be a great source for ideas.

All the mentioned tools can be used with my young learners but only as prepared and printed exercises for doing them individually. If I intend to do them online, I would have to use already tested one-computer technique.

As for the Nicenet classes or Class Blog, it is rather clear why I cannot use it with young learners, but I intend to do a Class Blog for my Italian Class. As a matter of fact, some of the things learned on this online course, will be extremely useful for my Italian classes also.

 

Ivana

I forgot to mention, here is my short lesson plan to be done in one computer classroom. Feel free to comment it and criticise!

The ABCD objective would be:

A: young learners (3rd grade)

B: will reproduce and accurately use parts of the city vocabulary

C: in exercises projected from a computer

D: with no pronunciation errors

This is the lesson plan:

1. Introduce parts of  the city using city plan from a book and using flashcards (teacher)

2. Practice pronunciation of some difficult words (orally with teacher)

3. Listen and do a listening exercise where the children hear the sounds of city places (like church bells, train arriving at the station, actors from a film, children at the playground...) and guess and write the place (class CD - children)

4. Do worksheets on a projector/tv connected to a computer (the children are chosen from a dropdown menu the correct word using a mouse one by one)

            http://www.englishexercises.org/makeagame/viewgame.asp?id=6165

            http://www.englishexercises.org/makeagame/viewgame.asp?id=6967 (exercise 2/3)

5. Imagine a town, give it a name and draw a plan of it making sure the town has places learned during the lesson (if there is time left, if not, the children will do it for homework)

Opatija, The Girl with a Seagull

Hi everybody!

I started this week considering the idea of learners authonomy contradictory. Why? I offered many reasons in my Nicenet posts, most of them springing from the fact that I mostly teach young English learners and the idea of  "indipendency" given to young children is difficult. 

shortly, the reasons I gave were:

-  if the children are left without any guide, they wion'tt do much of what they are expected

-  it is hard to learn something when you know you are supposed to do so; it crushes the motivation

-  the children as well as the teachers, are bounded by the curriculum first, there are subjects and topics they are supposed to learn and we, as teachers, have the obligation to “teach“ them the mentioned; this somehow excludes indipendency.

So, my only solution of this might be to let the children choose the way they will learn something. Their autonomy would consist in the fact that the teacher could offer various sources on the same subject to achieve the same goal. The teacher could also provide them with some techniques to ease the process of learning.

To summerize, the most important that I as a teacher can do is, try to inspire them to love the language I am teaching. I think that only this could light the sparkle in them to pursue the knowledge on their own outside the curriculum they are forced to follow. And to do that, boredom must be excluded, they must be willing to participate in the class activities that should primarily be interesting, fun and sometimes inspired by technology.

Ivana

Hi again!

I have just created my Prezi for young learners on how to tell the exact time. Here is the link, hope you will enjoy it!

What's the Time?

Šibenik

Hi everyone!
There were so many different topics to discuss this passing week. Regarding the PPt presentations, I have been using them many times during my classes, as probably many of you also do. I included video clips, music, links and some simple games, but I haven't ever used it for creating for eg jeopardy quiz. So, I will try to include some kind of quiz in it for my weekly task as I would surely include blank page. It really is a good idea to draw some attention during the presentation.

I have also checked the other 5 applications for those who do not like PPts. I really like Prezi!
It is fun, seems so lively compared to PPt.

How can  PPts help us engage our students more? I think they are just help that must be carefully intricated in our lesson. Not to be confusing, I am strongly pro technology. Regardless the good technological preparation is time consuming, I think we ought to use it because the children we teach are born with technology, they are digital natives, it makes the great part of their life and we simply must keep up with them and the technology itself.

To conclude, I don't think that the role of a teacher can be replaced with technology, but I sure think that it can make things more interesting and appealing to learners.

Ivana

Dubrovnik

Hi people!

I wanted to tell you that I had created my first WebQuest in order to implement PBL in my class. It is for the 3rd grade, young learners. They do not have the skills to use the Internet or PC in general yet so I intend to help them with it, so I would probably have to:

-          guide the children through the process of PBL giving them instructions in mother tongue

-          do all on few computers only and use one connected to projector because it would be impossible to monitor them and help them all at the same time

-          keep my PBL preparation short with few tasks only

-          let them do some part of PBL with the help of their parents

 I will leave you my WebQuest link if you want to check it. it is:

http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=171269 Animal webquest

Thanks in advance, 

Ivana