Ciao!

All'inizio, presentati!
Come ti chiami? Che classe fai?

Hi everyone!

We have reached the final week of our course and I am feeling a little sad. I got used to doing weekly tasks and I am sure I am going to miss them.

What I have learned so far in this course? I was introduced to many interesting and useful web tools, and I will use some of them in my teaching.

I like a lot Prezi presentations, they are very dynamic and are not so linear like PPts.
I also like WebQuest. The lessons obviously need some time preparing, but I think children will benefit from it.
 RubiStar is also great. Making rubrics with this tool is so easy, I am sure it will be of great help for me in the future.
Delicious is also useful, instead of remembering all the passwords for different pages, you can only remember one - that of delicious.

There are also many different sites that have already prepared lessons. Some of them are yet to be explored in more details. I have left that for the future time when there will not be weekly tasks to do.


To conclude, I am glad and grateful for the knowledge I gained and hope that the future participants will know how to make the best of the course.

Greetings,

Ivana

I have another IMPORTANT thing to announce: We have our first class baby!

He is a beautiful baby boy, named Lovre and he is already adored by his mummy!

Here is his picture:

Hi everyone!

Here is a short reflection  I have on this week's topic. I was familiar with the multiple intelligence concept before, but what was new to me from this week was Felder's classification of learning styles.

I was surprised to find out how I can relate to some of his types. Anyway, what I liked the most is the statement that everybody is sometimes both types from any classification. I guess it depends on the situation...

I also took a quiz on what type of learner I am, and I wasn't surprised with the results. So here they are: 

Ivana

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