Week 10

It's time to say goodbye my dear online friends. Thank you for sharing your views on different topics and reading and visiting my posts. Thank you Sean, you were supportive and active.



Frankly speaking  at the beginning of the course I felt overwhelmed by the amount of tools we had to use: blackboard, google sites, wikispaces, blogspot, nicenet and e-mail account. As soon as I got to know about the organization of the course I remembered Bridget Jones' diary and wrote my resolutions on week 1. Now that we are almost finishing I can include on my list:

•  Read the weekly tasks on week 1

•  Start participating as soon as you finish reading part of the materials

•  Participate in Nicenet discussions

•  Interact with your classmates

•  Follow other participants' blogs

•  Customize your blog: include a blogroll, tags, audios, videos, photos.

•  Reflect

•  Read additional materials

I tried to follow these ideas and did my best. I found the course very useful. All the contents were interesting and there were many sites I didn't know which I'm planning to share with my students next year. I loved the organization and the fact that we could interact with guest speakers such as Donna and Jeff.

One of my students in ICT for ELT created this online video after attending the subject and as a student I somehow feel the same way.

Final reflection by laucascone on GoAnimate

 

My final reflection part 2 by laucascone on GoAnimate

As regards the readings from this week, I've been using technology for a lot of time. When I started working as a teacher I used different tools to prepare handouts. Students were rather passive in the sense that they were not using the tools.
Nowadays I think I'm at the Transformation Level. I encourage the innovative use of technology tools. I try to be creative and flexible. In the case of the final project, I started using multimedia e-portfolios and students set their goals and rather than completing assignments and they reflected on their learning process.
University of Southern Florida: The Technology Integration Matrix


State of Washington: Tiers of Technology Integration
I can say I'm at Tier 3 because my students are actively engaged in using technology esp. in Materials Design and ICT for ELT. Students create their own resources such as online quizzes, videos, etc. They participate in collaborative activities in google docs and wikispaces. What's more,  they share and publish their work online.

All in all, it was a great experience. I learnt about other contexts and how to integrate the interactive web. What else can I say?

This is a new beginning. Good luck my friends!

Learning styles/Multiple intelligences

This week I read about learning styles and technology tools for multiple intelligences. The article Tech tools that support multiple intelligences was very interesting because it includes information on multiple intelligences and how technology tools support classroom activities for each of the 9 intelligences identified by Gardner. I participated in the discussion in Nicenet and included web tools I know for each intelligence:

Verbal/ Linguistic: people learn best through language including speaking, writing, reading, and listening which means that we can use most of the websites we saw. :)
What's more, students can prepare interactive Powerpoint presentations and complete tasks created in different authoring tool programs such as Hot Potato. They can use audio recorders such as Audacity and Vocaroo.

Logical/Mathematical: people learn best through numbers, reasoning, and problem solving. For example, they can use graphic organizers such as Cmap tools and Cacoo and webquests as we created.

Visual/Spatial: people learn best visually and tend to organize their thinking spatially. I have mentioned some and I'd like to include online comic creator tools such as Toon Doo, avatars like Voki and talking photos like Fotobabble. I included some examples in previous blog posts.

Bodily/Kinesthetic: people learn best through physical activity such as dance, hands-on tasks, constructing models, and any kind of movement. QR codes treasure hunts which I included in Paddlet seem to be a good option. Students can go on a field trip use their mobile phones to take pictures, record videos and audios and then prepare a presentation.

Musical/Rhythmic: people learn best through sounds including listening and making sounds such as songs, rhythms, patterns, and other types of auditory expression. I'm thinking about David Ferlazzo's post on week 3, using radio programmes and video clips and speaking lesson plans at one stop English. 

Intrapersonal: people learn best through metacognitive practices which means that creating a reflective blog in Blogspot or an e-porftolio in Weebly where students write about their learning process and goals apart from showing their work can be of great help.They can also use blipfoto if they like posting photos. Blipfoto lets students share their photos one day at a time and write about them. It's free and easy to use. It's like a daily photo journal.

Intrapersonal: people learn best through interaction with other people. For that reason, students can participate in forums, work in group in wikis or google docs, participate in key pal or school links projects, comments on each other's blogs, etc.

Naturalist: people learn best through the interactions with the environment. This may include using QR codes for treasure hunts, the mobile phone for videorecording and taking photos to prepare a presentation of a field trip, google earth, woices to upload photos and audios about a school trip, etc.

I also read the article "Learning styles and strategies" by Felder & Soloman which explores the impact of different learning styles on classroom performance. Teachers must understand the fact that students learn in different ways and plan lessons which suit their needs and learning styles.

My final project

I'm happy to know that my final project is ready after 9 weeks of hard work. It took me some time to put all my ideas and resources together but in the end I could publish it. It was a good idea to follow different steps:

1) I analyzed the students who were attending the course "Materials Design" at IES en Lenguas Vivas Juan R. Fernández in Buenos Aires.

2)  I wrote my reflections on the course "Materials Design" and described the issues that technology might be able to help improve.

3) I wrote about the  technology-related change that I was going to implemen.

4) I started to implement  that technology-related change in the course "Materials Design". I keept a log to record what was done and what happened.

5) I wrote a draft report about what happened when implementing the project and shared it with Olga who commented on it.

6) I used the checklist that Olga completed when she commented on my draft report and wrote the final version of my project. Then I uploaded it onto out wiki and Nicenet.

 Here's the final version. Hope you find it interesting!

Anvill

This week we had the opportunity of meeting Jeff Magoto, the director of the language center at the University of Oregon. It was a great idea to have access to Anvill developed by Jeff who explained to us how to use this course management system and the different tools it provides.

Here's a video about Anvill.

So I decided to open a teacher account and to create a course in Anvill. You don't need to request for membership. The course is called "Trying ANVILL: Materials Desing" (Group Registration Key: 2447) and  is open as you can see in the above screen shots.

 

 

Then I created a lesson plan based on a presentation by Nik Peachey delivered at IATEFL 2013. After watching the presentation, students have to complete certain tasks. As a follow up activities I created a voiceboard and a forum.

Edilim

Last year I got to know about Edilim and decided to try it out. It's a frees oftware that can be used to create different activities. It's user friendly, free and provides a variet of options.

 Last term, my students created a multimedia e-book in Edilim which included 3 activities. In this case, I want yo show an example.

Viviana Grieco designed 3 activities for 7 year-old-students. On the first activity, students have to solve a puzzle about pets. On the second page of the e- book, they have to solve a memory game and say the animals aloud whenever they find the pair. On the last page of the e-book, kids read and find the corresponding pictures.

 

 

Hot Potatoes

When I was a student at the Teacher Training College I was introduced to Hot Potatoes. We created activities and tried to customize them. We changed the background, the fonts, the colours and the feedback. That was in 2002. Nowdays, I teach students how to create activities in Hot Potato but they don't like it much due to the fact that its layout is not very attrative. Yet, it's free, you don't need internet connection and it's user friendly. You can create different types of  activities and even design a menu with links to them.

 

These are screen shots of a set of activities I created in Hot Potatoes. After reading "Chapter 2: A model for the design and development of multimedia projects" from the book Multimedia Projects in Education by Ivers & Baron, students will complete 4 activities.

The menu includes the four activities I created. 

1. Students complete a graphic organizer based on the DDD-E Model.
2. Students match concepts and definitions.
3. Students choose the correct option for each sentence.
4. Students put in order a paragraph.

Project Plan & Peer Assessment Checklist

This week we had to present the first draft of our final project. The good thing about it is that we've been working for 7 weeks on this project which means that we have to collect the information and reflect on what happened when implementing the project. I like the fact that the project was organized into different steps. We explored projects from former students, we had access to rubrics and a peer assessment checklist, we characterized the group and the setting, the problem and planed a possible solution.

In my case I worked with Olga. We both exchanged our project plans and completed a checklist.

Click here if you want to read my project plan

In my case I read Olga's project which was very interesting. Her learners are master students working on their theses. Wow! They're studying at university and improving their presentation skills. I completed the checklist and made some suggestions.