Dear all,
Below you can find the link of my final webquest.

Looking forward for your comments!
Blerta
http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=120213

Introducing students to new learning methods

 Dear all,

I was thinking about what will happen if we as teachers can not explain clearly to our students the new ways of learning, in our case, learning through technology.

I think that through this picture we can guess what students will think.

WEEK 5 REFLECTIONS

Dear colleagues,
During this week we have been introduced to many tools, methods and techniques, such as: PBL, assessment tools/rubrics, and webquests, through which we can directly and actively involve our students into the learning process.

It is great that through PBL the students will have the opportunity to be more interactive while working on different topics that they are interested in, and also they will be more motivated to participate and to have a better performance. The other advantage of PBL is that students are going to enhance their research skills by working in groups and by trying to find relevant information about  their respective topics.

As I mentioned also in the discussion thread in Nicenet, unfortunately  in Kosovo PBL is a very new way of learning and there is a lack of teachers who could apply technology and PBL in their schools and classes. Even though the schools will be digitized very soon, it will take a relatively long time to train  teachers how to use  technology and PBL with their students.

However, I feel very privileged and also very lucky that I have the opportunity to learn very much from different experienced teachers from all over the world and also share my experience.

Regarding the creation of rubrics, I must state that I found them very useful and very organized. While I created my rubric in Rubistar,  I saw that it is a great tool for setting the criteria of evaluation very clearly, so that students exactly and very clearly know how they will be evaluated in certain stages.

In addition to all my reflection, I have to say that the creation of the webquest seemed to me the most challenging task. But, it is great that while creating webquests we directly and practically learned the way and stages on how to create projects with our students and how to apply project based learning.  

Finally, I think that until now, week 5 was the week where we not only learned about new web tools that can be used   in class, but also how to apply them directly and very efficiently.

Week 4 reflections

Dear colleagues,
After having watched the video that I've posted, I saw that now- days it is not only a necessity, but also an obligation for teachers to get more knowledge and more training about using technology in class.

During this week I learned many things about how to enhance or improve reading, writing and vocabulary skills.
Especially in Krajka's and Liang's articles there are described very concretely the ways we can help our students to improve these skills and they also included very useful links.
I've already suggested my students some links from Liang's article where they can read different books and articles:  http://bikesters.com/; http://www.cyberkids.com/cw/mul/sydney/

The other thing that was very new for me, was the creation of a technology enhanced plan. While creating this plan, I saw that the lessons through technology can be transferred into something interesting. 


But, also by reading the lesson plans posted by other colleagues, I saw that even the most boring lesson can be fun and special for students.

Engage Me!

Week 3 reflections

   I think that the 3rd week was a  very fruitful week because we have been introduced to several new things. 

It is very nice that now we have created Delicious pages where we can find our favorite websites (at least to me this was very good and helpful). 

Amongst other new and important things that I've learned during this week are the strategies on  building  aural/oral skills. It was a great week because we had the opportunity to be introduced to different strategies and ways on how to build these skills. We also shared different useful links, and  fortunately, I've been already able to use some of them with my students. 

The first link that I used directly in class was  www.esl-lab.com, there students could do some listening exercises directly in the computer, and I saw that it already had a good impact on them. After this exercise I recommended some websites where they can practice their listening and speaking  also at home, they are: livemocha, bbc.com.uk, and, real - english.com. The advantage of these sites is that the students have the possibility to practice directly with authentic material.

Finally, I'm very glad that now I'm able to teach my students that they can use the web also for their education, because till now they used it only for fun. But, after using the above-mentioned links they said that also learning English through this way is fun, so I can see that this new way of teaching already began to have some good impact on students, and it's also a great experience for me.

Teaching Pronunciation with Jazz Chants - TEFLVideos.com

Teaching pronunciation

While searching for some material about how to teach pronunciation, I found a very interesting article about "The Hows and Whys of Teaching Pronunciation" written by  Shelley Vernon in  http://www.teachingenglishgames.com.  The author in this article describes different stages of teaching pronunciation, but amongst all these stages she also incorporated, according to me, a very important point "How not to Teach Pronunciation," where she states the mistakes teachers do when they practice pronunciation. For more details you can click on this link:   http://www.teachingenglishgames.com/Articles/Teaching_Pronunciation.htm .

 

Week 3: New listening activities

Today I tried some listening activities with the 10th and 11th grade students who study fashion design. I tried a listening exercise called "CLOTHING STYLES" in  www.esl-lab.com.  After telling them the title, I saw that they started to be very enthusiastic about the exercise and in a way they were also motivated.
According to an article  that I read about improving listening skills in http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk, it is enormously important to motivate the students before starting with listening activities with a text that they will find interesting and will arouse their interest and curiosity.

As a pre-listening activity, I introduced the students to the quiz text. So, we did some vocabulary exercises by reading the text and learning new words about clothes.
During the listening activity, they had to click at one of the multiple choices. While doing the exercise, I saw that even some students who usually do not feel very confident in English classes, were able to finish the listening exercise with a good percentage. They said this was helpful to them because the topic seemed interesting and caught their attention.
Unfortunately, this listening activity was performed by only one computer as there aren't any computer labs at school yet. So, students performed this exercise one by one, and they said that they enjoyed more this exercise by doing it through the computer.

However, today I learned that in order to make students to get the most of our classes is to be able to motivate them.

  I hope that in the near future the schools in Kosovo will start to be digitized and it will be possible to teach students the language through the web.  But, of course, also I as a teacher still need to improve my teaching skills through the web.



 In this link you can find a framework for planning a listening skills lesson
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/a-framework-planning-a-listening-skills-lesson

Differentiation Video

Why should you differentiate instruction?

THE NEW WAY OF LEARNING AND TEACHING Teaching different levels of students through the web

In my teaching experience during these two and a half years, most of the classes were consisted of different levels of students in the same class, and that was really a gap. Some students were intellectually prepared for the respective levels of English and some not. So, there was no "balance" between them. After identifying this problem, I did some search on the web (books.google.com )about this problem and I found a great answer "Differentiation." According to Diane Heacox's book "Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom", differentiation means to "adapt or modify" the teaching material according to the student's need, and it's a two - step process :
1. Analyze the degree of challenge and variety in your current instructional plans.
2. Modify, adapt, or design new approaches to instruction in response to students' needs, interests and learning preferences. (Heacox, Diane, "Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom", Free Spirit Publishing).
I started to adapt or modify the material I teach (also with the help of some teacher trainings) according to my students needs and it had some good results, at least there was created a balance between the strong and week students. Both, the strong and "weaker" students were able to finish the same tasks, and this was because the task was adapted according to their level of English. To be more specific, I mostly applied this method with a class of 11th grade students, where 60% of them weren't intellectually prepared for Pre-Intermediate English.
After reading in detail the learning objectives, especially "Bloom's Taxonomy", I think that differentiation can be applied even better.
But, now I would like very much to be able to apply differentiation with these different levels of students also through the web.

I was searching about "Teaching different levels of students through the web", and I used "Noodle tools". I tried different searching engines in there, like : iSeekEducation, SweetSearch, Wikipedia, Bing and some other search engines.Through the other engines I couldn't find the information I needed. They didn't show any useful links or results, whereas Bing was great because it showed also some other related links that are very useful, especially: http://oc.course.com/sc/tdc5/index.cfm?action=issue&chapter=2. In this link you can find different information about "Teachers Discovering Computers."

The other search engine that I used is YouTube (recommended by Vinicius ). There I could find different useful videos regarding this topic. Thank you Vinicius!

Finally, my aim as a teacher is to be able to use as much as possible the skills I'm seizing through this course. I hope and believe that the skills that I'm improving through this course can be helpful also to my teacher colleagues.

I strongly recommend this link to all teachers. Here you can find different information about integrating technology in the classroom.
http://oc.course.com/sc/tdc5/index.cfm?action=issue&chapter=2