I do not even want to write about a possible "END". You don´t imagine how sad I feel. I´m just writing in this moments and my tears are about to come out, believe me. There is a very beautiful song that says "it´s hard for me to say I´m sorry" from chicago, well, it´s hard for me to say good bye.
I learnt plenty of things and I´m always thanking robert and my classmates for being part of this important teaching team. When talking about successful topics I could say that all of them were and the most useful for me were: autonomy, learning styles, abcd objectives, rubrics, interactive PowerPoint presentations, among others. The least relevant was aural/oral skills, hot potatoes because I already knew about them and used them in class.

THANKS ONCE AGAIN PEOPLE!!!!!
I SEND YOU MILLONS OF KISSES AND HUGS!!!
I LOVE YOU ALL!!!!

WEEK 8 REFLEXION... THANKS A LOT!

Hello everyone!

First of all I´d like to express what I feel and it is that I am really happy and proud because we are in our 8th week of the online course. Congratulations everybody for being here too and thanks Robert we are now more technological English teachers and I do love it!

It´s amazing the amount of web pages we have to create our own exercises and tests. In fact, I had already used Hot Potatoes before. When I was studying at the university, some teachers gave this tool to students in class with the purpose of creating new activities for our own learners at school. Since then, it is always part of my interactive PowerPoint presentations to make it more practical and participative. Students love Hot Potatoes, they love interacting themselves and they see this activity as an amazing one.

Now a days, there are easier, more interactive and technological tools for learning English language. Let´s take advantages of it and enhance our teaching process!!!

Love you all!

CLASS BLOG!

Hello Industrial Safety Students! Welcome to our class blog!

I hope you had a great weekend! Now, our week discussion is going to be about "English Importance in Industrial Safety Studies". 

Instructions: Answer the following questions and post your comments about the topic:

• Do you like English?
• Where have you studied English?
• Why is English part of the Industrial Safety program?
• Is English important for this career?

Please, be sure you comment on your friends posts!  

One computer class!

This question concerns many teachers. Sometimes we just have a computer and we feel unable to develop any activity. There are always thousand of ways to enhance our classes and get students involve in the English learning process. Now, limitations do not exist for me. There is no reason not to use that computer and there it is where teachers have to use creativity and constructivism.

In my case, I do not even have a computer in the classroom, but I got my own, so the idea is to design an interactive powerpoint presentation where all my students can participate. How?, that´s part of planning and organization. Teachers must find the way so that their students learn in a cooperative way.

Interactive Classes with PowerPoint. How to engage our students into the English World?

Hello Colleagues! I hope all of you had an interesting and wonderful week the way I did. Interesting because I see that every week we pass through is a wonderful knowledge world and in this sixth one "Interactive powerpoint presentations in our classes". Having large or small lecture classes has been a big issue for a lot of teachers who sometimes lose control on them. They do not know how to manage the content of the PPT presentation and make their students interested and involved in them. This is because the classes are not interactive enough and the learning process turns to be very slow and insignificant for some students. 

The idea of implementing interaction in our classes makes students be in a more direct contact with the learning,  and they can undesrtand the class in an easier and  more interesting way. For this reason, it is highly recommended to design PPT presentations that include different activities and tasks where the learners can write, make questions and answers, play with different techniques, use true or false questions, answers selection, etc. 

As for my task project, I already though about evaluating my 8th grader students through a survey. It must be one of my first steps because I need to measure how much they know about technology, programs, web searchers or at least, computers. The survey will contain questions such as: Do you know about computers?, What do you use them for?, Have you used one of them before?, Do you know about internet?, How much do you know about it?,etc. All this questions will be measured by a rubric and it is going to be designed in order to evaluate results. I think this survey application will be for next week. My main goal is to let students know about technological English studies and make them see that it is an interesting,  easy and funny way to learn ESL.    

I wish another succesful week!!! Warm hugs from Venezuela!!!

Week 5 reflexion! Project Based Learning in an "English V Memory Book"

Hello everyone once again. Here I am writing about how interesting this week was and how successful this online training has become. PBL is an important strategy where our students can develop more than one skill, where they can discover that the teaching-learning process is beyond the classroom. A PBL can be done outdoors, too. It helps students to feel autonomous and see that they do not depend on teachers to do everything they want, learn and create to.

Based on what a PBL is and according to Susan Gaer, I took a very nice example for all of you. This is my “English V Memory Book” that my teacher “Luisa Cristina” and group of classmates did in the fifth semester at the university four years ago. The idea of creating the book was to compile all the term indoor and outdoor activities such as: Own dramatic stories, a native speaker presentation, review essays, today´s news, answers to legal cases, fairy tales own versions, unit previewing and an activity back to 60´s, 70´s and 80´s. During the semester, all of us did a great job and everybody wrote funny dramatic stories and fairy tales. “Back to the 60´s, 70´s and 80´s” was A field trip in an occasion when students go somewhere outside the University to learn about a particular subject, and one of these was organized as one creative and original activity for English V students. So, on May 9^th, 2006 the class of Professor Luisa Cristina Alvarez had the opportunity to go to “Monte Libano Club”, wear costumes and share with a native speaker, in order to improve their knowledge of the language. The trip was based on the 60´s, 70´s and 80´s with the purpose of getting “a touch” from those decades and learns about them.

For the book creation, we needed an organizing tasks group, and editing group, a production crew, a designing group and a general coordinator. All the students had to participate and we developed more than four skills. I really feel blessed for having this activity and many others in my life. We also changed the lyrics of “Hips don´t lie” one of Shakira´s song (a Colombian singer) and created a new one for our professor.  It was really funny.

To conclude, I give you my example in order to compare this memory book with Project Based Learning. The results? Well, everybody learnt more than simple class knowledge. All of us communicated with that native speaker and could create a book of more than 50 pages from our own term work. It was baptized through a very nice ceremony in class and it is now part of the university English Library.

Note: I have the “English V memory book” PowerPoint presentation, I´ll try to load it in my authorstream site. Register yourself in this web page for downloading this presentation. Here I will show you some pictures.

Thanks a lot. I hope you like it and I feel very happy to share this important experience. !!

 ENGLISH V MEMORY BOOK

EDITING GROUP

PROFESSOR LUISA CRISTINA IN THE BAPTISIM OF THE BOOK

BOOK BAPTIZED

GUEST SPEAKER IN THE FIELD TRIP

MY FRIENDS AND I WEARING THE COSTUMES

Week 4 Reflexion!!! Sharing with a great group of teachers around the world.

Another amazing week, isn´t it?

Technology is a great tool once again. I read and commented on my  friends´project tasks and it was really interesting to know about their teaching issues. However, there is not a problem without any solving. My project task is based on students which ages range between 14 and 16 years old. They do not know about studying with technology; they just know about engines such as: GOOGLE or using their messenger and facebook.

It would be a pleasure for me to take them into a real technological world. Make them see ESL is beyond books and a classroom, as I already mentioned it before in one of my posts. The easiest way to do it is taking them into a cyber cafe nearby the school, rent all the available computers and sit them in front  in order to start teaching  English from another perspective and develop the four skills. I am really sure they will love this interesting technique, because they love computers and playing video games. The fact is not only playing, but also learning by doing or learning by playing. They will discover that studying ESL with internet is as interesting as using their facebook every day. 

Remember that MOTIVATION IS THE FIRST STEP TO HAVE GREAT STUDENTS!!!