WEEK 4

 

Week number four is on. We are about to reach the belly bottom of the course. I have read so many articles that when I try to write about it, I have to go back to the paper and make sure about what I am going to cite. Week number three wasn't that busy. I had fewer responsibilities at my office and course activities were easy to achieve-

Sean our tutor mentioned in our weekly newsletter "I continue to be very impressed with how communicative and sharing everyone is. You all show such wonderful strength in supporting, helping, and sharing with one another. Your students are so lucky to have you in their lives." that made me quote Jose de Cervantes Saavedra, "Cada uno en su oficio puede alabar a Dios" (Ech person's job can praise God). I think of teachers as doctors who prevent and cure knowledge diseases. We, as doctors have to come up with new remedies for our new generations whose needs are wider than ours.

 

This week we are conferencing about Reading/Writing skills and technology Enhanced lesson plans. Readings include step by step how to put technology to work as a tool for students in classroom, how to use ebooks in reading activities.

I have still half week to go, so I will enhance this explanation as I continue to complete more activities. J

 

 

My computer crashed! The screen just freeze. My first thought was: It may be needing a time "to think" but after some minutes: PANIC!!!  All the hints I could get from my acquaintance was "format". How could I!!!

 

I wrote on my blog for about 2 hours. I had nice thoughts on the topics we studied in the last week..thinking, analyzing, writing, editing... and then --> SEND ... no response. The clock sand whirling on the middle of the screen. I cried in my heart. It took a little time to say: why not, let's format.   I finally did. I was able to save my files: family pictures, videos, old documents and so... but I wasn't able to save my blog.  

 

Proof reading on the material we had gone through the past week, I keep thinking about Mey-Ya Ling's recommendations  on her Three Extensive Reading Activities about how to use eBooks in class. She deeply set a plan to get the maximum of these activities:

1. Choosing the book.

2. Reading and Sharing the books

3. Evaluating books

 

Each topic includes: Goals, Procedures, Study guide and How to evaluate. If done as recommended, Miss Ling concludes that at the end of the activities students would be able  to interpret the texts and even study outside the classroom. Isn't it great?

 

 

 

 

WEEK THREE

Week number three is over. For the first time I checked my grades and it surprised me to see that I was missing grades. I had tried to keep up with all my tasks, so I checked and sadly realized that my blog for week two was still in drafts, not sure what I did wrong.

Studying on line is not easy as many of my co workers tell me, they think that not attending a classroom makes things easier but I had been very busy at work this week, especially because I tried to be engaged with every task we were assigned. I printed all the suggested readings and read them all, most of them I read while having lunch.

 

I wasn't too excited about bookmarking but reading my classmates posts and visiting all the links we were suggested was awesome, clicking on any other link I visited the Congress Library. That was a good tour.

 

Reading "Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Material" by Lindsay Miller I found interesting hints for teaching. We teachers, regularly go straight to the point and most of the time have to deal bring more material to reinforce. Miller’s recommendations is make Pre-, While-, and Post- Listening activities. I am sure that trying these steps would help us to change our previous results.

 

Project Task #2 was enriching also; I choose to read  Aleyda Linares from Honduras. What she did wasn't complicated but as she explains was relevent to her stdents needs and interest and it is also very interesting hint. Most of the time techers may think of bigger changes but if they dont catch students attention may not work as expectated.

 

I tried to do the optional task but the link keeps sending a message that it is a forbidden site.

 

I feel we are doing very well, I wish Sean our professor would post more answers to our post but I guess we are too many.

 

Week number four is knocking the door, it's midnignt in my side of the world so I better go to bed. Hope my classmates and professor have a good night too.

 

Week 2

There was about an hour left to write about what I have experienced during these weeks in the Webskills Course. I had been procrastinating that post because there were still too many thoughts storming in my mind and I really wanted to picture my experience in detail.

In two weeks I have read every post (and there are so many posts)  my classmates had published telling their experience about every topic. The greatest of these readings is that I have realized that even when  we are in different parts of the world, the  teaching - learning process behave almost the same everywhere.

Writing Objectives are not part of my tasks since I switch from being an elementary teacher to be a virtual tutor.  Virtual teaching environment has a lot of advantages and since I am teach virtual courses I left behind all the tasks a room teacher does like for example planning, writing objective and so forth.

Then Sean, my professor, assigned us to read and write about ABCD Model for Behavioral Objectives. These new words came up while I was reading: audience, behavior, conditions, degree; one by one they have a meaning I already knew, but the four together meant something totally different: an objective that explains exactly who, what, how and it is going to be achieved in the class.

New things to learn, new tools to work, more knowledge; words that describe my course in the second week.

Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops.
Henry Brooks Adams

WEEK 1

 

After "Introducing myself", "Comments on the guidelines and ground rules for discussion" was the topic  I liked the most on first week. Reading all my classmates posts, gave me a wider point of view about setting up rules. I learned methods not only for discussion but also for email exchange in virtual environment.

 

In my position, one of the hardest job in virtual classes is to make students follow certain "etiquette" while posting on forums or requesting for help via email. Even when they are sent all the previous material, they are supposed to read it and follow instructions, this week I learn that we, virtual tutors, can not take for granted that they are simply going to follow rules if we haven't discussed.

 

Sean not only posted the rules, he also invited us to discuss if we agree with them. I now understand that most of the incongruences we have had with some students is because we never discussed  the rules, and even when the rules we post in our site are almost alike those I have to observe in my class, they work properly in my class because everybody agree that we have read, understood and were willing to work by those rules.

 

I have something very important to teach my colleagues, somehow I feel we had disrespected our students by simply demanding they to obey instead of asking them to discuss the rules and feed us back about them.

 

I feel positive now that we are about to have a new beginning and that everybody is going to be comfortable as we are going to first agree how are we going to behave and later we will do the course homework.

 

 

 “Are you asking me or telling me?” ― Irvine Welsh, Filth

 

 

 

Creating my blog

Creating my blog

 

I had blogged before, but surely it is not the same to feel hyper or down and just come to your blog and express how you feel than being assigned to create a blog as part of your class tasks.

 

Creating a blog for serious business is all on the other side, mainly because knowing that you have to be objective, focused and serious in what you write, it is kind of stressing to sit in front of the pc and just tap with your fingers thinking how not to sound boring or out side.

 

Well, I have to say that once I made up my mind that this is my homework blog, I decided that I had to do my best, as what I want is to get high scores. The first thirty minutes I spent trying to find a good name for my blog and my expectation were high but the system kept telling me "that name is not available" so I had to keep watching until the blued check mark appeared.

 

Choosing what to say and how to say it didn't look like a hard task until I noticed that I had spent more than ten minutes typing and deleting all that came to my mind. I think that creating a blog to use it for class is very distant from what I am use to write a blog for, but I have to accept that I never thought of a blog before as an educative tool.

 

Analyzing how would I use a blog as part of my learning strategies is not clear to me yet, but then I realized that this is exactly what I am going to learn in my class so I think I had fulfilled my first task here.