WELCOME

PERSONAL STATEMENT

Since it's my learner reflection, I'm going to try my best to show you what I've learned in a very visual way, because that's the way I consider my learning and teaching style. Moreover, in each post it will appear a different type of technological tool, from the ones I've used during this course, specially my favorite ones. However, all the pictures with text are made me in Power Point, I have to modify it and turn it into pictures, otherwise the "Blog" wouldn't recognize the fonts that I'm using. Just in case you're curious, I've downloaded all of the fonts from this website, I'll add the link below if you are interested.

http://www.fonts2u.com/

 All of the patterns and pictures are just random things I find in google, for example, I search for the word notebook, and then add a paper, or a polaroid or stripes and it becomes what you will see. I don't have any knowledge on Photoshop whatsoever, (I wish) but for example if I want to delete a text from a picture I use Paint. Yes. That old program everybody has forgotten about.

 If you want me to send you the power point templates I've made throught the course, I'll be enchanted to share them with you. Hope you enjoy my reflection.  

GOODBYE COLLEGE... OR NOT?

I made this bistrip as an introduction to all the material I have learned and how it makes a difference between everything that I've been taught during college. 

Right now I'm in my 4th year of college and it's the last one so a lot of things are running through my mind, but the main thing is... How in the world am I supposed to fit all this information in my head so I can put it in practice? 

Truth is it's going to be hard, and I've seen it specially during my "Practicum" experience. You can plan all the lessons, the exercises, the material perfectly right that everything is so improvised when you start teaching that you are not going to be able to control all the chaos that surrounds this society. 

A learner reflection is supposed to make you think about your learning process, not only about the competences, but how you can apply it to real life circumstances. It's also about reflecting the didactic knowledge and skills necessary to teach languages and how to monitor your own progress and record your experiences of teaching. 

Therefore, I used one of the new tools I discovered through this subject, called "Bistrip" to capture this anxiety I had in my mind about future technologies and how am I gonna keep up with all of them. 

Learning Episode: Tellecollaborative Project

OUR MOVIE LINK:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj9IL3kqJBM

ILLINOIS VIDEO LINK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pnm_GAdfo

First Meeting

Link for my 36 second video:

https://vimeo.com/106630267

We even had a virtual contract to make sure that we were going to commit on the task of the TEPBLL. I found this hilarious and very useful at the same time for my future task as a teacher. The main purpose of this written agreement between the student and the teacher is directed towards changing the pupils behaviour. It is a motivational device in which you agree to provide a reward to the student if they complete a designated task or displays a certain behaviour. 

I am really positive about using it in a future, since it provides structure, routine, consistency and organization in the student's life and it also promotes self responsability.

Technology-Enhanced Project-Based Language Learning (I, II, & III)

Future jobs that doesn't exist yet. Competence they will need: problem solving. If you don't have language you can't think in the first place and if you can't communicative, you can't collaborate. Language teachers are essential for the next generation of citizens. but we need to re-thunk HOW we teach languages. We need to find new paradigm that integrates languages, technology, competences, new notions of knowledge and learning. How? Project - based learning, as well as communicative language teaching.

Socioconstructivism, communicative language teaching, the impact it has on your teaching. CLT  focuses on communicative proficiency rather than mastery of structures. Teachers have to find ways for repetitive exposure without being boring. This means finding ways to contextualize so that students can catch the meaning. Language learning is about learning to communicative, not filling in gaps or memorizing. Motivating students to use the language no matter what level they are at. Getting the students to use the language to communicate for a real purpose. Creating learning situations where the students use the language in unrehearsed contexts (tranferral of knowledge)

PBLL + Computers = TEPBLL

What is it? Authentic purpose, it requires cognitive engagement. It is messy and requires lots of planning. It does not only follow a text book, it is audience - oriented,  it is not teacher - oriented. It is a carefully planned sequence of activities that segues one sub-task into another while aiming for a final output.

Language learning is embedded in several layers of other types of learning.

Implementing it in the classroom- How to contextualize, the project must be embedded, go beyond the classroom and are linked to other content, emerge from the learning needs of the students and their contexts. How to start:

·         Students interests

·         An already existing school project

·         Community project / concern

·         A hot social topic

Checklist

Can you find an underlying purpose for the project?

Can you link it beyond the classroom?

Will students see it only as busy work?

For language learning projects, technology can be integrated in several ways.  CMC to explore topics together, augmented reality to explore local history, with technology your project can span the world. In planning TEPBLL you must first decide your scope, duration: a month? a semester? Breadth: one topic? cross- disciplinary? outreach: community? to others? Audience: another school? And then you have to think backwards: what will be the end product? What are the expected outcomes? what are the procedural outcomes? How will you evaluate them? How will you let others know about the outcomes? How will students show their learning? And how will you measure their learning?

You map your project, organize the tasks & activities, compile resources (technology comes in) Create a storyboard (work plan) calibrate LANGUAGE SUPPORT need for all the activities. You can use the communicate-ometer to measure the communicative demand needed to complete the activity successfully. You will have to plan your language scaffolding accordingly.  You can plan for increasingly higher communicative demand along the TEPBLL. But don't forget to repeat linguistic exposure with a variety of tasks and subtasks throughout. What do you think the role of language is in TEPBLL? How does the teacher support this? Should the teacher focus any language instruction and how? Where and when does the language learning take place? How can this be assessed?

I completely agree with you, projects provide opportunities for students to engage in real life communication, in context, with real people, and across the globe. Including technologies in the projects are a good way to prepare our students for the future jobs they don't exist yet, they have fun with it and it's also a good way to motivate them. However,  the world is constantly changing and today students are teaching their parents how to use computers and smartphones, therefore, as a teacher, how can I keep up with the future generations requirements?

Moreover, I also think it is very important to know their interests and use them as a motivational factor to do the project, but what if the ideas they give us aren't useful? How can we guide them to propose topics that are interesting and useful? I think that sometimes students need to learn things they don't like, we can try to do it in a fun way, instead of memorizing and doing lots of paper sheets, but how do we handle that?

Lastly, I would like to ask something else, sometimes parents like to see results, such as exams, lots of homework... and the school wants us to do a specific project. How can we balance what the families demand, what the school is telling us to do and what the students are willing to do?

Computer-Mediated Communication and Language Learning

Behaviourism/Structuralism

A long history, back to Henry Sweet, didn't pay too much attention until Pavlov and his theory about slobbery dogs. Skinner he did some scare boxes sometimes with birds and mouses, they are trained with positive reinforcement, if he sees the blue ñight food comes out, if he clicks the red bar he gets shocked or by negative reinforcement. It's about training creatures to do things automatically. Charles Fries, audiolingualism came up with the idea with audiolingualism, the idea is a immediately if you get something right, you get no awards, if you say something wrong you get correction. Behaviourism, if people do something wrong and they get not corrected, their idea would get stucked in their head.

Plato IV: the touchscreen revolution in 1972. Plasma monitor, online games, talkomatic. Techonology, this is where everything came from.

Drill and practice exercises. You have brackets, you check your answers and it tells you immediately which ones are wrongs, with audilingual approacheces you need immediate feedback. It can work pretty well but it can be boring. Thats' why he calls em Drill and Kill. Good habits are strengthened and bad habits are discouraged. The computer has the power.

There is always change:

Cognitive approaches

Chomsky would say why can we understand grammtical structure we've never heard? Black box, language accustion device and that errors are a natural part of language.

Learners should consciously think about and discuss how the new language operates based on the samples they are exposed to. Making mistakes it's important because it helps learners to test hypotheses and leads to rule information.

On computers, we go to personal computers, things come more graphic oriented, environments to explore, integration of audio and video, learners explore the world of the program, rather than having the program control them.

Sociocognitive it started with Lev Vygotsky, he claimed that all human learning, including language learning, is attained through interaction with other people.

Zone of proximal development, learners will benefit most from social interaction, must be collaboratively and preferably with the aid of more knowledgeable teammates, it will be more beneficial.

Most recent: Hhymes, language is a social constructed and communicative competence were one of his main point.

Computers: The computer is not a tutor anymore, it is a tool, they are used to facilitate authentic communication and it shifts the dynamic from learners.

As it was shown in the video, the speed at which technology has developed plays a major role in the educational changes. Nowadays, networking means instant contact with anyone around the world, just with the click of the mouse you can learn exchange information and learn new things. It amazed me the fact that in 1972 they already had the touchscreen revolution, but what really shocked me was the drill and practice exercises. As Dr Sandler said, they also refer to it as "Drill and kill" because sometimes it can be boring for students, even though you get the immediate feedback it reminds me a lot to the exercises we usually do in the paper sheets, so why do they keep on using this type of exercises? And what about the motor skills when they write in a paper? If they keep working with the computer, they are going to lose the ability of it, plus the computer cannot teach the students how to write a correct sentence.

Also, there has been many studies about the perks of learning with ICT, but none of them actually takes an insight view of how it influences on motivation in primary school, why? Isn't it a distraction?

Lastly, with the cognitive approaches its said that learners explore the world of the program rather than having the program control them. Is it a good thing? Because I think it is important to have a balance between what they discover by themselves and the discovery with the guidance of a teacher.