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.

Answers

As a group, we all had to upload our questions to the "linoit" website, which is like a blackboard full of notes and ideas. Each one of us had to watch the videos from Dr Dooly and Dr Sadler and ask them interesting questions about the topics. Both of them were nice enough to answer some of them.

Finally, I made this POWTOON Video as a summary of what I understood about the TBLL and PBLL and the main differences between them two. I really like this tool as a substitute of Power Point, because it involves more proffesional and visual elements and it helps to capture your audiences attention. Moreover, it can be shared directly on youtube or in the website itself. I would definately use as a teacher even though I'm using it too as a student in other subjects presentations.

Here's the link to watch my summary: 

https://www.powtoon.com/show/bzRPTBmUD8j/tbll-vs-pbll/#/

Virtual World Enviroment

With the "Padlet" website we had to post questions or key ideas of the article we read. Later, we had to discuss our article with our peers and explain it to them, answering their questions and viceversa. 

Gathering the information with the peers in the classroom and asking each others questions really helped to clarify the ideas and end up getting a really good picture frame of the concept VWs. 

Honestly, I think nothing clarifies ideas better than explaining them to others. Moreover, an impressive collection of studies has shown that participation in well-functioning cooperative groups leads students to feel more positive about themselves, about each other, and about the subject they're studying. Students also learn more effectively on a variety of measures when they can learn with each other instead of against each other or apart from each other.

These are the steps followed during that lesson:

I can't wait to use Virtual World Enviroments once I start my english practicum because I believe it demonstrates the way in which the use of a VW enviroment can help create a complex interdependency between the young learners and various new technologies in long-term and shared knowledge-building activities. It has the potential to enrich the educational process in a number of important ways that are not possible in a traditional classroom. 

Learning Styles

Before the lesson, we had the task to read the assigned document. Each one of us had an article about the different Learning Styles. In my case, I had to read the "Visual" one. I prepared it and once we were in the classroom we gathered in groups of 4 and each one of us had to explain to each other their "learning style" article they read. It was pretty useful to hear a summary of the 4 styles from one of your peers because we listened carefully and were more focused, Moreover, it's an amazing way of saving up some time, because each one of us had the task to read just 1 part, not the 4. 

Melinda put a power point presentation in display while we were presenting our Learning Styles that had some questions in it and a timer. Once the time was up, we had to switch and listen to one of our group peers. Furthermore, this is another great source of organizing the classroom and making sure you have your lesson extremely scheduled. Moreover, it helped us to estimate the time we would dedicate in each topic and to go directly into the matter of concern.

Once we all displayed our topics, we proceeded to discuss about what Learning Style each one of us had. 

Later we had to suggest activities for each of the themes. This was the result:

Teachers should embrace all kinds of learning styles, not only implementing their own learning style as the most important/correct one.

Moreover, we discussed which learning style predominates in our group and the majority of us have visual learning, including myself. When I study I need to have everything very colorful with highlighters and pictures, etc. Watching videos is also really useful for me, that way it keeps me motivated.

In order to integrate the different types of learning styles in our project we should create different kinds of activities:

For example, with the visual and auditory learning, they could go on Youtube or another web page and try to find videos that explain something about that topic. Afterwards, they could share all the information they gathered. 

If we want to use the kinesthetic style, they could record a video about themselves dancing and then show and tell.

For the tactile learning style they could create another video and explain an experiment while you're doing it.

A drama play would integrate the 4 learning style. The dramatization would be good for auditory and kinesthetic and the visual would be good for video edition and the tactile would focus in editing the video. In the middle age they had to dress with one type of clothes, they could find in the internet the types of wardrobe (visual) bringing photographs of them, painting...  The atrezzo could be done by the tactile and the kinesthetic. The audio could take responsibilities of the music. 

Showdown: Group work or Collaborative Learning?

When planning a TEPBLL is important to have a lot of organization and an alternative plan for contingencies because collaborative learning projects require many strategic planning. Therefore, deciding what kind of interaction you want your students to have it's an essential step in the process. Here's a word cloud of two types of interaction: Collaborative Learning and Group Work. They sound very similar, and sometimes they are referred as synonyms, but actually they're not. I made them with a program called TAGUL, an easy, fast and useful webpage for creating word clouds. You can use them to create  infographic-like visualisations to enhance students learning. 

Once you've seen the both words clouds I made with the main concepts of each one, I think it's clear which one I want to use as a future teacher: Collaborative Learning. However, the key difference remains in the fact that collaborative learning requires positive interdependence with structured goals, accountability for individual work within the group, sharing of leadership roles, explicit teaching of collaborative skills and teacher observation of students interaction whereas group work, has no positive interdependence between group members and no structured goals, no accountability for an individual's share of a groups work, no explicit assignment of leadership roles, the assumption that students already have the skills required to collaborate and little to no teacher observation. 

Therefore, it's essential to promote collaborative learning, especially in the context of TEPBLL, in order for student's to truly co-construct knowledge. 

I would like to end up this section with a quote I really like about collaboration:

The Bus Metaphor

1. BUS METAPHOR.

One metaphor I created to explain the ideas explained in the video is the "Mountain metaphor" which is about climbing a high mountain and getting to the top by starting from the bottom of it. It's a link between the collaborative learning and the process of it which has similarities as climbing a mountain. You start building up questions from the start, the bottom of the mountain, where the students stand as well, because it's something new and unknown, but the objective is to arrive to the top of it. If the students have previous knowledge, they will get to the first stage of the mountain, where they get to know what are their strong and weak points. At the same time, the teacher will discover what are the stuents interested in. The procedure of it, will be the process of climbing the mountain, they will have to know that the final objective is to get to the top, which is a metaphor of achieving their initials targets, Later, they will have to discover how to get to the top, will they need a car? will they need their legs? This means, that the pupils will have to understand what's the best type of interaction and materials. When will they know they have arrived? The assesment stage is the key proof that the students have achieved the initial objectives. How will the teachers and the students know? By sliding back again into the mountain and getting to the base, where they will check the instruments of feedback, the final outcomes and if the competences were assimilated. It's a long process, so the results of learning won't only be shown at the end, it's a continue assessment.

2. Back & forth

It means that the learning process it's a tough road. Sometimes, specific parts of the project will be very dynamic and satisfactory, but then others will be such an uphill battle, and it will seem like they have gone two steps back. But that's a part of it, learning how to deal with this constant changes, with the highlights of the project and the downfalls.

3. ZIG ZAG

An hypothetical example of a ZigZag activity, would be for a example, the creation of the perfect school. Students learn necessary expressions to describe a school by taking their own school as an example. They are able to input their description into visual information to support the partners in another school to practice their knowledge by describing the unfamiliar school. Therefore,  each partner is responsible for part of the project output.

Developing Intercultural Competences

Lastly, I made this Facebook conversation with the following webpage, easy to use and fast: 

http://simitator.com/generator/facebook/status

Exit Slips

One of the things we've been during through the course of this subject were the "Exit Slips" Melinda gave us a topic to talk about, or we chose it sometimes and had to send her an email with a summary of it. The Exit Slip strategy is very useful and I can't wait to use it when I become a teacher, because it helps students to process new concepts, reflect on the information learned and express their thoughts about new information. Moreover, it requires students to respond to a prompt given by the teacher, and is an easy way to incorporate writing into many different content areas. Furthermore, the Exit Slip strategy is an informal assessment that allows you to adapt and differentiate the planning and instruction. Here's an extract of an actual Exit Slip conversation through gmail.

Here's the document I sent Melinda about Peer Evaluation.

The Fishbowl Activity

This strategy is especially useful when you want to make sure all students participate in the discussion, when you want to help students reflect on what a “good discussion” looks like, and when you need a structure for discussing controversial or difficult topics. Fishbowls make excellent pre-writing activities, often unearthing questions or ideas that students can explore more deeply in an independent assignment. 

It's an activity I want to try for sure, but to me, as a student that lived that moment it was so stressful and it seriously gave me anxiety, because I couldn't talk or give my opinion or stop and say "hey, I don't understand this" But once the roles reversed and I got to be inside the fishbowl it was relieving to get the chance to talk and to blow off steam. 

Assessment

We did this activity in the way we usually do them. Each group had an article to read, and prepare. Once we were in the classroom, we gathered in groups and each one of us had to explain each other what we read. Afterwards, we had to prepare a presentation and go from corner to corner to explain to other groups what we learned with the article. It was very useful because as you were explaining your article to others you were memorizing it and understanding it better, Moreover, they could do questions or add their opinions. We also had to listen to our peers assessment articles so we learned new methodologies about assessment. 

Final

As a goodbye gift to our classroom peers, we had to make a video, poster, comic or whatever resource we wanted to use. Judith Cladellas, Maria Villalba and me decided to make a fun farewell video! Here's our jib jab and the link to it: 

https://vimeo.com/114227345

And finally, here's the final summary of my whole TEPBLL experience in the format of a video:


https://vimeo.com/118287469

Yours truly,

Patricia Montaner.