Week 14: Projects for Learning Language

As we know, motivation is an essential element to learn a second language. The articles required for this week provide us good example to promote collaboration and motivation in our students: Working with projects.

Both articles present steps that students will follow to create a project. Also, it describe how project based learning has helped students to improve their results while learning a language.

As a future teacher, definitely I will use projects to promote the work as a team, in that way, students would feel comfortable to face their challenges by helping their classmates and themselves to understand their target language.

Week 13: Particpation Through Technology

In the articles required for this week “10 Benefits of Getting Students to Participate in Classroom Discussions” by Maryellen Wimer, and “Increase Student Interaction with ‘ThinkPair-Shares’ and ‘Circle Chats’”  by Kristina Robertson, exposed how boost participation through languge learners and the benefits of doing it.

In the first article, the author claimed about the benefits of student’s participation in classroom discussions. Something that I learned from this article is that by listening how students express their ideas, we as teachers can identify the areas where students need to emphasize. Furthermore, when students give us a wrong answer it is an indicator that students did not understand the topic of the class. In the same way, the second article provides two activities that promote participation, which are “ThnkPairShares” and “Circle Chats”. What I like the most from this article is the facts that author explain in clear way the steps of these activities, something that results very helpful at the time to do these activities with students.

In addition, in one of our task for this week, we had experience to participate through technology by giving our opinions about the articles that I mentioned above, in a website called Nicenet. From these articles I learned that taking an online class does not mean that you will not participate in classes.

Week 12: MALL

Imagine using your mobile phone to teach a class or made an activity with your sudents, it sounds a little complicated, and it is when a question emerged: Can mobile phones technology support learning in the second language classroom?

As we know, these days mobile phones are used everywhere by everyone, and students are not the exception. They are constantly sending text messages outside the classroom, taking pictures, etc. as teachers; we have to take advantages of these activities.

The article required for this week: Twenty Ideas for Using Mobile Phones in the Language Classroom by Hayo Reinders, give us some advices to use mobile phones in a second language classroom. There are numerous ways to use our mobile phone as a useful tool to made activities with our students. We can use WhatsApp to create a short story, we as teachers beggins with two introductory lines, then a student continue writing the story with another two lines, and so on with all the students to be able to finish the story. This activity is good for practicing writing skills. Also, students can record conversations, made a blog with pictures and descriptions of each of it, etc. the purpose is take advantages of all the technology taht mobile phones give us.

In conclusion, mobile phones give us numerous tools to use with our students in classes and is our responsability as teachers be actualized with future applications that we can use in order to make the classes more interactive for students.