Week 7: How to Help Them 'Gain' Their Independence

Food for Thought: "Moving the Bus Forward"

This week I realised that, as much as you can try to achieve the goal of turnining your students into autononous learners through non-technological methods, it is painstaking. Why not recur to technology if we learn in a modern world and we have to prepare our students for this very life, a technology-based life?

What I loved a lot and found very inspiring and clear was the following site: http://www.lburkhart.com/elem/strat.htm." It provided lots of techniques to experiment with during class in order to vary the ways we use that single computer and make students become of the process of using this resource themselves. They become more interested once they are personally involved with it and the fact that they know their way with that computer makes them feel better and increases their self-esteem. One of my favourite is polling the class and make charts of the results.

I have discovered a new way to use the only computer, very similarly to making an imaginary itinerary made of pictures that the students have brought (as have visited or wish to visit)--Tahsina's idea--, or making up a story together. My version is much shorter than a story and it's very fun, because it involves each student who may go to the computer and write only one word, but one that can contribute the a valid sentence. The sentence-machine activity via technology. Another activity stands for working on text together, turn by turn again, as in the Sentence-Machine, but this time, the students are given a text and they can only delete one word, but in a way that it shouldn't affect the text. It's interesting to see how the text disappears and meanwhile learn which parts in a sentence/text are the most important and of which the students might dispose. 

Going back to  learner autonomy, this is what all teachers should strive in their classes, to help the students become self-made men. I think that almost all project-based activities or 'engaging students' classes are steps on the path towards gaining their independence.

Week6: Engaging Students Is ALL about Interaction

Food for Thought: Untying their brains and maximizing their thinking will unleash their personae

This week we read and talked about engaging students and viewed numerous different interactive techniques that make students active even in large classes. The goal is to create a "learning laboratory," to make an active workshop for discovery out of each course. We should put all our efforts into this in order to thus change this context of dropouts and absenteeism because, as Nelson Mandela said it clear enough: "Education is the most powerful weapon to change the world."

Concerning the importance of engaging students, I guess that there is no need to stress the vital and infinitely positive aspects of active learning. I will thus focus on different ways and techniques that I have learnt about this week in order to achieve that class atmosphere.

Week 5: PBL--The Ultimate Adventure

Food for Thought: "Be PRACTICAL, Teach Practical English"

Kids love projects. It's part of human nature to take up these discovery 'adventures.' It's curiosity. It's a mere reflex--the most basic of survival instincts. It's their chance to "shine." This would be the reasons why projects still work and will, for as long as teachers would make them attractive for their students. Projects help them grow and give them the chance to express their personality. How could they not like them then? It's inner deep motivation to be involved in projects that appeal to their interests, to their age, to their previous knowledge, to their weaknesses that they know they should work on. Their behaviour?! Very engaged students thus, once they resonated with the idea proposed by the project. Let's take for instance "Drama Clubs/Plays" or "Reader Theatre's Activities". They simply love them. They'll reverberate always.

I will now talk about the benefits of such a task. It can be fun, interesting and the project gets them to share and collaborate. It helps them socialize better and they gradually learn to improve their communication in English, and possibly in time, they might grow to think straight into English...something that most of my students lack. They seem to have this bad habit of translating their thoughts from Romanian to English. They preserve the Romanian structures and patterns so this hinders communication at times.

Moreover, they need projects to improve their critical skills and enlarge their creative powers. It's a magic realm-- what a good and real-life oriented project can offer! In addition, when working together they learn to discuss and negotiate, so they gain something not only professionally, but also as human beings. 

On the other hand, alternative assessment seems to offer a clear image upon what exactly is expected from  students and it offers guidance on attaining our teaching goals and lesson objectives, but what I liked most this week was WebQuest, a wonderful opportunity to work on projects! What is most interesting and practical about it is its structure: students can see right from beginning the steps that they are supposed to follow!

Week 4: Tech to enhance our "Dancing" in English

Food for Thought: "It's important to keep walking..."

The Reading materials for this week have been really exciting and most of them quite new for me, so I gained much stimulating information and for this I am very grateful to everyone who posted Discussions on Nicenet. Reading is indeed a mystery, as Hector mentions on his blog, a mystery that belongs to us humans. I was also intrigued by the way words in a text seem similarly woven as in quilt. I guess there's no wonder it is called "texture," when in fact they have such analogical patterns.

Furthermore, I would like to share one particular site that I've grown very fond of during this week and which I already shared with my classes, because they need to develop their storytelling skills and this site is the right one for that particular need they have: http://stickyball.net/esl-writing-exercises-and-activities.html They loved it! I hope they will keep their enthusiasm and keep on working on it weekly. 

Moreover, during the past few weeks, I've been keen on discovering what helps people build these connections within a text so as to make it intelligible and cohesive. My ninth graders seem to lack that at this point. They have this bad habit to think in Romanian structures that they desperately strive then to translate, failing of course because the structures are rather different and what works for a Romanian storytelling does not in English narrative. This is why I also recommended them the famous FoldingStory site I've encountered in one of the discussions of our class, on Nicenet, and I am eager to see the changes this might trigger among my students: because the individual contribution is quite short, there's no pressure regarding the "response," as there are no wrong answers when it comes to literature, there is suspense and curiosity to see how the story develops, and on top of all, they get to learn from each other. I think that it will be very beneficial for them, especially since they are already familiar to a certain extent: we sometimes play a similar game in class--we form a "train" and everyone is supposed to continue the sentence by adding an appropriate word. It teaches them a lot about syntax and word order and they've made lots of progress as they now spot the error as well as correct each other whenever one places a noun instead of an adverb and so on so forth. 

On the other hand, I would like to share a really wonderful method I've discovered this week on the following blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ What I liked most about it, is the fact that this LingQ programme can really help my students keep track of their learning and build up their vocabulary and definetely increase their confidence in English production!