Week 7: A Large Class & Interactive Power Point

Week 7 is over again and I have learned two interesting things in my teaching. Teaching in a large class is one of challenging thing to do as a teacher. I can’t imagine how I can manage my lesson if I have 200 students. Yes, I don’t think I can have an interactive with my students and I think it will be one way communication in class that is only me to the students. Well, it is good for me that the large class I have only about 85 students in one hour. This week showed how to integrate technology into classroom and help classroom more interactive. Using interactive power point helps teacher a lot in their classroom. As for me I know how to create it in a simple way and I just have known that it is much more to play with it and help my lesson not boring. I learned about Jeopardy Games from this site http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgPO-agnnMk ( I am still trying to do it) and this site for using PowerPoint to make an interactive story http://www.microsoft.com/education/story.aspx . The Top 10 Slide Tips - basic information about making a better presentation from this site http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/slides.html

Even though I don’t teach in a large class but technology and tools I have learned this week is really benefit for teaching English in a small class as well.

WEEK 6: Multiple Intelligences & Learning Styles, Alternative Assessment and Rubric

Finally, the end of week 6 is coming and luckily I have done all my assignments and also have time to work on my blog. This week I have read about multiple intelligences and learning styles from Gardner’s. I think I have studied it long time ago when I was in the university. Honestly, I did not pay much attention to set or prepare the lesson for students learning style. What I did is focusing on the learning objectives and what techniques I used to help students achieve the goal of learning but I forgot focusing on learning styles. So it seems new to me and I realize that if I know my students’ style, it would help me understand and prepare the activities for them better than before. Having read the article about multiple intelligences from Gardner at http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic68.htm that classified learners’ style into Verbal-Linguistic, Logical/Mathematical, Visual/Spatial, Bodily/Kinesthetic, Musical/Rhythmic, Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, Naturalist and Existentialist. To apply technology in different ways in which suitable for learners’ style, teachers should know how to prepare activities promote their students’ learning. And also the article by Barbara A. Soloman and Richard M. Felder (index of learning style) at http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html and
http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSdir/styles.htm
(Learning Styles and Strategies). I gained a lot for my teaching. Yes, it is important to address learning strategies which students learn in many styles depend on their own interests.

This week I have learned about the assessments. There are many types of assessment which is important for language teaching and learning. Effective teaching and learning language cannot be successful without assessment and the main purposes of assessment are to make summative evaluations and to provide instruction feedback to help students progress. Obviously, the result of my students showed how failure I had from last school year. I have to think back of my assessment that I used before, is it good enough to assess my students. Is it suitable? This week assignments reminded me of what I have done before and reviewed my weak point of teaching. I should keep learning and searching for the best new things for my students. Additionally, Rubistar is great for helping me create my own rubric to assess students. It’s easy to create and apply to my lesson. It does help a lot for the ones who have no much time to think about the criteria because it provides some of items that you might want to use it. It depends on what you want to focus in your students’ task. I am glad I can share all of the sites I have found in this course and make them available for my colleagues in my school.

It's great and that's all for this week.

Week4: Reading/Writing & Lesson Plan with Technology

Week 4 is over! I finally can't finish my assignments and my reflection in time. Poor me! Reading and writing is my weak point of all four skills. I myself like to teach listening and speaking. It seems lot of activities and exercises to have the students practice during an hour. Actually it is not what I thought, Internet as a technology is the great resources that provide various of authentic materials in English and benefit students at all level. They can ascess it with no cost. It is convenient for both teachers to prepare their lessons by integrating this wonderful tool which is suitable for their students' level and what skills they want them to improve and for students themselves, Internet provide opportunities for individualized learning when they work alone. Internet can provide forums in which students can share their works with otheres. As from Jarek Krajka's article "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction" (http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html)showed the idea of the three main elements for using Internet in writing, websites an authentic material to find information both for students need and teacher’s also, e-mail to help written interaction while communicating in writing with their peers who have the same interests, and web publishing to create students' website where they can post their own writing. As from Chao-chih Liao’s article “E-mailing to Improve EFL Learners' Reading and Writing Abilities: Taiwan Experience” used e-mail to improve students’ reading and writing competence. He argued that after students joined Computer Pals Across the World (CPAW) their intercultural and communicative competences were improved. They not only grained more those competence but also their reading and writing skills were developed.

During the week and having read the posts from other participants I found lot of wonderful websites that are really truely benefit in teaching language for all skills especially reading and writing in week4 assignment. Mary Grace Magcanam suggested some sites to use reading to teach writing:
http://www.ehow.com/how_4471443_use-reading-teach-writing.html
In improving writing skills, the site http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/70-ways-to-improve-your-english.html has 70 suggestions to improve the English language. She suggested that it has a lot of activities that are easy for teachers to prepare.

http://www.wikihow.com/Improve-Your-Writing-Skills this sites also offers some tips in improving the writing skills. Lot of subcategories that is very useful in giving suggestions and activities that are truly useful available for us. And for reading test exercises she adviced this site http://www.usingenglish.com/comprehension/intermediate.html
There are several Readings and follow up questions to test reading comprehension of the students. We can use this http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/writingexercises.html for writing test. It has a varied topics to test the writing skills of the students. And also these sites from our professor
http://a4esl.org/
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/
http://legacy.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html
http://www.manythings.org/
http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/

In this week I also have a task to write the example lesson plan with technology. In fact I spent most of the time read my classmates' and tried to imagine of how could I integrate this tool to help my students improve their reading and witing skills. After reading my classmates' example lesson plan I found that everyone is done all assignments perfectly and shows their good examples for me. Well, I am going to say thank you for everyone and that is all for this week.

Best,
Garunyawun