week 15: assessing language and technology

After reading this article, I concluded that I really do not like to use technology, and more specifically computers to take quizzes and evaluations. As students I have had the chance to take several quizzes online, and I still prefer the old methods because of many reasons. 

First, I do not like to trust my grade to a computer, I am aware that there are software’s that had been specially designed for those tasks, but still I believe they are not 100% reliable. Second, when students take online quizzes from their home, teachers cannot be sure that they are not cheating; students might feel tempted to open a new tab and look for the answer to a question they do not know. Finally, there are many things that could go wrong while taking an exam; the internet connection might fail, for example. Because of all this reasons I will always prefer paper and pencil when it comes to take quizzes.

I know that as teacher, I will have to accept that in a future all quizzes could be taken in computer. But, we have to remember that, like me, not all students could feel comfortable taking evaluations in computers, and is our responsibility look for solutions that can befits everybody.

week 14: participation with technology

The article was very helpful because as the name of it says, the author exposes the benefits of making students participate in classroom discussions. Something that I learned from this article is how participation can provide feedback to teachers. While listening to the way his or her students express their ideas, teacher can identify what areas of the language they 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 “Think Pair-Shares” 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.

Moreover, in our weekly task this week we had the chance to experience participation through technology by providing our own ideas about the previously mentioned articles in a website called Nice net. It was very easy to share my thoughts here. Thanks to this task I learned that taking an online course does not mean that you will not have the chance to participate actively.

 

week 12: learning languages project

 RATED 3


After reading this week's articles "Benefits of  Project Work in Foreign Language Classrooms" by Bülent Alan and Fredricka L. Stoller and "Seven Essentials for Project-Based Learning " by John Larmer and John R. Mergendoller, I learned how we can motivate our students to learn a second language through projects.

Both articles are very similar, they describe the steps that students must follow to create a project, and they provide examples of how project based learning has helped students to get very good 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.