Leo’s teaching confessions

Practice definitely makes you better , however, I think that the right kind of practice is essential, being able to choose the right tools that maximise the practice itself. My main goal is to have students practicing their oral English as much as possible, inside and outside the classroom providing the right tools.   Bax (2011) states that there are five stages in order to have an effective educational practice to know: 1.      Access to and interact with sources of information. 2.      Participation and interaction with others, which includes a social and even an emotional dimension. 3.      Expert intervention and scaffolding through planning, feedback and advice constantly checking that learning is taking place. 4.      Expert modelling.   5.      Challenge and contradiction from an expert and other learners.  As it can be seen the social ...

I like trying new things very often, visiting new places, experiencing new cultures, meeting new people, tasting new food and also new ways of teaching. I strongly believe that when someone wants to achieve something good, it is necessary to get out of the comfort zone and take risks. When you try something new, you get experience and you will be able to learn from those experiences and make wiser decisions. In teaching, I think that most of us are afraid of trying something new because we are content in our comfort zone and since most of our methods have worked so well during so many years, why would we change them? If teachers have already prepared all their lessons and they have taught them for so many years, why would they prepare new lessons? If our students spend too many hours with their phones and probably know more about technology than us, why would we bother to use technology to teach?   Prensky (2009) stated “Digital wisdom means not just ma...

Hi there Before starting I want to thank all you for taking some of your time to read my blog . It is really important to me that you do it and give me feedback about it. The idea is that you all can contribute to make this blog better. This week reading, in my master, was about four different myths about technology and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) by Blake, R. (2008). To known: technology is monolithic, technology constitutes a methodology, today’s technology is all we need to know and technology will replace teachers. But what is educational technology? Is it understood as internet exercises or online exercises only? Is it just restricted to online services?   What is the difference between a “traditional” teacher and a “modern” teacher? Is it being innovative just about technology? Is it being a "traditional" teacher the one who does not use the cutting-edge technologies in their classes?   Technology is monolithic I stated in my p...

Hello everyone I am so anxious to start my classes with my new oral English freshmen students next week. These are going to be twelve-week courses where I will meet my pupils for 90 minutes once a week . In addition, all my classrooms are set in a way that it is extremely difficult to change the positions of the chairs and tables since all of them are screwed on the floor in a traditional way ; that makes it so difficult in terms of interaction and planning activities during classes. To be honest with you, I feel frustrated since I am used to applying different classroom setting in order to maximise the interaction among the students and allow communicative activities happen easily.   Furthermore, most of these classes are compulsory classes , meaning that some of the students are not motivated to learn but they attend to class because they have to , as a result, it makes teaching English a laborious task since students are not interested in learning the languag...

Hello everyone My name is Leonardo but everyone calls me Leo. I have been an English and Spanish teacher for more than 10 years and I think that being a teacher is a beautiful profession, which will not make you millionaire but it will bring you lots of advantages and experiences that a regular or normal office job won’t.   Throughout my travels, studies, and experience in some countries around the world I have been able to attain what I hope to be a worldly and open-minded teaching perspective. In my efforts to further broaden and improve this perspective, I decided to join a top university such as the University of Nottingham. I am convinced that a program like the Master of Digital Technologies for Language Teaching will train me to compete with other professionals around the world and it will give me outstanding qualifications and experience in language teaching that could be beneficial for any educational institution. My career objectives and personal interest...