second confession


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 language but they only care about passing the subject or course with the least grade or mark.
 As a matter of fact, most of Chinese students are not even interested in learning their major and they are at the university studying what they do not like because their parents forced them to do so. Like many Asians parents, they push their children to choose careers that permit them obtain high salaries jobs in order to provide for their families.  

Due to the lack of interest in studying, some students are playing online games, chatting with their friends on their phones or even sleeping during classes. As it can be perceived, motivating Chinese students to be involved during English classes is a real challenge.


Joe Dale (2013) states that “Technology is not going away and language teachers need to embrace its full potential to engage our 21st century learners.” Since traditional ways have not had the best results during my classes I decided to make changes in my way of teaching and use technology inside my classes. Having said that, the drivers or reasons for using technology in my classroom are two: first, the need to motivate students to be more independent in their learning process and become autonomous learners by giving them technological tools since they feel more attracted to them. Second, to maximise the time inside and outside the classrooms and find better ways to improve my classes with the support of technology; even though I am not the best example of a “geek” teacher, I want to improve my teaching skills and I think that technology is the key to succeed in this technological era.
In our introduction to learning technologies module, we had an overview of some of the technologies that have been used in teaching, for instance: Blogs, discussions forums, emails, mobile devices, virtual learning environment (VLE), videos, podcasting, virtual worlds, and wikis among others.  According to Paul Kirschner (2014) “the context of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is a unique combination of the technological, the social and the educational context”. As a teacher, it is important to be able to combine these technological tools with my students’ needs and the resources that are available in the university that I work for. 
Taking into account the previous idea, my students need to be motivated to learn the language, and I am going to plan my lessons (ten sessions in total, which is the number of classes arranged by the university) in which the learners will use their mobile devices, videos, chats, social networks and discussions forum; in addition, I will implement flipped classroom approach in order to overcome the length of time problem. 

As Paul Kirschner (2014) stated “Educational affordance can be defined as the relationship between the properties of an educational intervention and the characteristics of the learner that enable particular kinds of learning by him/her”. With this in mind, I hope to reach an educational affordance with my oral English freshmen students and the learning technologies proposed in order to improve their speaking skills.     

 
Reference 

Dale, J. (2013). Are language teachers leading the way with education technology? The Guardian 16 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/may/16/language-teachers-technology-social-media



Kirschner, P. A. (2002). Can we support CSCL? Educational, social and technological affordances for learning. Inaugural address, Open University of the Netherlands, The Netherlands. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242493388_Can_we_support_CSCL_Educational_social_and_technological_affordances_for_learning

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sixth confession:  where there’s a will there’s a way.

Image
The other day I was listening to the radio, when I heard the news about Einstein giving two advice-filled notes to a bellboy as a tip because Albert was short on cash. One of the notes says “a calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness” the other one says “ where there’s a will there’s a way .” Those sentences have been in my head for weeks, especially the second one. If a person is willing to do something, that person will try their best to make it work. If a student is motivated, feels the need to learn, he or she will seek the means. With this in mind, I consider that motivation is a key factor that influences students’ disposition to work inside the classroom. As Drexler (2010) states “ A student’s success depended upon his or her motivation but also greatly on the strategic guidance of the teacher .”        Honestly, I really never realized how much I motivate my students , I prob...
Read more

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing

Image
This entry is about explaining the ideas of telecollaboration and how it can be beneficial for developing intercultural on writing and speaking tasks. What is telecollaboration? It is connecting learners from different part of the world through different types of technological devices such as emails, social networks, instant messaging apps, blogs, wikis or online learning environments that allow them to share their culture and approach a different culture than theirs. There are three different types according to the implementation that the teacher and the learners what to develop within their classes. Tandem language learning (e-tandem as its online equivalent) ·          It involves a language exchange and collaboration between two partners of different mother tongue ·          Learners must make use of both languages during an hour or so ·       ...
Read more

11th confession: changing my classroom with Edmodo

Image
     This semester is almost over and most students are studying for the finals. During the last ten lessons the learners applied digital technologies, such as voice recording, PowerPoint Presentations (PPP), making videos and Edmodo (Virtual Learning Environment), in order to promote learning responsibility and independence. Additionally these activities were planned to encourage students to speak, to listen to themselves, to experiment, and to ask questions. a profile in Edmodo        Some research has shown that social software tools can be effectively integrated into both face-to-face and online environments (McLoughlin, C and Lee, M. 2008). By implementing a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) the students received a collection of integrated devices which helped them enhance their oral skills and provided a system to deliver information, access to resources, track students’ performance, and assess.      As a matter of...
Read more