Sunday, June 3, 2012

Hannah's Eighth Week of the Webskills Course


The eighth week of the course is coming to an end. I am sure people are busy working on their final projects. It is great to see them adapting new ideas directly into their classes or planning new lessons with technology for the students.  It is unbelievable we are almost finished with the course, already.
The last biggest task is to complete my final project plan. I am still working on mine. There are a lot of thoughts and ideas going on my mind. What makes me confused is not the lack of resources, but the excessive materials making it difficult for teachers to select what they want.
Implementing new technologies to the class is one thing, however how to properly manage it is another thing we have to closely think upon.
Adapting technologies to the class is inevitable in this era of smart media. However, it is still questioning what additional skills do teachers need? How we manage class with technologies?
Foreign language acquisition requires technology-based teaching and learning. It also requires students with greater autonomy in that since language learning takes certain amount of time and effort, studying English only in the classroom is definitely not enough.  
Therefore, I am going to spend couple of days to figure out how to realize “smart education” in our classroom?  I hope I will be able to answer the question “smartly”.     

2 comments:

  1. Hi Hannah.

    Totally agree with you. Now we have so many resources that choosing a good fit for our students is a bit hard. As you said not only working with technology just because it´s there, but knowing how to use it, how students will benefit, how to evaluate, how to incorporate it in our curriculum, that is a huge task. And this course not only gives us all the resources but show us examples, and real examples of how teachers have used them.
    Hannah I will send you my comments. I mostly work at night, so don´t worry you will certainly have an input, and hopefully it will help you.

    Glenda

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  2. Hi Hannah!
    I agree with you, especially when you say that "since language learning takes certain amount of time and effort, studying English only in the classroom is definitely not enough". My adult students don't seem to understand that. When they enrol in the first year, they think learning English is just a fun activity that requires no further study of their own (at home) – big mistake! 4 hours of English a week is not enough to consolidate the work done in class. So I think that's the root of many of our problems. At least when they get to the 4th year, they are a bit more autonomous... but again, not enough! :(
    Happy "projecting"!

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