Week 2

Many steps onto the right direction

On the second week of the course, we had to read the material suggested and write our posts on our class description, ABCD objectives and on searching on-line. I have come up with the following conclusions:

The perfect on-line teacher?

When motivating students to learn English, the main things we need are motivation, patience and loads of creativity. If we are motivated to teach, our students might feel motivated as well. We must be creative and have our pockets full of engaging activities.

It is a good idea to test students on their predominant type of learning at the beginning of each course to have a more realistic context to plan our teaching and design/prepare different activities that could match each type of learning.

Classes are completely different everywhere. Classrooms can be equipped with computer labs, interactive whiteboards, video projectors and Wifi, but there are others where the only technology schools can afford is electricity. Now, having them does not necessarily mean using them appropriately. That is why teachers in general need preparation on how to use technology effectively.  

Nowadays, students spend a lot of time on the Internet, mainly Facebook, and we, as teachers, must take advantage of that situation to take learning into their homes as well.

When using technology for our lessons we have to think of the goal of it. Would it make learning more memorable? Or would it interfere in the learning process? We cannot force the content of our classes to fit technology. And that’s when we need to set clear objectives of what we want to achieve and what we need to achieve it.

We can structure objectives by using the A.B.C.D. method.

A stands for Audience

B stands for Behavior

C stands for Condition

D stands for Degree of Mastery

I found this method easy to follow and apply when planning my lessons in general. But when we want to use technology into our lessons, it is essential to revise Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy for more precise objectives.

Search Engines

Finally, as for searching on-line, we do not have to rely only on Google. There are plenty of websites we can use for our specialized searches. Let’s take advantage of them. Many of these sites are not easily searchable on Google, you have to dig in to find a good one and thanks to noodletools we have them there waiting for us.

P.S. This is a short tutorial I have made on some useful codes for the posts on Nicenet and any other site that allows HTML codes. Click here. I hope it helps and it is clear enough. It's only one slide.