WEEK 3: "DESIGNING ACTIVITIES AND ITS BENEFITS"

Along all the teacher training degree, we have had to do many didactic units, in which the material we designed were hand-made, namely, most of the times we haven’t use an specific programme, just Microsoft Word and our imagination.

I supposed that in this subject I was just going to be taught how to use innovative tools to create innovative materials, but we don’t have to forget that new technologies can also help us to design more traditional kind of activities that are still very suitable to work literacy skills (fill in gaps, crosswords, image-vocabulary association…).

I think the most useful of the week has been the discovery of HotPotatoes. The idea of the existence of this sort of tools has never crossed my mind, and I don´t know why. This app is easy to download and control, and allow us to export our exercise as html webpages (interactive use and check) or as word to print it (the solutions are given bellow the exercise). The html option is excellent to share exercises online (on wikis or blog) to give the students to practice at their homes. Its option to suggest word to omit in the filling gaps exercises is very helpful and the option to import images by url make possible not having to save all the images used with the exercise document.

In the future I’m quite sure I will use this tool, not only to create my own material, but also proposing the children to create exercises and share them in order to encourage their making contents ability and their metacognition. 

Respect to this week’s presentation about the text “Computer assisted English language learning in Costa Rican elementary schools: an experimental study “I would like to highlight my reflection about educative financing. In this research we appreciate how the English learning assisted by the use of computers means a considerable improvement in pupil’s learning. We know this thanks to the resources an money that Costa Roca’s institutions have invested. Taking into account my experience as pupil I can assure that I have never taken part in these kind of researches, and nowadays as future teacher I find online more educative researches from Latin America than from Spain. Our class said that Costa Rica’s catchword is “we prefer to build an army of good teachers”, but… Do all the countries think like that? I don’t know but what this research made me to reflect on is that more than ever, as teachers, our duty is to be aware of new technologies and implement these ones for our students although the government or others institution don’t fund researches or programmes. Finally, we can’t forget the tele-collaboration simulation carried in class. This activity taught us that by the time we use video-conference to interact and to check our previous knowledge about a topic (in this case video editor), we can also record ourselves in order to analyse later our speech or pronunciation, provoking a feedback that will make us improve by watching our mistakes. I think that this recording activities must be done every day in class, because children are more conscious about their weak or strong points and the teacher has more evidences of the children’s learning in order to evaluate their process.