WEEK 6: " AMAZING TOOLS TO DISCOVER"

I think that this week have been the most enriching and I have to admit I have no idea about the amazing tools we were introduced.

The biggest discovery was QUIZLET. Thanks to this site we can create flashcards (image-image, image-concept, and concept-description) in a fast and easy way (although there are some boundaries if we use the free version). The children can flip the flashcards, listen how is pronounced the vocabulary, challenge themselves doing tests, matching exercises and typing games (this is the most entertaining). But Quizlet offers us more services. We can create an online class in which we can share our sets of flashcards and play with the others’ ones. IT IS AMAZING! Thanks to this the teacher can check the score of each child in each set of flashcards, being this a marvellous tool to assess the children progress or previous knowledge.

QUIZLET also give us the opportunity to print in different formats the flashcards and their exercises. It is a tool essential to work vocabulary in class, because the children have fun and the drawing make easier to memorise and understand the vocabulary’s concepts.

Of course we can’t forget although using new technologies is very funny and dynamic we always have to assess what we carry out in class and for this we need to design the proper instruments. 

We were taught how to design a chart with Excel to evaluate children. All of us knew the existence of Microsoft Excel , but… Did we know all its possibilities or functionalities? The answer is no.

If we want to evaluate all children’s skills we will have to create different task, and each of this task will have a different weight in the final mark. That’s why we always have to do complex operations to calculate our students’ final marks ( existing the risk to calculate this wrong).

With Excel the assessment calculation is an easy and fast task , as long as we design a good chart. Thanks to Jesus we realized how important is to be well-organised in order to make the teacher work more manageable. Besides sometimes we are not conscious of the potential of Excel, thanks to the filters we can even highlight with colours who has failed a task or activity. 

I can also assure that I will implement Excel in my future.

                                                

And following the topic of evaluation we can’t forget to mention SURVEYMONKEY. This tool teach us that If we want to test our children’s minds we have to give them different formats of questions in order to challenge them.

This tools surprised me, because it compiles all the results and express them in charts and graphics in which is very easy to evaluate and compare the data. The surveys can be shared easily to our children. SURVEYMONKEY IS AND INDISPENSABLE TOOL.

BUT, the most innovative discovery to me has been PODOMATIC. It is a tool to create podcasts (usually short recordings).  At first the possibility to create podcasts, upload them, share them ad comment them, didn’t suggest anything to us until we were deeply and perfectly explain the READING 6 by our classmates.

As teachers we must provide our pupils a continuous feedback in order to make them be conscious of their achievements or mistakes and improve. But…how can we pay attention to all our students at the same time? Sometimes it is impossible, but thanks to Podomatic we can propose the children a task (for example: record themselves taking about what they do in their free time) and then we can evaluate them analysing their podcasts. Or what it is better give the children the opportunity to be conscious of problems doing a peer-assessment activity in which they have to listen to their own podcasts and then compare their mistakes by listening also to their classmate’s podcasts.

This tool is very versatile, and give the children to judge themselves improving their self-confidence and problem-solving skills.