Monthly Archives: December 2008
ICT in the classroom
Some months ago I was really thrilled because I was granted a scholarship to take the ICT in the Classroom course offered by The Consultants e validated by Trinity College London.
My inspiring tutor during this course was Valentina Dodge who was always ready to help and full of great ideas. The course started in October but one week before we had full access to take a look at how moodle works.
We were 7 participants from different countries. Several games and online activities throughout the course made us know each other better. By the end of the course a sense of belonging to a community was generated among the participants. The Consultants e participants community could be created!!!
The moodle platform was easy to use and each week was divided into: Weekly Tasks;
Discussion Forums and Documents. There was a summary of all the activities before starting each week that was really useful. This course is based on a Constructivist approach.
Due to my experience using some of the ICT tools we dealt with during the course I found that week 4 The Internet: Lesson planning & teaching was key for myself.
This is a topic teachers should always review and bear in mind. Luckily this course allowed me to review most of my previous knowledge and blog posts available online therefore I had the chance to evaluate my learning process.
Some of my conclusions integrating ICT are:
- You can´t expect your students to blog if you as a teacher don´t have a blog.
- When you plan to integrate a blog remember that blogs have different purposes and lengths. I created a blog that was only used during 3 months.
- Planning is a key component when integrating ICT and there must always be an alternative plan just in case something goes wrong.
- Evaluate how Technology integration worked with your students. (what went right and what went wrong). This important step should not be left out.
- Teachers should start to use different technologies in their daily classroom work as natural as a blog or a coursebook. However, despite impressive advances in the range and possiblilities of computer-related technology, with blogs, wikis, podcasts Business English language teachers on the whole still treat computers as marginal and have not incorporated them in their daily teaching. Where are the Business English blogs, wikis created by teachers???
BESIG presentation in Bonn
This year I was invited to give a video presentation for the first time at BESIG( Business English Special Interest Group) in Germany on November 23 at 12 GMT. The topic of my presentation was Teaching Business English with Technology via Skype. All the arrangements for this presentation where carefully dealt with.
While I could see through Skype that the room was full of participants Eric Barber who was in Bonn kindly helped me deliver the presentation as Skype does not offer the possibility to add Power Point Presentations.
You can take a look at the presentation in the voicethread I prepared and also in slideshare.
