Week 10 (New beginning)

Well. I just have to say THANKS! to the US Embassy and University of Oregon, for this great opportunity.
I have made 20 new friends =).  Technology makes people get closer.
 During these 10 wonderful weeks, we have discovered a whole new world that made us reflect upon what we have been doing in our teaching practice and how tech tools can help us improve our students performance in English!. It is not about using ICT tools to be innovative but also how to be better teachers.

Maybe some of us had some experience bringing technology into our classrooms but I can be sure that none  had ever experienced so many ways to combine and fed from many different teaching points of view. and that´s what I have to be thankful for.

Teaching means lifelong learning, so let´s keep working and leaning, this is not the end, instead this is a new beginning=)

Thanks Webkills for making my first 2012 months so meaningful and worthy to live for =)

Yours,

Yohimar from Venezuela!

Week 9 (Projects)

Well, during this week we had to improve our projects and upload to the wiki the final version. A no so busy week since I did my best during last week to do a good draft, so I just had to make some changes after my partners feedback.

The course is almost over and I feel really satisfied with the process and final products. From 20 participants, 19 have finished and added their projects into our wiki . It means we did it people =)

During this week we also discussed about learning styles and multiple intelligences, Gardner´s theory.
 they are:
* words (linguistic intelligence)
* numbers or logic (logical-mathematical intelligence)
* pictures (spatial intelligence)
* music (musical intelligence)
* self-reflection (intrapersonal intelligence)
* a physical experience (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence)
* a social experience (interpersonal intelligence), and/or
* an experience in the natural world. (naturalist intelligence)

We had to focus on applying this theory to the learning and teaching of English using tech tools. I proposed different online tools that can be combined to take advantage of each student´s learning style and intelligent, such as facebook, twitter, Vyou, ning among others. 
As you can see, technology expands our horizons about the available teaching tools different than the convencional ones, and that is what I am going to do in my classes from now on. This course gave me the tools to improve my teaching practice and now I feel responsible to be the change in the subject, to try to make things different and overcome all shortcomings and restraints I have in my school.

Still working on my week 9 tasks,

Yohimar

Week 8 (Project draft)

Week 8, a week for hard work!

This week has been really tough for me, catching up with some papers for the MA I started 3 weeks ago,  the project report draft of webskills course and the usual tasks of each week...Not that easy! But, I nailed it :)

During this week, we discussed about online tools applied to teaching practice, especially language teaching. People came up with some suggestions such as skype, LMS, VLEs, blogger, nicenet, ANVILL and some other tools we can use to teach online. I am sure they all work but this should not be just about content but also management of learning. In order for students to have a certain sense of autonomy in their learning, for example, VLEs must have a structure that begins in socializing, passing through interaction until they get personal demostrable competence in what they are learning as Salmon suggests in her model for e-moderation http://www.atimod.com/e-moderating/5stage.shtml

Another important thing about my progress during this week, is that I worked with Marina (Greece) and Orquidia (Venezuela) checking our project report draft. We gave really good feedback concerning our reports. It is nice to learn from each other to improve our products from this amazing course.We are doing our best and helping one another to make perfect project reports

Well, actually I am so excited to achieve this first 2012 promise! The E-teacher scholarship program gave me a great opportunity to get updated and become a better teacher!

Still having a blast in this course,

Yohimar