technology is great when it works

This week has been hard. Apart from having a tone or two of work to do at school and my allergies and the medication that makes me work slow, I had some fight with internet. Everytime i found a reasonable period of time to go on nicenet or work on the tasks, there was no internet. Thursday morning, no internet. Friday, I spent a couple of hours updating my computer to make it work better, Saturday afternoon (finally I had all the time I needed) no internet at all until after dinner time.

So, technology is definitely boycutting me. And I find it extremely irritating because then I have to rush and do things in a hurry and then I can't do my best which is even more annoying.

Then I ask myself: why am I not like most people? Why don't I settle for minimum effort?

The fact is I need motivation, too and all this course activities and researching and websites and new ideas excite me and make me want to do new things which take a lot of preparation and consume a lot of time. I wouldn't like to be any different, I'm crazy but it makes me happy!

(Oh no!!! No I seem to be unable to post this! i've tried 3 times and no use! Unbelievable! It's 1:14 am and I give up after my 5th attempt)

Today is sunday and the situation remains!!!!

Hate it when things don't work.

Week 3 - final reflection

First of all I'm sad - no one commented on my latest posts :( (But then I understand it's weekend and maybe most of you are celebrating Easter.)

I've written about CALL and delicious.com, so I'm not going back to them.

As for projects, I realised I was being prejudiced (and I'm ashamed of it) as I chose the projects I thought might be more familiar to me in terms of country and students' age. Now I think - why shouldn't a project from Burkina Fasso or for university students be useful to me? I'm used to remaking and adapting materials and activities, why did I stick to "familiar"?
Well, maybe I was feeling uncomfortable about going through projects and more about writing a project of my own. Even though at school Class Projects are mandatory, they are actually a bunch of papers with little practical effect, I'm afraid.

I'm happy for the project I chose as it is absolutely practical and focussed on the students and technology without neglecting the syllabus. Something our leaglly imposed paperwork tone projects don't even get close to! (By the way, I hate paperwork, especially when it's totally useless for students)

Zoila said she's using this project as a model and I think it is a good idea as I think it's good, clear and manageable and is a good example of project methodology which will probably come to great effect!

Now, I know it's still early in Oregon but already Monday in Portugal (luckily it's a national holiday: Liberty day) so I think I'd better go to bed and have my beauty sleep.LOL

(image in: seekerville.blogspot.com)

Blog away

I just did a crazy thing: I decided to click the button "next blog" at the top of my blog page and I just wandered about. There are blogs about everything, from people all around the world. Blogs about families, films, cowboys, talking with spirits and even a guy who is sure he's right (probably the only one who does!) Funny enough, most of them are in English!
There was nothing really important about this but I still wanted to share it.

Delicious call

What can I say?

Listening/ speaking skills are a serious problem for my students and for students in general, I think.
It was great to find out so much about developing those skills (thanks Robert, those readings were excellent) and to discouver such good ideas to put that into practice. Until last year I didn't do anything special to develop those skills but when I met a class with students that could write well and understand written texts well but were extremely weak at speaking and listening, I decided I had to do something. So, I established that every wednesday we would have at least 15 minutes of pure speaking activities and I "made up" or adapted some activities to make them talk. The hardest part is preventing them from cheating (having a look at their colleagues "secret" cards or speaking Portuguese) but when they follow the rules, the outcome is great. They get more confident and enjoy speaking. Now I guess I'll have to work pronunciation with them. It won't be easy (their first question is always "does that come in the test?") and we are going to have very few lessons as they finnish in the first week in june but maybe I can work with another class, especially 7th form as they are at a lower level, so it will be easier to "mould" them.
As for delicious, I've already written about it on nicenet. It would be an answer to my prayers if I prayed!!! Over the years I tried to find a way to do what delicious does so well: save my favoutire links so that I could use them later. And it does more as we can have a look at other people's bookmarks and get even more links. It was a wonderful find.

week 2

ABCD

At first I had some trouble with it but then I found a great link and it all became very clear. It took me some time to post my objective as it was evaluation week at school and I spent all my time in meetings and writing reports and trying to pull myself together again after 3 days in Seville with 45 kids and 40.ºC. (By the way, Seville is wonderful!) Then I started reading all posts and I thought the people in this course are quite motivated. It was a bit hard to follow the posts - I'm a visual person and not too good with names and miss connecting the posts to people (faces). Fortunately, people's blogs are making that easier for me. I wrote my objective, got nice responses to it and felt fine.

SEARCH

It was nice to try new search engines. I like searching as I always find surprising things that are useful for my lessons or simple fun or interesting on a personal level. I have a problem with speed, I mean, when a website is slow I get impatient and sometimes give up on it. I realised I was using google all the time and I'll try to ensure some variety in my search from now on.

PROJECT

I guess I started a project without even thinking about it. All of a sudden I asked 7A kids if they would like to have a blog and it was like setting fire to dry hay - it went faster then I ever expected. Even though it was a bit rushed, I don't regret it as now they are eager to go back to English lesson after Easter. ;) Besides, I've been reflecting on it and I promise I am going to plan it really well.

WEEK SUMMARY

I was tired and overworked so I didn't take as much time as I wanted to go on nicenet and keep up with posts. I read all the posts (I really did!) and I think the people in this course are really GREAT. I was amazed at the number of students in most classes. I had never imagined people could have so many kids in a single class and I felt very lucky (We have to value the advantages we have) and now those teachers are hero-teachers to me - they never give up, no matter how difficult things are.

FINAL REMARK

A Portuguese Pedagogist called João de Deus said in the 19th century that "love is the only pedagogy" and I think he was right - only by loving what we do, can we do it fully.

Writing objectives is really a serious task - I already knew it but hadn't thought of it in these terms. I've just checked one of our readings and I was having some trouble in getting the idea. I decided to check additional pages and found a great activity to understand writing objectives (beware the specific maths vocabulary). Go check it out and tell me if it helped. Follow this link.

happy sharing

Yesterday I was telling my housemate how happy I was about this course. Despite being total beat from some hard days at school, I felt support from people who we thousands of kilometres away and who I've never met face to face. It's amazing how we share the same worries and face the same problems. There are no countries for teachers, only the world. :) So, I'm starting to get really confident that we are going to do a great job together as we already see each other as a classmate. Keep on sharing! (I won't be responding the next days as I'll be on a field trip with my students. I'll be back on monday, if I'm not too tired and sleepy to type!) See you!

week one

First advice - don't forget to save your new messages before you try to see your blog! LOL Silly me, I had just written my reflection and was so anxious to see the post I forgot to save it and... lost it! Now creating the blog was quite easy as I have had one for some time (thus I should have remembered to save!). I could add a link but it's in Portuguese and has nothing to do with teaching. I do it for fun to share some thoughts with friends. As for using blogs for teaching, I've thought of that but there is an issue related to the computer room. Although there is a computer in every classroom, only one room at school as enough computers for the whole class and that one is taken by ICT lessons most of the time. Besides, my ICT colleagues are very jealous of it. LOL We can use laptops but sometimes the network is not strong enough for all of them. As for asking kids to do them out of school, many haven't got a computer or internet at home. I think a class blog would be great to develop writing and commenting skills so I'll try to prepare one in advance to start in September. Do you have any ideas to share with me?