Week 14

Learning Through Projects

After reading this week's articles "Benefits of  Project Work in Foreign Language Classrooms" by Bülent Alan and Fredricka L. Stoller and "Seven Essentials for Project-Based Learning " by John Larmer and John R. Mergendoller, I learned how we can motivate our students to learn a second language through projects.

Both articles are very similar, they describe the steps that students must follow to create a project, and they provide examples of how project based learning has helped students to get very good results while learning a language.

As a future teacher, I would definitely use Projects to help my students learn and understand their target language because by doing it, I would be motivating them to work as a team, helping them to feel motivated towards the language, and at the same time being independent.

RATED: 4

Week 13

Participation and Technology

In this week's articles "10 Benefits of Getting Students to Participate in Classroom Discussions" by  Maryellen Weimer, and "Increase Student Interaction with 'Think­Pair­Shares' and 'Circle Chats'" by Kristina Robertson, we read about how to boost participation among language learners and the positive outcomes of doing it. Besides this, we had the opportunity of experiencing how technology can help us to promote participation.

Weimer's article was very helpful because as the name of it says, the author exposes the benefits of making students participate in classroom discussions. Something that I learned from this article is how participation can provide feedback to teachers. While listening to the way his or her students express their ideas, teacher can identify what areas of the language they need to emphasize, for example. Moreover, a wrong answer from a student can help teachers know what is not clear enough for students. Similarly, Robertson's article provides examples of two different activities that can be performed in the classroom in order to boost students' participation. These activities are "Think­Pair­Shares" and "Circle Chats". What I liked from this article is that the author explained the steps of each activity in a very clear and detailed way. In conclusion both articles resulted very interesting and helpful.

Moreover, in our weekly task this week we had the chance to experience participation through technology by providing our own ideas about the previously mentioned articles in a website called Nicenet. It was very easy to share my thoughts here. Thanks to this task I learned that taking an online course does not mean that you will not have the chance to participate actively.

RATED: 5

Week 12

Introducing Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL)

This week's article "Twenty Ideas for Using Mobile Phones in the Language Classroom" by Hayo Reinders introduced a different way of using technology to improve language education: Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL). In my personal opinion, it was a very useful article because it not only provides meaningful information about what MALL is and how it works but it also provides 20 different and useful examples of exercises in which MALL can be used.

I found very interesting the description that the author provides about MALL. Reinders said that mobile devices, and more specifically  mobile phones "help minimize the separation between the classroom and the outside world". I wanted to recall this quote because I think what it says is true, and I have experienced that. This semester I've been able to use my mobile phone to do many of my tasks for different class, specially those classes that are online. Today's technology allow us to download apps for free that can be very useful, and I have been able to get apps for the platform we use for those classes, and for other websites that result very useful too.

As stated in the title of the article, the author also proposes ideas for using MALL to improve language education. I really liked those ideas because they are very easy to execute. Also, I think that students would feel motivated to practice their target language when they realize that they will be using their mobile phones in order to do so. Such activities are designed to practice the for skills of a language (listening, reading, writing, and speaking) individually or more than one at the same time, and also to learn more aspects of the language like vocabulary. In this activities students are required to send texts, take pictures, record audios, and post information. In other words, students are asked to do all the things they do with their mobile phones just for fun. I believe that that is the main point of MALL, and the key of its successful. With MALL students do not feel like they are doing just one more boring homework, but they really have fun by completing these tasks.

Finally, the article also provides some examples of challenges that can be presented while using MALL such as lack of access to mobile phones, privacy considerations, etc. I really appreciate the fact that the author recognizes that using MALL does not mean that there will not be any difficulties, and the fact that he took the time to think about some possible solutions to such challenges.

In conclusion, this article was extremely useful and interesting.

RATED: 5