Classroom management.

I believe that the classroom magement could be the background of a class because if there isn’t an adequate atmosphere things might not go well.

As a student I witnessed backtalking quite a few times, I remember that in highschool my male classmates were really tough boys, actually I used to try to avoid them all the time, at the end I hardly talked to them because I found them dangerous, sometimes they had a very «macho» attitude. Once, the teacher started to talk with one of my classmates about feminism, the teacher was a woman by the way, they started to argue and the discussion lasted for about fifteen minutes, meanwhile the rest of the group was just listening  and not working on the class.

What could have happened could be that my classmates might have turned even more violent, maybe not physically but with their words and maybe  not with the teacher but with us, their female classmates.

What I consider that the teacher could have done was to avoid the discussion and promote women’s value through a good attitude as a teacher.

Bloom’s Taxonomy.

The subject for this class is going to be Simple past with regular and irregular verbs. And the way I would clasify it is this:

1. Remember-Understand: The students are going to observe a short power point presentation with old pictures of the teacher. Each photo is going to have on the top a sentence related to the image in simple past. The auxiliary verb and main verbs will be highlighted so the students identify the structure of the simple past tense. The teacher is going to answer their questions so they canbe sure about how to use the simple past tense.
2. Apply: The students will try to transform a small group of sentences in present to the simple past so they practice its use.
3. Analyze: In small groups the students will compare and discuss their answers. Each group must have the same answers so the teacher will check just one exercise and correct it when needed.
4. Create: Each student is going to write a sentence in simple past where they talk about something they did in the past that nobody in the group knows (for example: as a child I had a white cat). The sentences have to be written on small pieces of paper and the students can’t see each other’s sentences. Then the group will be divided in two. Each group will read aloud by turns and one by one the sentences (at least some of them) that the other team wrote and try to guess who wrote them. Every time one of the teams guesses they will get a prize (it could be candy or a chocolate).
5. Evaluate: Each student will take at random one of the sentence and check if it is correct, if it’s not they will correct it. The teacher will do a final checking and in the end all the students will get their sentences back and see if they used correctly the simple past.

Blooms’s Taxonomy.

The Bloom’s Taxonomy can help us as teachers to organize our teaching by separating or adapting the activities we choose to do in class, according to the level of abstraction they belong to.

I believe it is possible that we have been using the Bloom’s Taxonomy without even noticing that we have been applying it because we don’t use an activity that belongs to synthesis when the students haven’t even got over the knwoledge level of abstraction for example.

Learning styles.

Our learning style is more important than I thought. I know that now that I’ve been working as a teacher, because my own learning styles have had a great impact on my classes.

Here are the results of my learning style tests:

As you can see, I’m very intrapersonal, I keep many of my thoughts for myself, I don’t use to talk very much, especially in public. On the other hand I like to be interpersonal too because I like to know what the other people think or feel, I find this really interesting, actually that’s one of the things I like of teaching, to know new people who have new ideas.

My tests also show that I’m a very auditory learner, which has helped me to learn languages through music and TV shows, this has affected directly my classes because I’ve tried to teach the way I learn, through songs for example, and this has succeeded with students that are auditory learners, like me, and have the same music taste, but not so much with the ones that don’t.

My love to nature, as my students could confirm, is very notorious in my classes because I always make sentences as examples that talk about animals (cats mostly) or plants.

It has been difficult for me to separate my learning styles and then to adapt my classes trying to satisfy all the learning styles so all my students can learn no matter what intelligence they have and this is another one of my reasons to take this course. I hope you can share your ideas with me.

Motivation to learn.

Motivation is very important for a class, if there’s no motivation the students just don’t learn because they don’t really  care about the subject.

Unfortunately, to motivate a student can be very difficult, that’s why we look for strategies to help us to increase “motivation” which is what we can see on this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpE7Wi-F0ZA. This teacher uses good techniques to impulse the students to practice their English and he does it with an attitude that keeps a good rhythm and order in the class. Also I shall compare his motivational srategies with my own and see how could we make them better.

The four abilities (units 5-8).

Studying the units 5-8 has been so interesting that they went by so quickly. We had the opportunity to analyze that we have what we call the four abilities: speaking and writing which are producing abilities, and reading and listening that are receptive skills. I found really interesting the differences between written and spoken language. Because when we are speaking we don’t use punctuation or very complex grammar, but we use pauses, stress, intonation, gestures and facial expressions. For listening is also very important to be aware of the existence of many accents so we can try to get used to them and we don’t have problems to understand. I found also fascinating how the accents are modified by all the context of the community.

Web tools exploration.

Hello!

I believe that Ian James blog is great, it offers great options to use in class when we want to practice speaking. What I found amazing as a tool for our class is the creation of a voki speaking avatar. My students are gonna have so much fun creating a voki.

In my class, we are gonna talk about jobs. What I would like to do is to ask my students to imagine what proffession they would like to choose for the future, where would they like to work and under what conditions etc, then they would have to create a voki who looks like the professional they would like to become into. I’m not sure if we can do this with the voki, but I’d like that they can look like a nurse or a lawyer for example.

Then, I would like their vokis to have in couples a dialogue where they use the questions «what do you do?», «where do you work?», «when do you work?» and «what company do you work for?» which is what we have to practice.

I would assess the activity the next way:

Nombre del maestro/a: Demetria Garcí­a
Nombre del estudiante:     ________________________________________
CATEGORY	4	3	2	1
Oraciones Completas	Habla con oraciones completas (99-100%) siempre.	Mayormente (80-98%) habla usando oraciones completas.	Algunas veces (70-80%) habla usando oraciones completas.	Raramente habla usando oraciones completas.
Vocabulario	Usa vocabulario apropiado para la audiencia. Aumenta el vocabulario de la audiencia definiendo las palabras que podrían ser nuevas.	Usa vocabulario apropiado para la audiencia. Incluye 1-2 palabras que podrían ser nuevas para la mayor parte de la audiencia, pero no las define.	Usa vocabulario apropiado para la audiencia. No incluye vocabulario que podrían ser nuevo para la audiencia.	Usa varias (5 o más) palabras o frases que no son entendidas por la audiencia.
Contenido	Demuestra un completo entendimiento del tema.	Demuestra un buen entendimiento del tema.	Demuestra un buen entendimiento de partes del tema.	No parece entender muy en el tema.
Entusiasmo	El tono de voz generan un fuerte interés y entusiasmo sobre el tema en otros.	El tono de voz algunas veces genera un fuerte interés y entusiasmo sobre el tema en otros.	El tono de voz es usado para tratar de generar entusiasmo, pero parece ser fingido.	El tono de voz muestra poco interés. y tampoco genera mucho interés en la forma de presentar el tema.

I’m still thinking wether to show or not this rubrics to the students,, maybe I should so they know what I’m going to evaluate.

See you tomorrow!

Hot potatoes crosswords Units 2 and 3.

Hello!

Crosswords have always helped me to learn new vocabulary, that’s why I’ve chosen to prepare two of them for unit 2 and 3 (Vocabulary units 2 and 3). Even typing the meaning of each word already helped me to memorise some of them.

I hope you enjoy tem too!

I like Grammar, but I want my students to like it too!

I believe that as a teacher, is good to know as much grammar as we can, and for a student it is necessary to know enough grammar to be able to communicate and to be understood by the others. But, I also think that it depends on the students particular goals or needs.

What I like to do, and I’ve noticed that works, is to have my students talking about themselves through questions or sentences that I write about them, using the grammar tense we are intending to work with. Then, they discuss or tell their opinion about it and in the end they sort of get used to the grammar structure we have been using and they usually deduce by themselves the grammar rules. I believe that this way the students don’t get bored because they usually enjoy talking about themselves, their opinions, feelings or interests. 

I’ve found on a website called http://www.pinterest.com some good ideas or suggestions of videos to work with grammar. I hope you like it!

Welcome everybody!

By teaching I have learned so many things, not only about the language but I have also learned about the humanity in general. Now I’m looking forward to learn how to become a better teacher.