Reflexion !

When I started with the blog, I wrote a brief explanation about Why I choose to be an English Teacher? I remembered it was difficult to put into words my feelings and expectations about my future profession but now, I realized that what I said is true.

I wrote about children and their ability to remember you, not only for what you are teaching, but also for what you are. During our practices, I realized about this.

After all our preparations about what we were going to teach, how we are going to do it, and other questions we asked ourselves; the most important thing was the relationship  we established with our students.
I felt completely pleasant, happy and enthusiast when children said me: “Me re diverti Seño, me re gusto la clase. 
Nos vemos el Jueves?” or “                                                                     Seño te voy a extrañar”.

                                     The way in which they demonstrated how they felt with us or how important was what we said, make me realized that 

a teacher is really what I want to be.  

TPACK !

Nowadays, we are involved in a 

technological society. 
It happens because technology become in an important resource for everyone. 
That´s why I think that a possible question  we as teachers may be ask ourselves is: 

How to incorporate technologies into our classes?

Technology is another resource to teach, which is very popular in children those days. 

It´s clear that technology is not the answer to all he questions and the solution to all the problems we may encounter in our teaching process. However, it´s a way to enrich our classes taking into account our curricular and pedagogical needs. This is what the TPACK model presents to us.  

According to this model, we need to take into account and follow three important decisions:

• ·         Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) referring to the knowledge that allows you to organize and adapt the content in the best way to be taught, selecting the type of activities we want to do, the final outcome, assessment strategies, and so on.

• ·         Technological Content Knowledge (TCK) referring to the knowledge about how content and technology influence on each other, deciding on the topic to be covered and the objectives to be achieved by the students. It implies knowing what type of technology is the best for teaching the content and how to use it effectively in the classroom.
• 
  
• ·         Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK): this is the knowledge about how education and technology influence each other. It implies knowing what type of technology is available at the moment, and how it can be adapted for educational purposes, choosing and looking for the appropriate technological resources that will help us to achieve our aims for the class.  

So, the integration of these three items results in Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge or TPACK model. 

You can develop different activities for the different subjects taught at school, incorporating technologies and using CLIL. For example: make presentations on power point, prezi or other resources presented by the teacher, where students have to present/explain about a topic related to what they are learning (science, social studies etc). In other levels, you can encourage students to discuss about different topics online by email, chat, foros, blogs, etc. 

So, it´s important we can incorporate technology into our classes, but we should be conscientious, at the same time, about the decisions we make about why and how we are going to use it !

21st Century Literacy

 Literacy needs a set of abilities to understand and use the symbol systems of a culture for personal and community development. 

However, nowadays, the daily routine of people is influenced by technology.  So, in this technological society, the concept of literacy is expanding to include the media such as TV, radio, magazines and newspapers, internet and electronic text, mobile phones, chat rooms, etc. All this technologies become in an essential part of people´s lives.

What does being literate actually
mean today? 

Nowadays, traditional literacies become more difficult to succeed in our technological society, so as a consequence new literacies emerged. They are:
Informational literacy related to read with meaning, using the information, provides by the web, in different formats depending on the context.
E-awareness which says that learning is related to the awareness that one is living in that new era.
Technological literacy related to the confident and critical operation of ICT, recognizing the value of formal and informal learning.
Digital literacy which involves instrumental and strategic skills as well as the ability to think creatively and share information or knowledge in multiple formats.  
Media literacy which represents a complete understanding of the ways in which traditional mass media and digital media function. 

The emergence of these new literacies has to be not only to the big influence a computer has over people, especially, young people, but also to the 21^st century jobs. These require creativity, the ability to solve problems, leadership, teamwork and persuasive communication skills. In other words, new work environments require competencies and skills that are only developed online. 

So, this new technological culture sets standards for ways of being and living, which also influences over the student-teacher relationship. That´s why is important that today´s teaching programs include media education as a crucial element.
When teaching 21^st century students, we should teach them not only about the use of the media but also about its strategies, which may be manipulated and as well as informative.

Another important situation to take into account is that many times children know how to do, but they don´t know how to explain what they do. Their language is characterized more by action than by reflection. That´s why the teacher is expected to teach and educate students in order to prepare them for their future professional life.  However, one problem is that, frequently, children do not think in their future since they explore in the present.
According to that and to finish this post, I chose a phrase, which reflects this new generation´s interests, from the book “Children learning English as a Foreign Language: 21^st Century Students and 21^st Century Skills” by Roberto Balaguer Prestes.

“This generation seeks out a sense of the practical in what its does, and prefers that what it learns can be explored and applied. Because of this, its learning is closed to the model of “just in time” than that of “just in case” that is typical of traditional education. This generation prefers to learn what is applicable in the presence and not what may be usable in the future”. 

Techniques and Materials !

Related to what I had been writing in the last post, now I want to write about techniques and materials to teach. We know that we cannot base our lessons only on a textbook because we need supporting materials. We can use different resources from different books and websites. We can also create our own materials but “You don´t need to add more stress to your life by trying to create brand-new materials”, how H. Douglas Brown says in his book Teaching by Principles..

Techniques include all tasks and activities performing by teachers and students during a lesson. 

As material we can use for example PICTURES. 
There is a phrase that says, ‘A picture speaks a thousand words’ (Anonymous). So, pictures are excellent resources for English language teaching. Through pictures, students can predict what the topic of the lesson or the activity will be about. In this case,the idea is to activate students’ background knowledge, which is essential for the construction of new knowledge. Teachers can foster students’ interaction by resorting to games or in order to fire students’ imagination, teachers can use pictures as a guide for students to create or tell a story based on just a single picture. Pictures are usually used to break the ice by asking students to describe what they can see, especially to encourage beginner students to speak in class.

In conclusion, pictures can be exploited in several ways in English lessons. 

Example: Fingerprint trees

If we are in September/ October, a month of changes because a new season arrives, there are some useful tips to carry out an art project on this topic with small children.

You can show them pictures like these:

You can prompt them to describe what they see and talk about seasons: What´s the weather like? What colour is the sky? What colour are the trees? What´s your favourite season, autumn or spring? Etc.

Later on, you can draw a tree trunk with bare branches on a big piece of paper. Show it to the children and ask, What´s missing here? (leaves/flowers) and encourage them to paint with their fingers.  

Finally you can divide the class into small groups and assign a different season to each. The groups who got autumn will dip their fingers into yellow, orange and brown to paint on the ground leaves. The groups who got spring will dip their fingers into green, red and blue to paint leaves and flowers.

You can also, for example, play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as background music while the children are painting. This will create an atmosphere for them to express themselves creatively. Another extra idea is that this Fingerprinting activity can be done outside.  

What do you think about "pictures"? 

Nice idea !

Look at this picture !I think it is a nice idea to put in our "future classroom" to make students feel important and welcome to the class.

How necessary is a textbook?

This is always a good question: Is it necessary to have a textbook in the class? How and when we need to choose one?

Some teachers use textbooks as the whole part of their daily practice, but others prefer no textbooks in their classes or they prefer to select some material presented in them. 

If a teacher decides to choose a textbook, she´ll wait a period of time to know their students´previous knowledge, rhythm of learning, level of proficiency, needs and likes. In that way, the teacher can select the most appropiate textbook for them. 

However, a lesson can be great and successful always you take into account organization and always you feel sure about your own decisions.
I think we, as teachers, can´t base our lessons only on a textbook.

I found a chart which presents some advantages and disadvantages of using textbooks: 

What do you think? How necessary is a textbook?

Observing Young Children

I found this video and I think it is really interesting because it shows different ways and purposes to observe young children. I hope you like it !