QR codes: a new tool for creativity

It has been a recent phenomenom that has led teaching towards the needs and interests of students more than ever. Some of these innovations and changes have already been mentioned along this blog, and here we have a new one, QR (quick response) codes.  They are a 'square composed of black modules on a white background with encoded information that can be scanned by  web-connected smart phones' (Mallia, 2014).  What they do is to open a file, a link, a video, or an image, playing the role of a Key that opens a door to somewhere else in the virtul world.  The surprise effect that it can have on students, specially pre-teens, is great, and an excellent factor for meaningful learning. For example, you can create a treasure hunt by QR codes, and tell students that they are going to play a game with all the topics they have dealt with during the year , the week, the lesson, etc. The flexibility that this type of tool provides is amazing since you can customize it in the way that best fits your classroom. It is easy to use and create, but the only drawback is that you need to have internet connection in order to open a link, that is, a website.

So having stated the advantages and disadvantages of this innovation in the classrooms, we could say that it worths trying and looking at the effect it could have on our students. Because teaching shouldn't be related to make students memorizing words, phrases and grammatical items but it should help them learn in a better quality and more innovative way.

References: G. Mallia. 2014 The Social Classroom: Integrating Social Network Use in Education. University of Malta, Msida, Malta.

Technology against all odds?

Nowadays, the use of technology and the myth of mobile phones being a threat in the classrooms  is becoming more and more debunked.
As we saw previously, we have a wide variety of options to include Technology, sometimes even in contexts in which we are lacking of Internet Connection.
On of the options is to include games. It is often said that games at the beginning and/or at the end of the lesson helps our brains to relax and change children's mood and predisposition to learn and to recycle some aspects of the language such as vocabulary. So games are, for us as teachers, a good way to revise vocabulary and have fun!
For example ''Charades''. You can download this app easily on Play Store for Android. You can the customize it by adding the specific words or phrases you are revising with your students. It's a competition game played in groups, so children and teens usually love it!

Another possibility is to use Whatsapp groups to do activities with emojis, for example, to tell a story, or play a competition game with emojis while revising the topic of feelings.

The last, but not least option is to use QR codes to do a trasure hunt, for instance. It will be explined in the next post and you'll be able to see how much we can do with technology. So next time your students want to  use their phones, take this opportunity to make it a worthwhile experience for you and for them! Take advantage of technology and don't be afraid of it!

Blended learning, breaking down the myths about technology in the classroom

Blended learning is an educational method which combines the use of technology and  the importance of face to face teaching. This combination builds students’ confidence and autonomy  since they are dealing with what they naturally know -technology- (they are digital natives) and also, they have teachers who support and scaffold their learning. It’s interesting that we, as teachers , bear in mind the implementation of this method because it has many advantages. For example, it helps to lower the affective filter, students are using a tool that makes them feel more autonomous and open to learn the language leaving aside the stereotypes that learning English is tedious.

Teachers need to be aware of the changes the new generations bring and try to be as updated as possible to work  successfully in the classroom. According to sophie Partarrieu (2005) “Working with teachers who have received sufficient training, governments and institutions can begin to look at ways of blending traditional teaching methods and technology. Done well, the blended learning can produce remarkable results, although many different factors contribute to the success or failure of this approach”

That is why we  have worked in this subject, Eco II,  the combination of traditional teaching with the use of technology in our lessons. We value and take advantage of what we have discovered and experienced in relation to the original ways of designing materials and  implementing technology in the classroom. A good way of reflecting about it, was the design and use of this blog in which we can write about important aspects related to technology and teaching English. Besides, we can learn from our classmates through reading each other’s blogs. It’s good for keeping ourselves updated and informed with new trends in education.

Source: https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/why-we-still-need-face-face-teaching-digital-age

Going Mobile: a motivating trend

We had the pleasure to attend a conference delivered by Nicky Hockly. She is an international speaker and Director of Pedagogy at The Consultants-E, and has wide experience in the field of face to face and distance language education. Besides, she runs workshops and teacher training courses for language teachers all over the world. She is also a well-known author of methodology books on the application of technology to language teaching.

The conference we attended was named “Going mobile” because the author talked about how challenging is for teachers to incorporate technology in the classroom. That is why it was really interesting and useful since she showed us great examples of how to use students’ mobiles in and outside the classroom, and encourage them during the lesson and the tasks proposed. We could benefit a lot from this talk, since it was planned as a workshop, in which we experienced what Nicky was teaching us. For example, she recommended us some apps, such as Aurasma which can be used in and out of the classroom, by aucmencted reality.

Also, she suggested using mobile phones in class to look for photographs, in order to carry out speaking tasks. It was really engaging, and very coherent to what students are accustomed to seeing every day. Since students are now digital natives (see post about it) we as teacher need to offer them something appealing and visual, as well as to provide many ways to approach an open task, by letting their creativity flow.What is more, she was so charming and the talk was extremely enjoyable. At the end of the talk, we took a photo with her and some of our classmates.

Sources: https://www.theconsultants-e.com/consultancy/our-team/nicky-hockly/
                 https://www.aurasma.com/

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Web 2.0: innovative and creative teaching through the Internet

What comes to your mind when thinking about Web 2.0? It refers to blogs, interaction, collaboration, social networks, authorship, sharing. All this provides innovative forms of approaching English Teaching in more creative and pleasurable ways. It means a number of advantages for the English classroom in which teachers now are able to innovate and present content and topics in a more attractive way, catching up with the students current knowledge and interests concerning the use of internet resources. At the same time, students are given more opportunities to become authors and create their own learning.


We want to share with you two useful teaching tools, one of them is www.storybird.com and here students have the possibility to read many lovely stories and poems and also to create their own story with their favourite characters. It helps us as teachers to enhance reading and writing, and since we are using technology tools, students are more motivated and interested. Here you can see an example: http://storybird.com/books/a-hero-44/?token=45ufhsb42y .

The other one is www.buildyourwildself.com and we think it is especially for children who love creating their favourite creature. Not only do they play with their imagination but also they learn how to make descriptions and expand their vocabulary.
Here is an example:

  













To conclude, Web 2.0 offers a wide variety of tools that you can apply to the English classroom so as to incorporate something different to our lessons. We can assert that working with these two tools is simple and entertaining. We just need to give the students some rules for using them and then is their time to experience and have fun with these websites. They are useful when working with children mainly since they are attractive and and motivating. We highly recommend  them for teaching purposes and for giving our students the possibility to use their imagination while learning English.  

Important aspects to take into account when designing material for the English classroom

One of the most important things to consider when planning a lesson is the designing of our own materials. We have been reading an article “Guidelines for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials” by Howard and Major (2005) and we considered 3 important instructions they mentioned.

The first one that we want to make emphasis on is that English language teaching materials should be “contextualised to the experiences, realities and first languages of the learners.” (Howard and Major, 2005). We consider it important because, as teachers, we have to relate what the students already know to the new material and topics to be taught and also we have to connect that content to their own culture. By doing this, we are giving them better opportunities to find English learning meaningful.

The second one we selected is “materials should encourage learners to develop learning skills and strategies” (Howard and Major, 2005). Since it is really difficult to teach everything that is meant to be taught  in the curriculum, due to the inconveniences we may face during the year, such as holidays, strikes, meetings, we have to make our students autonomous and allow them to see and be aware of the different ways they can use English outside the classroom.

The third one, “Materials should be attractive” is really important to consider because students may work with the materials in a more engaging way and feel motivated with the activity or task. Another point to highlight is that the materials must be appropriate for them in the sense of durability and easiness when working with it. By making our own materials more durable, we make sure they will help us a lot in different contexts, and making the necessary adaptations to the tasks we provide.

To conclude, we consider these guidelines proposed by Howard and Major really useful because they provide the basis for the design of teaching materials and help us to empower students in our lessons by providing them attractive and contextualized materials.  In this way, we learn how to approach our students in a entertaining and pleasurable manner so as to make their English learning more meaningful.

Presentations: a way of empowering and giving voice to creative students

During our last lessons in ECO II, we have been working in the preparation of presentations in the classroom, using technology as a tool, not only for us as future teachers, but also for our students. This included PowerPoint and one of the alternatives to it, Prezi. We worked with Yohana Daján and Julieta Grassino (http://thinkingabouteco2.blogspot.com.ar/) and then we shared our presentations to the rest of the classmates. We worked with the Task-Based Learning approach (TBL), which main points consist of teaching the language for communication in a creative and innovative way, in this case, using technology as well. We chose a Prezi presentation about “our ideal holiday” to show our students a model of what we were going to do in the following lessons. This would engage them since they knew how to work with this website and all the possibilities it can offer. So as to carry out this task with students, we bore in mind the SAMR and the TPACK model.

The SAMR is a model which offers various ways of making use of technology at different levels. It represents the Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. We worked with technology at the levels of Augmentation in a matching activity in which students joined pictures with their corresponding photo caption. This is Augmentation since technology provides a new way of presenting pictures and activities, with the advantage of giving the whole group the possibility to do this at the same time and with more attractive images.

We also worked at the level of Modification since the technology was used to redesign some parts of the task and transform students, that is the case of the video they watched in order to discuss it later. In this case, students played a game which consisted on guessing their classmates' “ideal holiday” and some of the activities that they can do there. Using the prezi presentation we make this more enjoyable because they do not have to use photocopies that are generally not so attractive and engaging for them and it is even better for the teacher because she does not have to spend money on buying the material.

As regards the TPACK model which means Technological knowledge, Content knowledge and Pedagogical knowledge, we took into consideration the three concepts when working with this task. First, we taught the vocabulary related to the activities that they could do in the places they chose, and we emphasised the use of the ‘be-going to’ structure as regards grammar content. Then, the pedagogical knowledge was involved when students  had to listen and watch a video about two people talking about their holidays, discuss and make an agreement in one place, use online dictionaries to start working on the project and at the end, create a Powerpoint presentation. The technological knowledge was included when we presented the prezi to our students as support, providing them with an interesting tool to express their creative ideas in a more flexible way, since this webpage allows students to incorporate images, videos and music to their final product.

We consider this a really worthwhile experience and a very good task since we could learn from our classmates’ presentations new ways of reaching our students' interest and attention and we also learnt how to enrich our teaching practices. Through the T-PACK and SAMR model, we can redefine and reflect upon our practices, while taking into account important factors to innovate our lessons. By means of technology we, as future teachers, are given a wide variety of possibilities to teach English in more innovative and creative ways, with the advantage of giving our students the opportunity to talk about themselves and create their own presentations to share with their classmates and have fun while learning English.

Source:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us0w823KY0g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2&v=FagVSQlZELY