Our old companion Power Point and the unknown guy Prezi

While reading Santiago's blog, particularly his comment on the Power Point we worked on in Literature II last year, I remembered my best work with this tool. To be honest, I acknowledge it is not so impressive, but I recall the time it took and my special concern on making it look eye-catching. Feel free to judge it. The importance of being Earnest - Act II

Last friday, I met with Alejandra in order to think of our lesson about travelling. We have chosen to develop our presentation with Prezi, just to give it a try. At the beginning, I felt puzzled about it. Luckily, Ale is more of a digital native than I am. Even though we spent more than four hours - a long period of time - it was really enriching for two main reasons: we used Prezi successfully for the first time ever and we could give the Presentation our personal touch (for instance, the listening task will be the description of a journey around England, visiting places where Harry Potter's scenes were filmed and The Beatles's hometown.)

This Tutorial I found in Youtube was of interest. Have a look at it, if you feel like doing so:

The history of technology

I would like to share this video. As the title reads, it is about Technology in Education. After watching it, the first thing that came to my mind was whether we can really think of this kind of classroom in our days. Can we think a of a classroom with all these resources available for each learner?

Being a material designer

In my primary teaching practice, I design the materials for each lesson. I found this task really time-consuming but I came to appreciate its many benefits.

As a teacher, it is essential to bear in mind what students already know and try to relate it with the new language they are to learn; in order to help subsumption take place. When you design your own material, you reflect this relation. Since the boys and girls I am teaching have already dealt with places where you can buy food and they are learning some new food vocabulary, this Clasification Task would help them relate the knowledge they have and what they are learning.

In addition, while designing your own materials, you show your understanding not only of the learning process in general but also of the way your students learn according to their age. In Piaget's theory, pupils in the primary classroom are thought to be in the concrete stage. Consequently, they will find it difficult to deal with abstract concepts. While using Flashcards, they have access to concrete objects.

As part of a task-based methodology, in our first lesson young learners were presented with Tasks related to Top Chef, a radio programme. Their final task is to produce a similar programme in groups of four. In the process, they have written ridiculous recipes. While checking their productions, I saw that the organisation of the recipe is not clear for them (name, ingredients and their quantities and cooking instructions) so I decided to make it more explicit by designing both the Empanadas Recipe and the Flan Recipe.

I am still thinking of more practical ways of designing the materials for the lessons. So far, I have used Internet to download images, Paint and Microsoft Office Picture Manager to alter them, Audacity to record a listening, Microsoft Power Point in the presentations I have downloaded from BusyTeacher.org (just as a source of information), and Microsoft Word and Excel to organise materials, eventually exporting them to a pdf format. I hope I go on learning new tools to make my designing more efficient.

Pecha Kucha

During our Material Design lessons, some comments about Pecha Kucha aroused my curiosity. At first I misunderstood that it was a software in order to work with presentations, similar to Power Point and Prezi, but it was not. Even though it turned out to be a simple presentation format -showing 20 images, each for 20 seconds-, while exploring its official website (Pecha Kucha) I realised how challenging it was.

The most relevant aspect of this format is the time constraint, which involves being very concise. Consequently, Pecha Kucha is highly likely to require much preparation time and rehearsal. Other characteristics to be taken into account regarding Pecha Kucha are the organasation of the information and the selection of pictures/words to be displayed. As in any case in which you want to convey a particular message to an audience, it is an intellectually demanding task.

At the website, I could see many presentations recorded during Pecha Kucha nights. I enjoyed one of them whose title was eye-catching:   "Changing the World - One Smile at a time" A moving experience which I believe it's worthy the 6.40 minutes it takes.

busyteacher.org

While analysing web pages which provide resources for teachers in our Material Design lessons, it occured to me that it was interesting to have a look at one of the tools I use on a regular basis: http://busyteacher.org.

When it comes to the main advantage of BusyTeacher I can say that it's packed with lots of materials. They've been uploaded by different teachers from all over the world and you also have the chance of sharing your own tasks or teaching ideas with others. (I've uploaded my first materials to the page and they've approved and published it! - Cake Recipe )

As well, the page is organised in clear categories such as vocabulary and grammar, and has brief descriptions of each material. There is also a "search" at the top of the page which is really useful. 

As regards the drawbacks of the site, there used to be no preview of the materials published, making any search more time-consuming. Fortunately, the site has been updated recently and now there is a quick view, and you don't need to download each file.

Last Friday I was looking for some verbs and vocabulary related to cooking in BusyTeacher and I came across a power point I really like. I've downloaded it and I'd love to share it with you: Cooking file (Here's also the link to the web page Cooking on BusyTeacher so that you can see the description that accompanies the file)

All in all, I strongly recommend this site because it fosters cooperation among teachers.