Reflection 5: Moving Forward!

There is no doubt, my friends, that the only way is forward. We are now in week 5 of our academical journey and the amount of information that we have acquired is just amazing and extremely useful. This is a fact that pushes us all towards new horizons in our educational highway and professional life.

This week´s trip started with a very interesting topic on PBL(Project-Based Learning which now I really find necessary and mandatory if what we want is real learning from our students. In PBL, the students become the doers and they stop being the receivers; in a word, they become actors and not just the mere audience. In addition, they work on something of their own; a topic in which they are the experts so the inversion of roles takes place; leading to an extremely positive outcome: The students get confidence and feel capable of improving their English speaking skills.

After that amazing first place, we were taken to a beautiful location with breath-taking scenery: Rubrics and Alternative Assessment. Here we came across an invaluable fountain of resources, especially for the creation of rubrics. The page RubiStar offers the possibility of creating your own rubrics based on the characteristics and necessities of each group you teach. This option, plus the opportunity of carrying out alternative evaluation, greatly enhances the learning process for each participant and for the whole class because it gives professors the chance to personalize each graded activity done in class.

Finally, As our last stop we went to a refreshing lake where we had the opportunity of using technological tools to the service of education by finding a solution to a problem found in one of our groups we are currently teaching . In my case, since a couple of weeks ago I had decided to work on my Grammar Advanced group. One of the problems I had mentioned before and which is the one I chose to work on is time for we have classes four hours a week which is not enough. So as a way to solve this inconvenient, I am going to implement a project-based learning activity with the use of ZunalWebQuest in which participants will be divided into groups according to their field of study or job. They will work on applying one of the topics studied in class to a text (video, story, article, poem, etc.)that is closely related to what they study or do every day. The idea here, my friends, is to take the grammar class to the student´s daily life so they can see and feel that it --grammar-- is an essential component of whatever we do in our lives and not just a boring academic subject. Then, through RubiStar a rubric will be created to evaluate such activity.

As you can see, this week´s journey has been a fulfilling one which has helped each one of us to give shape to our different classes; without paying attention to the geographical region or the topics or type of students being addressed. We all have benefited from the invaluable possibilities that we have acquired through the pages read and visited. It all depends on us, to be wise enough to visualize how to use them properly and constantly. At the end, the ones who will be completely benefited from all these mountains of knowledge will be our students.

Kind regards from paradise,

Hector.