Technologies have changed learning

Along this week we've seen several things. One is that technologies can help enhance aural/oral skills. In that sense, I feel that technologies can help enhance all aspects of life, including learning, including all foreign language skills. There are many sites other students in the course have recommended that are useful and interesting.

For the Spanish language speakers, teaching foreign language, let me recommend you the site of a good friend, full on well organized links: http://www.isabelperez.com

But what do we do with all this sites, how do we organized them? There comes Delicious, Diigo and other bookmarking tools. I've been using Delicious at my job, but for personal use I still trust Mr. Google to quickly fin the needed url. Maybe I'll change that with time.

Another thing we've done this week is reading the project plan report of a previous student of this course. I chose one by a teacher trainer from South Africa. Learning about their program has been an interesting experience.

One conclusion for this week is that technologies, in general, have changed society, and consequently learning. I'm engaged in a course organised by a University at Oregon with peer students from all around the world talking about common issues. It is marvellous to attend this course with people from four continents.

Good planning

Sometimes it is difficult when it comes to planning in Education. And yet, all teachers around the world need to plan what they are going to do. After all, teaching is more a science than an art. You can learn how to do it properly, and there are ways that work and others that don't.

Sometimes I listen that planning in Education goes against action. People often say that too much planning can be a corset, but I don't quite agree with that: the more you plan, the more free you can feel to act differently if the situation requires it.

What we need to do, in my opinion, is plan properly: say what you want to do, with whom, in what situation or context, with what resources, with what methodology, how are you going to evaluate it, with what purpose...

So, when it comes to objectives, I've never found a better model than the ABCD one proposed in the course. Taking into account the learners, what you expect from them, the context, and the evaluation criteria is simply great. All teachers in my Authonomic Region of Spain have to make public their evaluation criteria, and the best thing they can do is have good teaching objectives related to that.

I am going to try to use the ABCD model from now on when planning teaching objectives, be it in teacher training or in teaching kids.

Starting to blog

This is the first time I blog. At least at blogger.com. At the teacher training center where I work I've made many posts with announcements and such that can be viewed as a blog. But I've never written anything like this, a diary reflecting on what I'm doing.

And I suppose that is the purpose. If you reflect on what you are doing, in a deliberate way, you can better see what can be done to improve your performance.

I'm sure that this is a useful self-evaluation.
Juan.