Week 4: Multiple - Skills Web Sites

Teachers can use some interesting and useful websites to teach and encorage students to produce english language, in these websites we can find different kind of activities to develop the english language skills. most of them are very motivated for students and teachers, too. However as teachers, we are responsable of the stdents´ success, because we are the guides, and we have to give them all the technological resources in order to help them and in this way we provide students some important tools in their learning process.

"You must be the change you want to see in the world" -Gandhi

My week 3

My Week 3

I felt happiness when I finished week three because I have learned the importance of listening and how we have been using some technological resources. I consider that listening is one of the most important skill due to I had the opportunity to put in practice songs that encouraged the students to discover what they have heard and get main ideas from them.  Visit these links:

http:// www.musicalenglishlessons.org/index-ex.htm#repspeech

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRHGFyfAXes

Delicious it is a great experience because you have the opportunity to file your URLs and share with others helpful information.

My second week....

I have realized how important is to know about technology sources nowadays, actually these week has been very productive for me as a teacher and I have learned that teachers must prepare didactic material by using hi tech resources in the class and we shouldn´t stop preparing ourselves day after day. “Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, then the teacher is the most important” Bill Gates.

In spite of good and widely digital resources, students need the teachers ´guide and It´s our responsibility to get and apply new things  for increasing students´ Knowledge, of course without forgetting  to motivate them  every day, I mean all the time. As  teachers, we must prepare the best strategy to get their attention and  must give them all  these sources so that they could improve their creativity. I´m very convinced that technology is one of the best solutions in education.

On the other hand ABCD method is new for me, at the beginning I was not very clear about it, but now I got the whole picture. ABCD method will be easier and useful to apply, due to I see my goals in a better way. I think my mind has opened in this week, because It´s very interesting to know new things, practical and applicable in our students

How teacher learn technology best

By Jamie Mckenzie

When it comes to teachers learning and valuing the effective use of new technologies, some schools are discovering that the kinds of training programs offered in the past may not represent the most generative method of reaching a full range of teachers and their students. The key term is "generative" - meaning that behaviors and daily practice will be changed for the better as a consequence of the professional development experience.

Fortunately, some schools are now identifying approaches more likely to encourage teachers to employ these technologies on a frequent and sustained basis to enhance student learning.

Lead districts are finding that adult learning, curriculum development projects and informal support structures are proving powerful in promoting recurrent use aimed at deep curriculum integration.

After two decades of providing software classes to teachers, we need to explore different approaches — those honoring key principles of adult learning while placing both curriculum and literacy ahead of software and technology.

As will be explained later, adult learning strategies are fundamentally different from training strategies and usually more promising because they are tailored to the learning styles, preferences and needs of teachers in ways more likely to win their commitment than the approach more typical of training models.

In some places, eager planners have "put the cart before the horse" - emphasizing the purchase and installation of equipment without providing sufficient funding for the staff learning required to win a reasonable return on the huge investments being made.

We have evidence from Market Data Retrieval (MDR) (1999) that the majority of American teachers enjoy fewer than five hours of technology related professional development annually, and most of that seems to be training.

In many schools, the failure to fund and design robust professional development leads to "the screensavers’ disease" — the educational equivalent of an accountant’s red ink — as hundreds of computers sit idly glowing throughout the day and the district’s investment proves a huge waste of funds.

This challenge should be about using new tools to help students master the key concepts and skills embedded in the science, social studies, art and other curriculum standards. It is not so much about powerpointing, spreadsheeting or word processing. The focus should be on teaching and learning strategies that make a difference in daily practice — on activities translating into stronger student performance. As a result of these practices and the use of these new tools, students should be able to . . .

• read, reason and write more powerfully
• communicate productively with members of a global community
• conduct thoughtful research into the important questions, choices and issues of their times
• make sense of a confusing world and a swelling tide of information
• perform well on the new, more demanding state tests requiring inferential reasoning

This article will outline how teachers learn technology best and how districts may promote such learning to avoid "the screensavers’ disease."

(Note: This article first appeared in the January, 2001 issue of Electronic School, a publication of the National School Boards Association and is © 2001, J. McKenzie, all rights reserved. It also appears as a chapter in Planning Good Change.)