WHO AM I?

Hello everybody!

My name is Esther Soria and I'm a student of Primary Education in Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, in fact, I'm doing the English minor as I want to be an English teacher. During this first semester, I'm doing a subject called Aprenentatge de la llengua estrangera en l'Educació primària mitjançant les TIC, in which we are learning how to introduce Technology Enhanced Project Based Language Learning (TEPBLL) in our classrooms. Now you are probably wondering... what is this?

As Melinda Dooly (2014) says, we have to re-think how we teach languages, we have got to find a new education paradigm that integrates language, technology, competences, new notions of knowledge and learning based on socially-distributed cognition.  

Nowadays, technology is in our daily lives that's why at school, we don't have to look to another side; we have to face children's reality and take profit from it. If children are engaged with technology, why do not introducing it in class to motivate language learning? This is the key point of TEPBLL, it focuses on language learning through real communication contexts, apart from a lot more things that we will see as we go on in this blog.

Before starting reading my reflections, here you have a link in which you can know me better!

I hope you enjoy it and you join me in this learner reflection!

WHERE AM I STARTING FROM?

Hello again!

Before going in depht, I would like to set out which competences I want to improve during the course so that, at the end, I will be able to assess how it has gone.

According to the European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages (2007), there are some main competences and knowledge required of a good foreign language teacher. Going through these competences will allow me to see which ones I already have, which ones I want to work on during this course and, finally, which ones I will deal with in upcoming years.

If you click the link below you'll see which competences I have chosen to develop during these months. Once you're in there, you have to click on each title and, then, it will appear the competences  chosen  from each section.

Where am I starting from?

See you soon!

1st WEEK

Let's start!

This is the first week, not only in this subject, but also in the English minor, that's why I feel excited for starting something new but, at the same time, worried for what might happen.

Although I have never got along well with technology, it is the new era in which our students are, that’s why I’m really interested in learning new resources to use in classroom and improve my teaching. 

Here you have some reflections about how I have felt during my first day!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

See you next week!

2nd WEEK

Hello bloggers!

This week I haven't had any class as it was La Mercè but we have had our first meeting! I was really nervous because I was starting something new  just with the guidelines of the blog and with only one class done in the previous week.

Let's see how it went...

1st meeting feelings

As an autonomous work we had an assigned text to read! In my case, I read a very interesting article about Virtual Worlds, written by Dr. Sadler. [Sadler, R. (2012). Virtual Worlds for Language Learning. From theory to practice. (pp.55-78). Bern/Wien: Peter Lang.].

When I saw I had to read such an academic text, first I was a little bit scared, but then I started reading it and it was easier than expected. Probably, it was because I have been reading about these authors before in the degree, so having previous knowledge about it really helped me to understand it.

After reading all the text, I think that the most important idea is that, as Dewey, Vygotsky and Kolb highlight, we should teach in new environments giving priority to students' interactions. As we know, this idea appeared a long time ago, but we still use tradicional methodologies at schools. Here is where it comes the importance of including technology in class. Thanks to Virtual Worlds, we can create truly communicative environments where the students are engaged while they are learning, not only language but a lot of useful competences for their near future.

See you soon!

3rd WEEK

Hello again!

This week is full of new and interesting issues!

Do you want to know what have I done in class? Follow this link!

In class reflections

Once we have assimilated the content, we met the members of our group (seek&found) to exchange information. Here you have the conclusions we arrived to...

Group Discussion

In this week, I’m starting to see the importance of collaboration. For example, we couldn’t have done this group discussion if all the members hadn’t read the articles first. It’s very important that each student feels responsible not only for his/her own learning, but also for their peers’ learning.   

Moreover, we have to present each task using different tools so we can pick up ideas and resources that catch our attention for, later on, using them in class. In this meeting, for example, we had to present some ideas related to work telecollaboratively. What we have done it’s, first, we have opened a google docs to work on it all the members and, then, we posted everything on a prezi to present it to our classmates. Here you have the result of our discussion!

TEPBLL

I would like also to comment how was the second meeting. Here you can listen my feelings after it!

2nd meeting

See you next week!

4th WEEK

Hello everybody!

In this week we were doing our Practicum at different Primary schools, for this reason, we haven’t had neither class nor meeting. What we have had was an asynchronous online activity in which we had to start thinking about possible ideas for the TEPBLL we are going to plan.

Surprisingly, it was easy to reach an agreement as most of our ideas were very similar (food, festivals ...). In this case I was the leader of this activity and it worked very well. I created a google docs where each member could include her ideas using the scheme provided by the teacher in order to, later on, be able to discuss them.

It was an intense week as Practicum let us very few hours to do all the homework from university. This made me feel a little bit overwhelmed because with so much work I couldn’t go in depth as much as I would like with all the materials provided.

See you!

5th WEEK

Hello!

For this week we had to do a lot of work before class, here you have all my reflections after doing it!

5th week

Apart from these activities, we had to explore UniCollaboration website. I was really surprised because I didn’t know that there were websites destined exclusively to promote telecollaborative projects. Here is where I started to be aware of the magnitude a TEPBLL has and how it can help students and teachers to grow up academically and personally. Here you have some ideas I want to point out. 

UniCollaboration

During this week, we had to choose a tool for doing a critical review. The truth is that it took me some time to decide which tool I wanted to use as I don’t master many tools and I didn’t want to choose a known one but discover new ones. First, I decided to delve into some tools that we were using in class and they were new to me, such as Padlet, but as time went by, many people had chosen them before. Finally, I found a tool (WeVideo) which I consider that could be interesting.

You’ll see in the following week!