This week I learned strategies to promote student´s autonomy and how to
deal with a one-computer classroom for the benefit of learners. In our
discussion forum, almost all of us have agreed that autonomy is not a concrete
state that is learned in a single step but it is rather an ongoing process
along the way of education. We also learned that the first step towards this
transformation is assisting students in their own awareness of autonomy. Our
education system has traditionally been very authoritarian and leaving a small
space for students to develop their own interests and leaning goals in a manner
that is consistent with their potentials and capacities. It is also true that
this change of approach should also start with the educator. We as teachers
need to see the possibility of teaching modification to enable a more
autonomous learning environment. The promotion of this new aptitude towards
leaning should come from the teacher’s trustful guidance and counseling and it
may be expressed in the early stages by assigning seemly simple tasks like
cleaning the tables, boards and any other classroom chore to initiate or
promote mutual interdependency and autonomy. Others see independency when
students engage in real world tasks like giving an address or explaining something
in a second language, I do agree with this as well. As I see it is like a symbiosis
between the teacher and students where the first lay out a propitious space for
the others to develop their skills and abilities. This in turn, will benefit
the teacher as to a sustainable teaching environment.
Regarding the topic of the one-computer classroom, it may surprise some
that there are still many places in the education world where technology is
rare or of difficult access. We learned lots of ideas on how to promote
learning with technology with such a shortage of resources. I particularly
liked the combination of the Jigsaw group technique to work with a computer as
a workstation and the colorary collaborative learning environment that results
from this procedure. It is incredible the amount of ideas we learned this week for
using just one computer.
As for my final project, I chose and I was selected as a peer-reviewer
of the first draft which is due next week. I have already started to type the
first part of it. Last week I assigned a task to use a web-based tool to
improve reading pronunciation. This week I sent a massive e-mail with a survey hoping
to get some insights from my online students about their experience with the
new voice recording tool. I am looking forward to seeing the results of that
survey by this weekend.
