Week 6 was another week full of treasures in terms of teaching ideas.
Before, I thought of PowerPoint as a “One Way Only” presentation application,
but, fortunately this old idea has been vanished. I learned that what seemed to
be a boring, static, sleep-provoking media can be turned into an inspiring, moving,
and motivating tool for engaging students during presentations. The benefits of
using PPT in large classes were clearly discussed and we learned a lot from those
teachers who deal with populated classrooms. Creating my first interactive
presentation was an exciting experience; I learned new features like linkings,
Conceptest, jumps, etc. As someone who runs a hybrid course, I need to learn
more on how to deliver an interactive slide show for distance learning. PPT fits
perfectly well for delivering content and language matters. This week we could
also learn about PPT alternatives; for example, I tried an online-delivered
presentation using Google Docs and some teachers in my course used Prezi for
their purposes. We were fulfilled with the benefits of using such applications
and for having learned about 36 interaction strategies.
As for my final project, week 6 represented the implementation phase.
So, I have already assigned a small-scale project in which my students will
make a recording of their readings using a web-based tool for it. This will be
due in one week from today. They have to previously use a listening and
speaking application to practice their pronunciation before doing the recording
as a way to make comparisons, corrections, and improvements. The final product
is the recording itself, but there is a whole process behind this scene. They have
also been provided a rubric for self-evaluation; something I learned in this
WebSkills training as well. I am very confident that this project will produce
good results and my students will finally be able to modulate better English reading
pronunciation thanks to technology.
There is a lot to be digested, processed and put into practice from this wonderful course. It will
require time and dedication but I am sure we will learn more along the way.
There is not destination point in technology training, there are just learning
stop-overs in this journey.
