Learning Process-Use Web 2.0 and Strategies

Learning Process-Use Web 2.0 and Strategies

HOW TO INTEGRATE TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM?

In today´s classroom educators face many challenges. They must adapt to a generation of students who have grown up using the Internet. 

Students must be able to –

• Communicate effectively,

• Collaborate with others,

• Think creatively and critically and,

• Gather, analyze, and synthesize information.

Students communicate daily by texting and posting on Facebook pages and other social media avenues to stay in touch with friends. Teachers can help students make the connections between their recreational writing and the kinds of writing they need to become successful beyond the classroom.

It’s important to stay aware of the digital world students live in as we design learning experiences to cultivate important skills. The diverse variety of Web 2.0 tools allow students to create products, such as videos, podcasts, interactive posters, cartoons, and share them online with others to see.

Web 2.0 tools can provide authentic audiences for students’ writing. Consider the “Old School” tradition of written reports and essays read only by the teacher. Now imagine an environment where students write for their peers, sharing information online, discussing and commenting with one another- a community of actively engaged readers and writes.

In schools creativity should not be limited to just art and music classes. Anyone in any occupation can be creative in their work. That is the reason why we must provide opportunities for our students to be creative across the curriculum.

Ilustración 1- Use Web 2.0 in the classroom

                                                                               

Ilustración 3- Social networks for learning

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Ilustración 2-Teahcers as Facilitators

        

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

Why students at Fray Damian Gonzales need to learn English?

Besides all the opportunities available to the management of a foreign language, English has become a very important tool for education. Here are some reasons why it is worth learning:

1.    It is the most widespread international language and is a strategic communication tool in various areas of human development.

2.    It encourages students to open their minds, accepts and understands new cultures and promotes exchange between different societies.

3.    It allows access to scholarships and internships abroad. It is very important that young Colombians can take advantage of the educational opportunities offered abroad and require specific performance levels in English.

4.    It offers more and better job opportunities.

5.    It facilitates the exchange of knowledge and experience with other cultures whose official language is other than English as this is a common language and disseminated.

AREA GENERAL SKILLS ACCORDING TO COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK

Communicative competence

It is the set of knowledge, skills, abilities and individual characteristics that allows a person to perform actions in a given context. In the case of English as a foreign language in school Fray Damian Gonzalez is expected to develop communicative competence. This includes:

Language Proficiency

It refers to the knowledge of the formal resources of language as a system and the ability to be used in the formulation of well-formed and meaningful messages. It includes knowledge and lexical, phonological, syntactic and spelling skills, among others. This competence involves not only theoretical concepts managing grammar, spelling or semantic, but also its application in various situations. (For example, make associations to use the vocabulary known in another context or apply grammar rules learned from the creation of new posts).

Pragmatic Competence

At first, it relates to the use of functional and linguistic resources discourse competence regards the ability to organize sequences sentences to produce textual fragments. In second, it implies functional competence for both linguistic forms and functions, such as how strung with each other in real communicative situations.

Competition sociolinguistics

It refers to knowledge of social and cultural conditions that are implicit in the use of language. For example, it is used to handle etiquette and other rules that order the relations between generations, genders, social classes and groups. It also handles the contact with expressions of popular wisdom or register differences, dialect and accent.

It is important to note, that during learning a foreign language like English comprehension skills (reading and listening) and production (writing, monologues and conversation) develop comprehensively in different learning experiences proposals to the students.

Why a Reading Plan is necessary for students’ comprehension?

Approaches to Improve Reading for Adolescents

While there are many instructional models available to help students in the high school years to become more efficient and skilled readers, research conducted specifically with this age group suggests that four factors contribute significantly to building reading proficiency. Students need to be:

1.    Motivated to read and improve their skills: it is often very difficult for students to admit their weaknesses and sustain positive effort, even with support, given ingrained feelings of embarrassment and hopelessness.

2.    Able to decode print: this is increasingly difficult for many students in part due to their having made incorrect assumptions about the alphabetic principle and how letters and sounds work; for others, decoding skills are so slow and labored that the mechanics of decoding interferes with understanding what is being read.

3.    Able to comprehend language: students whose reading is not "automatic" and fluid often need to focus their efforts on sounding-out words or guessing at words, making it all the more difficult to check their understanding of the material as they read.

4.    Able to seek information and formulate personal responses to questions: efficient readers employ a number of different strategies to validate the assumptions they made about material being read.

Methodology:

Communicative language teaching (CLT) is an approach to the teaching of languages that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language.

CLT is usually characterized as a broad approach to teaching, rather than as a teaching method with a clearly defined set of classroom practices. As such, it is most often defined as a list of general principles or features. One of the most recognized of these lists is  David Nunan's (1991) five features of CLT:

1.    An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language.

2.    The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.

3.    The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on languages but also on the learning process itself.

4.    An enhancement of the learner’s own personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning.

5.    An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activities outside the classroom.

These five features are claimed by practitioners of CLT to show that they are very interested in the needs and desires of their learners as well as the connection between the language as it is taught in their class and as it used outside the classroom. Under this broad umbrella definition, any teaching practice that helps students develop their communicative competence   in an authentic context is deemed an acceptable and beneficial form of instruction. Thus, in the classroom CLT often takes the form of pair and group work requiring negotiation and cooperation between learners, fluency-based activities that encourage learners to develop their confidence, role-plays in which students practice and develop language functions, as well as judicious use of grammar and pronunciation focused activities.

I used this methodology because it helps my students to be in contact with meaningful topics and it gives them the opportunity to use language to build new knowledge and use it in context. It gives them the chance to enhance their thinking skills and support their ideas in English. They can relate what they are learning with the reality and the world they live in.

Which strategy?

The chart below lists all of the strategies currently used, with guidance on when to use each strategy. It allows you to see right away if a particular strategy should be used before, during, and/or after reading.

Print Awareness	Before Reading	During Reading	After Reading
Concept of Word games	X	X	x

Phonological Awareness	Before Reading	During Reading	After Reading
Blending /segmenting games		X
Elkonin Boxes
Onset/ Rime Games	X
Rhyming Games	X
Syllable Games	X

Phonics	Before Reading	During Reading	After Reading
Alphabet Matching	X	X	X
Matching Books to Phonics Features		X

Vocabulary	Before Reading	During Reading	After Reading
List- Group- Label
Possible Sentences		X
Semantic Feature Analysis	X	X	X
Semantic Gradients	X	X	X
Word Hunts		X
Word Maps	X	X	X
Word Walls	X	X	x

Fluency	Before Reading	During Reading	After Reading
Choral Reading		X
Paired Reading		X
Reader’s Theater		X
Shared Reading	X	X	x
Tape Assisted Reading		X
Timed Repeated Readings		X

Comprehension	Before Reading	During Reading	After Reading
Anticipation Guide	X
Concept Sort	X
Concept Maps		X
Directed Reading Thinking Activity		X
Exit Slips			X
First Lines	X
Inquiry Chart		X
Inference		X	X
Jigsaw		X
Listen- Read- Discuss	X	X
Paragraph Shrinking		X	X
Partner Reading		X	X
Question- Answer relationship			X
Question the autor		X
Reading Guides		X
Reciprocal Teaching		X
Semantic Feature Analysis	X	X	X
Story Maps		X	X
Summarizing			X
Think Alouds		X
Think-Pair-Share	X
Visual Imagery	X	X	X

Writting	Before Reading	During Reading	After Reading
Descriptive Writing
Dictation		X	X
Framed Paragraphs			X
Paragraph Hamburger			X
Persuasive writting			X
Raft	X	X	X
Revision
Sentence Combining
Story Sequence	X	X	X
Transition Words
Writing Conferences