Talkback

When I was on high school I had a math teacher who was too strict, so one day he asked us to pass to the front to solve some math problems on the board and one of my classmates solve his problem using a different method from the method used by the teacher, although the result was correct the teacher told that he was wrong and that has to do it all over again ( I think that the teacher said that because he didn’t want to teach beyond the established on the class program ), of course that upset my classmate and that’s how it started.
The teacher was like; you are wrong, is unacceptable what you are doing, you can’t think beyond the things I teach you, ghrrr.
And the student was like; I don’t care about what you teach, I’m smarter than you, you are a bad teacher, ghrrr.
Everyone stood still, and when the discussion end the teacher told him to go back to his seat and the class continued with an awkward feeling, the consequences were that after that the teacher starts to press him to much, some students stop coming to class, the rest of the students start to collect signs to ask the principal to change the math teacher.
In my opinion the teacher shouldn’t tried to repress the student, and being so flat about the things he could teach, and on the other hand the student shouldn’t have being so childish by talking back to the teacher, maybe the solution could be that the teacher should accept the student methodology and use that as a change to teach something new, and the student should just shut up if the teacher didn’t like it his way to do it and continue studying by his own.
So what do you think, who was wrong, who was right, what would you do in that kind of situation.

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Activities with levels of Bloom’s taxonomy

After reading a little text about learning styles from the Interchange book, young adults of medium advanced level will:
• Recalling: Can you remember the seven learning styles that are mentioned on the text?
• Understanding: Why we have different ways of learning? What do we need to know to develop the perfect learning strategy for you?
• Applying: Can you tell what kind of learning style has one of your classmates according to the text? , Knowing the learning style of your classmate think of one activity that would be interesting to your classmate according to his/her style.
• Analyzing: Work in pairs and discuss about this, do you have the same learning style that your partner or is it different? , why? , how does knowing this can help you?
• Evaluating: Write about the way you study, do you study according to your learning style? Will you change your way of study?
• Creating: Describe one object for each type of learning style which could be related it, why do you think it is related?

Please don’t forget to comment.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

The Bloom’s taxonomy help teachers to have in mind aspects that are important to have when you are making a plan lesson, thanks to all the levels of bloom’s taxonomy is easy to remember what we need to ad at each plan, each activity of the daily plans, integrating those taxonomy’s levels we can develop plans to make us reach the lesson goal, this is something that is, and that will be helpful always, because the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding and remembering are what we want our students to do, to improve their skills, that’s why I think have to known about Bloom’s taxonomy.

Multiple Intelligence and Learning Style

This is the link to the voice thread that I made about learning style and intelligence https://voicethread.com/?#u3759143

TEFL class

The video that I saw was about how to teach the variations on pronunciation, well I think I will use almost everything that is show on the video, because the explanation is very complete, the only difference that I would make is that I’ll try to find one way to make it more interactive or dynamic, so the students can assimilate all the information.
This is the video

My opinion about motivation and online/face to face classes

My thoughts about motivation and engagement are that they are really important because sometimes the students feel scary or insecure because they don’t know if they can learn and use everything they see at class but with the right motivation, by the use of reinforces we can encourage them to learn and to use what they learn, so they feel more secure of what are they doing.
And because of that I believe that face to face classes are better, but at the same time the online classes are good because they provide interesting and convenient tools.

Rubric

this is the rubric I made at Rubistar http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?screen=ShowRubric&rubric_id=2315948 is kind of short you can get the idea.

Planing Plans

This post is about the plan I made for a Reading activity, but is not complete, so I hope you find it ok.
Before students arrive, I have to prepare a cloud on the board with words that are about the subject we are going to see and that are from the text we are going to read.
So the students will read them and analyze them, then I will ask them to try to guess what is going to be the subject of the text.
Next they will start to read the text but I’ll ask them to read it quickly without stopping to check the unknown vocabulary.
Then after they finish I’m going to tell them to try to explain me their ideas about the text, so I can check if they got the main idea of the text.
After that we are going to see the vocabulary that they didn’t understand by writing it on the board, first I will give them some clues about the meaning of the new vocabulary so they can think by themselves what could be the meaning.
If they don´t get the idea then I’ll make them read again the text, to make them figure the meaning by the context.
Then if I clear their doubts about the new vocabulary and having them with their ideas of what is text about I can start to explain the subject of the lesson, and make them do the activities form the book, but also I’m going to make them a little report about the text and some sentences using the new vocabulary, so I can determine if they understood the class.
So this is all, I’ll hope you find it interesting and useful, see you soon.

Graphic Organizers an useful Tool

Hello, today I’m going to explain you what are the graphic organizers , and we are going to se some examples.
Graphic organizers are a pictorial of constructing knowledge and organizing information. They help the student convert and compress information so they can give it an structure to make it more simple to read. At the end all the complex information becomes into something that is easy to understand.
The graphic organizers that I’m going to show you are the star diagram, the fact/opinion diagram and the vocabulary map.
Star diagrams are useful for basic brainstorming about a topic or simply listing all the major traits related to a theme.
Example: in the class I tell the students that the topic is lexis, so they star to think about lexical terms like compounds, multi – word verbs, synonyms, suffixes, prefixes and antonyms, then they write them in each peak of the star, after they write and analyze them we can start to discuss about the meaning of those terms.
Fact/opinion can be used to help distinguish facts vs. opinions.
• Facts are statements that can be shown to be true or can be proved, or something that really happened.
• Opinions express how a person feels about something opinions do not have to be based upon logical reasoning.
Example: the students can use this graphic organizers to determine what is fact and opinion, so I as a teacher give to the students one subject so they can make a debate, using this graphic organizer, they will analyze their statements so they can end with a solution of the subject, and with this activity they develop their thinking skills.
Vocabulary maps are graphic organizers that can be useful in helping a student learn new vocabulary words.
Example: for each new vocabulary word, the student writes the word, its definition, its part of the speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.), a synonym, an antonym, draws a picture that illustrates the meaning of the word and writes a meaningful sentence using the word.
All the information comes from http://www.enchantedlearning.com/graphicorganizers/ There are other kinds of GO if you want to check them.

About websites where you can find activities.

Welcome, I’m going to recommend you web sites that can help you and your student to practice vocabulary. The first site is http://www.vocabulary.co.il/ , this site has a lot of flash games about vocabulary which are fun, easy to play and they are specifically designed to make you practice your reading, phonics and language skills so you can develop your vocabulary, I think is a very good option to make your students practice at home without getting them bored.
Now the second site is actually a site where English teachers share activities and games for the classroom and its perfect to have all this activities that have been tested on classrooms and that are recommended by other teachers and there are activities that works at the classroom without the need of having resources that sometimes we don’t count with. For example I’m going to describe one activity that I found interesting, its call “add a word” it works for students of any level, the method is simple, the teacher suggest a topic so one student start a sentence with one word related to the topic , then a second student continues saying another word which continues the sentence. A third one must continue and so on, until one student says a word that doesn’t fit syntactically or grammatically. If the sentence comes to an end without errors, they may start again with a new word and when they finish, they could discuss about the activity.
Example:
Teacher: the topic is pets.
First student: my…
Second student: dog…
Third student: has…
Fourth student: spots…
Fifth student: brown…
The activity stops here. The teacher asks the student why, hoping that someone explains that the adjective brown normally comes before and not after the noun spots.
So this class work will help the students to practice grammar and will make them analyze themselves. The site is http://iteslj.org/games/ check it, it really has good activities.