Project based learning: the future of teaching.

Whew! It's week five already. The pace is really picking up. My horizons has been greatly expanded. Allan and stoller's article titled "maximizing the benefits of project work in foreign language classrooms really got me ticked. I used to relate project work mainly with science subjects. I never thought of doing projects with language classes, but the article gave me a new angle to work with. Projects are a very good way to develop students along the three domains of learning, cognitive, psycho-motor and affective. i definitely will be doing class projects with my kids when we resume in September.
I also love the concept of webQuests. I would surely use them in future when I teach older students hopefully in the university of college. The beauty of webQuest is the bringing together of various internet resources to guide student's project work. Its quite unfortunate i could not get the bonus 5 marks for setting up a webQuest. I tried but the internet was quite crappy this week. Bonus marks or not i would still set up my webQuest in the coming week.
My rubrics page was created and I hope Donna likes it. I will be creating more when school resumes.
My project plan is also in place and I look forward to implement it.
Bye!

Baby says cannot wait for school to resume.

Making steady progress.

Its the fourth week already. How time flies. I am really enjoying the insights I am getting from the course. my school closed on Monday for the long holiday. I discussed some the new technology with my pupils and they are feeling sad that they wont be with me next session to fully partake in my tech enhanced classes by September
I enjoyed reading the articles on using social media and blogs to enhance children's writing skills and Mikulecky"s Using Internet-Based Children's Literature to Teach EFL.. The sites referred to such as www.magickeys.com were very useful for teaching reading. The audio books are awesome. The gave me new stuff for my delicious page.
I have take another step towards teaching after the web-skills course with my technology enhanced lesson plan. It was an interesting time writing it.
I have identified "reading fluency" as the problem I would like to address with my end of course project. i cant wait for week five to commence. 

My pupils at end of term awards day!

Week 3: a delicious week!

I am having so much fun already taking this course. My teaching will never be the same again. I thoroughly enjoyed the article on using  Using Original Video and Sound Effects to Teach English. I have started experimentation on that. I believe that I can use these recordings to improve use of tenses (which is quite problematic for my kids).
Although we are rounding off the session (usually kids don't wont to do any class work after exams), my kids, after seeing the picture of the present tense board, are eager to try it out. By Monday we would surely get going. I am looking forward to getting more fun materials for next session form www.esl-galaxy.com.
A have all the cool kids and teacher activities on my delicious page. The funny thing is that for long time if had been seeing the delicious book mark on some websites, but did not bother about it. I now know what I have missed all this while. It was a delicious experience getting all my favorite sites in one place.
I hope to put up some pictures and videos by next week.
Cheers!

Week 2: A week of web searches and writing Behavioral Objectives

 I felt a sense nostalgia as a began my tasks for the week. The reading on " How to write clear objectives" brought back memories of my undergraduate studies. My professor then used to say "without Objectives, teaching is useless". The article made me review the teaching and learning objectives I have been employing in my class. To be honest I had not been setting clear objectives before now,  but now I know writing pedagogical objectives is as simple as the ABCD system!  I actually applied it to my lesson plans for this week and found that assessment was much easier. The ABCD system together with Bloom's taxonomy was the highlight of the week for me.
Searching through web engines was also fun. I found subject specific search engines to make searches easier. I love the tips for better searches, pretty cool! But I am still addicted to google!

Here is a picture of my class!