Week 3: So far so good.

It's been three great weeks of my webskills online course. In the third week I tried voki.com http://www.voki.com/, voicethread.com http://voicethread.com/ and voxopop.com http://www.voxopop.com/ . They're all great sites for developing my students' oral skills. They have so many features that are so engaging and motivating. I haven't tried any of them with my students yet, but I can still tell that my students will love them. It's really hard to describe all the features, but I love voki.com. As matter of fact I already made my own voki avatar (check it out on the top right corner of my blog) . I felt like a little child while I was making it. I encourage all my classmates to create their own voki avatar and then post them in their blogs.  I also encourage you to try this sites. When you create your voki, besides creating a graphic character you can then make you voki talk. You can make it talk by recording a message, uploading a sound file and typing. I love the fact that you can type your message and the voki just talks your message out. I introduced myself with my voki avatar and you can probably see that when my voki pronounces my name and my city is not very clear but it's just because they're in Spanish.
Sometimes we feel overwhelmed by sites we don't know how to use. What I do is try to find tutorial videos in youtube.com http://www.youtube.com. It's amazing how much you learn by watching people explaining how to use sites. I actually found a little kid who recorded a video giving instructions on how to post my voki avatar on my blog. The kid's video was extremely enlightening, I could finally post my voki avatar thanks to the video posted by this little kid. Internet has opened a learning environment where people just share and collaborate. It's really exciting to learn new tools every week.

Week 2 tasks.

Our tasks this week were to explore different web search engines, describe the class for the project, and elaborate an ABCD objective.
I have to admit that I took web searching for granted. I thought I knew everything I needed to know but I realize now that there are some many search engines out there. I learned a lot this week about different search engines that are specialized in specific subject areas. There are some for kids, for example AskKids, KidsClick, and Twurdy. Some academic like INFOMINE and Intute. I find this information to be very useful for my students and myself.
The second task was a little difficult for me because I did not know what kind of project I wanted to carry out. Therefore I did not know which class to choose. After some thought and planning I decided to use voicethread.com, which is a site that allows everybody to collaborate by recording a voice message, a written comment, a video recording about  a picture, video or slide. I finally decided on the class that is going to take part of the project.
About the third task, writing an ABCD objective, I also have to say that is the first time that I learned about ABCD objectives. I studied Bloom's Taxonomy, but I never actually used it. I think ABCD objectives are very useful in order to focus your scope and measure observable behaviors. Sometimes some behaviors are very subjective if you do not have a clear and specific objective. I have to say that I was difficult to elaborate the ABCD objective. I elaborated one but I still haven't gotten any feedback yet. I definitely need more practice, but it's great to learn how to elaborate ABCD objectives.
In conclusion, week 2 has been a great one. Learning about web search engines, ABCD objectives and planning my project are enriching experiences.These experiences can only broaden my horizon and I consider myself a lifelong learner. Now,  I can't wait to start week 3.

Our Webskills Class

It is simply unbelievable to have a class with classmates from all over the world. In this picture there are still some people missing but a few already pinpointed their locations. Hope you all can label your locations eventually. Come on people join the class in the map and pinpoint your locations on the class wiki http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=214224925404717716650.0004b5e1a90c2fadb87f6&hl=en&ie=UTF8&t=m&vpsrc=0&ll=9.795678,162.070313&spn=92.277181,105.46875&z=2&source=embed. I hope this link works.

The need to share my experience

After reading  all the blog posts that my classmates wrote, I feel the need to write about my experience. I personally find it very difficult to express my feelings in writing, but after reading my colleagues posts I need to write some thoughts I have. I already feel so bonded to all my online class. I am part of class that is so willing to collaborate with each other. Some people are a little inexperienced, some are more experienced. The fact that we are in an heterogeneous class  makes this course even richer. We can learn so much from each other because there are different points of views from all over the world. I checked the map of the world that shows the location of my tutor and my classmates and it is a great feeling to have classmates from all over the world.
I would also like to thank our tutor Janine for helping and encouraging us. I also feel that I can rely on her and that she will always facilitate our learning process. I am sure this is going to be a fascinating 10 week course to share and collaborate with each other.
Exciting times!!

Week 1: My reflective blog

This is the first time I created a blog in order to reflect my own learning and experience. I've used blogs for my students before. The first blog was used to publish my primary students' writing assignments and the second one was to write about tech tools that I wanted to share with others. In both experiences I discovered many uses of blogging with students, but I think that the most appealing usage, for my students, was that the audience was as broad as the Internet, not just the teacher reading their writing assignments. Being able to share your work with the whole world  is very attractive to the students.
The part that I personally find very difficult is motivation on the teacher and the students. But in that respect I learned from Graham Stanley's article  http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/blogging-elt some activities such as, Mystery Guest, Photoblog, Int'l Link-up and Project Work that can help keep motivation up.
I am really looking forward to reflecting on my own learning to improve my blogging skills and most importantly to use them to make my students experience their own blogging skills.