Making a group work significant.

Rate 4

According to what I read in the articles “Maximizing the Benefits of Project Work in Foreign Language Classrooms” and “Seven Essentials for Project-Based Learning” I can say that working in groups can be meaningful for students; however, the educator has to do this work meaningful by applying the group work correct in order to reach that goal I would like to quote something from the reading, Lamer and Mergendoller stated that “A project is meaningful if it fulfills two criteria. First, students must perceive the work as personally meaningful, as a task that matters and that they want to do well. Second, a meaningful project fulfills an educational purpose. Well-designed and well-implemented project-based learning is meaningful in both ways” (p. 1). As we can see creating a significant group work is not that easy; first, students need to be somehow motivated to feel this work like a personally meaningful task. Second, there must be a purpose on that work because we cannot have students doing work group without any sense. A good example of a meaningful work group will be:

Work group: students need to form groups of 5 students (they can work with whoever they want), they will research about the most important news around the world in the last month (students will be free to choose the kind of news that they will be looking). Then, students will have to work in groups and write the new that they like the most in past tense. After that, students have to send the new to my email. Teacher will send feedback with comments and corrections after revising the homework.

I think that this will be a good work group because students are free to choose what they like so their opinion counts; second, they can choose the people that they will be working on it in order to be comfortable; also, students will cooperate with each other and choose the new that the like the most on order to write it in past tense. In this homework students will be using technology to look for the most recent news (innovation will be applied). At the end, students will get their feedback to realize their mistakes and correct them so they will be getting a significant learning through cooperation and the application of technology.

Interaction, a very powerful tool to enhance student’s participation.

Rate 5

According to what I read in the articles “10 benefits of getting students to participate in classroom discussion”, “Increase students interaction with think pair shares and circle chats” and also in the presentation interactive power point, I would like to say that participation is one of the most important factor throughout the learning process; that is why we have some techniques to enhance the students’ participation such as blank slide, Quick Quiz: ConcepTest, Think, Pair, Share technique and some others. Even though we have a lot of techniques to interact, I think that the most effective ones are: Think-Pair-Share and the Circle Chat because in these two techniques we can see a very good interaction between students and teachers. First, The Think-Pair-Share technique students are given time to think, process the information, think in the correct way to share this information and share it; thus, the Think-Pair-Share technique is a very effective tool to enhance interaction. Second, we have the Circle Chat which is an activity that applies a student-student interaction, what I really like about this technique is that each student have the opportunity to speak and share his/her thoughts. Concluding, I would like to say that applying these techniques students will be able to develop an interaction in the classroom that will help them to share information and also they will be encouraged to practice a cooperative learning.

Four out of Twenty Ideas for Using Mobile Devices in the Second Language Classroom.

Rate 5

According to what I read in the article “Twenty Ideas for Using Mobile Phones in the Language Classroom” I can say that this is a very interesting article which provides some inquisitive ways to apply mobile devices to education; however, there are a lot of ideas that I do not agree with because I do not see them as a meaningful tool to learn a language. I would like to focus on ideas number 12, 16, 19 and 20. First of all, on idea number 12 which is “Use the mobile phone for social networking” I think that social networking is a very useful tool to put in practice every kid of language; furthermore, mobile devices give us the option to do some social networking. Second, on idea number 16 which is “Use mobile phone memory to distribute reading material” I strongly believe that mobile devices are a great help to read and having reading materials in our mobile devices really help us to read everywhere we are and to save time as well. Then, on idea number 19 that is “Use the mobile phone to check student comprehension and get feedback” as you may know there are a lot of websites, applications, etc. that allow teachers and student to interact, in that way students are able to get feedback from their teacher among other activities. To finish, we have idea number 20 that is “mobile phone memory for research and data collection” Obviously with the technology that we have access nowadays, mobile devices are an easy tool to have easy access to internet that is why students are able to search for meaningful information about whatever topic they want. Although there are 20 ideas about the application of mobile devices, I only focused on 4 which are the ones that I consider help a lot to students.