Nicenet and blogging. with adolescents?????

I will like to tell you how useful these two tools have been in my teaching daily live.

I know that almost all, who form this group, are adults, I will like to put on practice these tools with adolescents, I have not tried them yet, my question is. Are they mature enough to be reading and to answer, as well as to reflect on their knowledge???

I will like to know if someone has practice this with students from 15 to 18 years old. Please share your experience with me. I really will appreciate that.

Changing my idea???

Now what???

After reading all the papers and my web mates comments; I´m thinking again about my final project. At the beginning of the course I had an idea but   now that ideas is been changing. Now I find many tools so attractive, and so interesting to be used by me and my students to improve their English. What shall I do??

At least I will keep thinking……

Week 3 from Apri 23 to 27.My experience during these days.....

All the time when I was a student (attending to school) I used to have specific material as students.

When I became a teacher, 28 years ago, I used to have special material to teach, only for teachers.

Today with the use of CALL applications, both students and teachers can learn.

Computer has been attractive for any student. Computer by itself motive students.

During this week when I started to do my homework, especially when I opened the delicious page, my first thought was, what is this? What for? As I saw many pictures on the page it creates confusion inside of me, and I got more confused when I started reading sports, technology, food, I asked myself where is the relation with the topic of this course?, Do I have to elaborate a commercial or designed something?

What I did not realize was the use of the website, until I read the instructions to create one. Wow! On that moment I felt safe!!

I started creating my delicious site, and now I can say that this is another amazing tool that I learnt in this course. I found it helpful for me. To paste  my favorite sites, but also I am planning to create another where my students can find sites that I recommend to them, including topics that have a relation with our course.

I got an Idea!!!

This week after reading almost all the comments pasted on nicenet. I had the opportunity to see how helpful this tool was. To be clear, all of us were commenting about the ABCD approach, and if you read all the post, you can see that Janine gave feedback to almost all of them, this was the useful aspect.

Thinking on my context working with adolescents between 15-18 year old, I do not know if they have the maturity to read all their classmates comments, because if they will have it, they will learn to much from our feedback, the same that I learnt from Janine.

Every head is a world, on nicenet we can show and share these entire world to our students where they are solving their doubts, they will understand better, the knowledge will be like an open window.

Week 2. April 16-20. What a WEEK!!!!

I will like to star writing that I have been working so hard... I have been reading a lot, and searching with the new tips from the new sites!!!



The task about ABCD approach, looked easy, but when I start to elaborate it, is where I start thinking, and I realize how all the aspects have to be synchronized, I cannot evaluate, or ask about something that I did not teach, or maybe not exactly that I did not teach, I would say under the same condition or the same behavior. Sometimes on the material that I use as teacher which is my teacher´s book and the students book, I find exercises where students are asked to identify something, for example " relative pronouns" and then on the test that someone else elaborate I find the instruction to write a sentence using relative pronouns. My question here is, in what time of you class, did your students practice elaborating sentences with relative pronouns?



If on the workbook the exercises asked them only to identify them. I think that as teachers, as someone who knows, we can do it, but let’s be on the shoes of our students.



This point disappoints me a lot. As my students are in a processes of learning I do not consider fair to ask the same topic with a different behavior, because they did not have the practice.



Teacher should not be supposing what students can or not can do, just ask ourselves, do we practice this at class?

Now that I have been reading my international classmates comments about the rules, I realize how important these are. I have worked with blogs at my English class, fortunately I have never have any problem, the point is that I did not use to give them  rules, they are young adolescents ( teenagers from 15 to 18) years old, they  just follow my instructions, and they have been respectful, but know I can realize the importance of this issue, to teach them how to behave at the web, maybe they are going to be surprised but I am sure that this topic is going to be so helpful for their  near future.

Week 1 April 9-13

During this week I have been surfing on the course web, trying to find out the correct places for the wikis, creating my blog page, and checking everything, including reading the advices or recommendations from people that already took this course.


My reflection:

I have worked with blogs before. I consider them so useful, but I have never use them as a journal. I think that writing my reflections here is a kind of journal to share with everybody at the web. I use the blog with my students to communicate, to let them know about homework, about the entries for the journals that they have to write every week, about study guides for exams etc. Right now I think that is a good idea to use it as a reflecting journal, so we (teachers) can read what do they think, about what or how they are learning, and in that way they will not feel like they are going to be evaluated, it can be a useful tool for me to know how are they doing with the language.


Talking about this first week it surprised me the organization of this course. How technology can connect people from all around the world that have something in common, the same interest that is teaching. I consider now as an adult that work in this way is going to be a great experience full of knowledge, and this is something that we can generate or create between students around the world, those that are learning English as a second language, or that are interested in practice the language.