Nt portfolio

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NEW TECHNOLOGIES 2014-15 ANA SATRUSTEGUI ARAMBILLET PUBLIC UNIVERSITY OF NAVARRE YEAR 2014

Transcript of Nt portfolio

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NEW TECHNOLOGIES 2014-15

Portfolio

ANA SATRUSTEGUI ARAMBILLET

PUBLIC UNIVERSITY OF NAVARREYEAR 2014

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WEEK 1 Page 3

WEEK 2 Page 5

WEEK 3 Page 7

WEEK 4 Page 9

RUBRIC Page 10

WEEK 5 Page 11

WEEK 6 Page 14

WEEK 7 Page 16

REPORT Page 18

CONCLUSION Page 21

INDEX

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The society has suffered a lot of changes in the last few years and these are affecting different aspects. As we know from our experience, Education is the base of human being, and as humans, we have the nature to remain contact with all that concerns our society and undoubtedly, our lives.

Of particular note, the traditional Knowledge era has turned up to the Technological, where we have predilection for technologies and they are gaining an important role in our routines. The proliferation of technological devices is the reason why students are designing “best-fit” solutions for their very specific needs when it comes to the Internet and other means of communication. Children are used to using computers, tablets, smart phones, managing with images and all sort of videos. Therefore, children are taking advantage of the benefits of tools and this is how they learn better.

In my childhood memories, I can barely remember how I managed with technologies. I can assure that when I was in primary education, we scarcely made use of a computer and teachers only taught us how to do easy activities followed up traditional approach. That is to say, it was based upon the principle of memorising all the content given and being able to show a good response of this learning. I strongly believe that being taught by this methodology made me avoid using new technologies on many occasions.

For this reason, I started this subject with poor knowledge of new technologies. During my degree I have only been taught how to use Power Point, Blogger and Microsoft tools. However, this time I was given the chance to change my mind with this subject and endeavour to enjoy and do my best to learn what I could not in the past. I want to be a teacher from this generation, I want to be up to date and be proud of myself.

Making use of technology for a constructive aim it enhances you to end with a great success in terms of developing student´s skills, raise their awareness, build up their competence, gain knowledge and make the most of learning in this technological time with its resources.

I have to mention that Digital Competence is one of the eight competences which every child has to develop at the end of their learning process and must be able to keep learning during their whole life. This competence enables one to take the advantage of the possibilities of digital technologies and new challenges, and it is necessary for this new technological era in which we are living.

Nowadays, we have to be up to date and try to be competent enough in the digital sphere. In the last few years, activities given to students were hardly

WEEK ONE

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poor and all was expected to learn of by heart without any other purpose. Somehow, this Digital Competence leads us to prepare better tasks for our pupils, to focus our effort on producing authentic activities with different goals.

Apart from this, I have never heard of the existence of a PLE (Personal Learning Environment). We are surrounded by a wide range of information provided from different sources; we must know where this information comes from and search for more. Every person should be aware of their PLE and try to broaden it.

In my view, I strongly believe that as a teacher, I will have to deal with digital resources and manage with the problems that I will liable to encounter. Teaching itself is not an easy job; it can be hard work as it should be linked to the real world outside school. Teachers need to be concerned of the forthcoming changes in the way of learning.

All in all, that is what I expect from this subject; to change the way I deal with technology, to make use of it successfully for my future as a teacher and to remain constant contact with it.

Nowadays, digital residents tend to use the web in many aspects of their lives. They develop an identity, participate in online culture, and view the web as a venue for conducting their social life. A Digital Resident is generally someone who spends a significant amount of time online using a

WEEK TWO

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wide range of programs either apps. What is more, daily life connects citizens with social media as part of their activities.

In contrast, digital visitors use the web as a tool for achieving specific goals as needs arise. They do not develop an online identity nor participate in online culture in the same way, or to the same extent, that digital residents do they just use it when necessary.

Never had I think of it before and I honestly think that we all need to be aware of the use we make of the internet because somehow, this is becoming part of our lives.

After coining these two terms and having learnt them, I am able to say that I consider myself a digital resident because I spend most of my time online whatsoever the reason is and wherever I go. The reason for this may be laid on the fact that I have plenty of digital devices such as computer, desktop, tablet and smart phone. Even more, I am hooked on these gadgets and they are my most time bandits taking up the most of my precious time.

Indeed, since I started at the university the web was the main source I had to communicate with my lecturers, classmates and be updated with all the assignments and news.

Apart from the general use of the internet, I have explored the role of English language in relation to social networking throughout. In general terms, it is important to know how people use English in their digital devices and how much time they spend on them to understand what type of user they are.

Nowadays, most of students spend around four hours per day on their laptops either their smart phones, so as me. This is to say, we all are becoming digital residents. When it comes to study English, students make use of their devices for educational purposes. Nevertheless, there are some who use them for gaming or even just for social aims.

From my experience, I must assure that I have always used internet for learning English. This provides an added value while learning. By saying so, I mean that I always make use of online dictionaries like Word reference. Furthermore, I discovered the brilliant English online Thesaurus, where you can expand your vocabulary.

It is undoubtedly the fact that being able to use digital devices properly can be an added value in the teaching practice. While writing in English, students can prepare themselves for real life because they will need to write online. We barely write in hand at the present time and starting to teach them how to do so would be a good training for future purposes.

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We are living in changing times and if we are going to be teachers, we should adapt to them. Our pupils are better prepared for this technological era than even us, and we permanently, should be updated and get trained on digital competence. Because of this reason, I would like to explore more about what kind of websites children tent to use for improving their English, what they find them engaging and what enjoy them most.

As regards teaching practise, I stick to what I have been mentioning before; it is not an easy job, it can be tough and it should be completely connected to real life. The way of learning has changed remarkably and so has done the way of teaching and designing tasks for our students.

WEEK THREE

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Over the last decades, tasks were rather traditional and monotonous. Students were only expected to learn a content remembering it by doing repetitive exercises on books. They had nothing but to give the proper answer according to the theory books.

There is the belief that creating tasks for students is not rocket science but it is further more than keep the learners focused on the work. Tasks should be thought to be authentic and meaningful. That is to say, they should provide students with an input and get an output.

Whether teachers want their students to build up their new knowledge on their own they should be aware of the importance of providing a meaningful task. Basically, these must be connected to their real world and be useful, for instance, they can create a food pyramid and explain the amount of food intake suggested in a day, they need to take into account the nutrients that this food has and what all this gives to our body.

By reading this example, one can create a picture in their mind about what actually an authentic task is. Well, it is something that asks a student to construct a substantial and tangible product that shows their understanding of concepts or skills and the ability to apply them. It is a way of applying things students learn on something new. Authentic tasks should be of students´ interests and it is really important to bear in mind that a task has to be meaningful, motivating a totally different.

There are plenty of tools you can use to create them, for instance, Hot Potatoes software. Never had I have the opportunity to introduce myself in such ant to be honest I felt really excited. Basically, this suite includes five applications; JCloze, JCross, JMatch, JMix and JQuiz. There is also a sixth one named The Masher that will compile all the Hot Potatoes exercises into one unit. This enables you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. I can highlight that this suite is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like.

Furthermore, dotsub is another way to provide authentic tasks. This is very good for creating and viewing subtitles for videos in multiple languages, transcription and video editing systems. It has a lot of positive points; it is funny, easy, free and nothing to download. Students can upload their videos, transcribe, caption and translate them. The amazing thing is that they could share them with the world.

As we are non-native English speakers I believe that most of us should ever use subtitles for a better listening understanding. I think that transcribing itself is a difficult task but our students will benefit from it. By transcribing, two languages skills are worked; listening comprehension either writing. To some extent, finding tools to create your own video transcription build up your self confidence in the target language.

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To sum up, I would like to explore more about this field for my own learning. I think that this is crucial for ear training and thus, for learning a second language. I came across that the act of transcription can strengthen your ear, and develop your listening skills but like anything else, practice makes perfect.

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As I have been referring to designing authentic tasks, it is vital to take into account that a task has to be different; you can adapt it for students depending on the topic and level, meaningful; they have to know that it has a purpose which is connected to real world and finally, it has to be motivating, that keeps them working and learning something of their interest.

For this subject, we had to do many authentic tasks and so I cannot forget about mentioning the Storyjumper website. I was very engaged when I created my own story, I enjoyed myself a lot and I went back to my childhood memories. When doing it, you have to think about what you want to tell through the story, where is the story taking place, and which characters are going to be the main or the secondary ones. It is also important to be careful with the language in terms of vocabulary and grammar aspects. This resource is perfectly thought for children to create their own short books. While making a story, pupils will need to cope with finding illustrations, dragging or dropping images onto the page. After all, I would strongly recommend its use as a fun school activity or for their leisure time as it is almost game-like. Children can get into creating virtual environments featuring the characters they have brought to life.

We also had to cover a task on WebQuest. Analyzing different websites it is a very good practise to find out which tools are more suitable than others and build up your personal criteria about them. We had to analyze Text 2 Mind Map and Stomboard tools. I do really like both but I personally think that Text 2 Mind Map is less complicated for my use and even for children´s. What is more, I tried to use this tool during my internship period for teaching ´healthy habits´ in the classroom and it ended up in a big success. 

Furthermore, these tasks could be used for both learning and assessing; as children learn through the activities they have to do and once they have finished they can be evaluated by both, teachers and classmates. The correct evaluation of tasks is as important as the task itself and that is the reason why we should be well prepared to evaluate properly. Whatever is not evaluated, it becomes overlooked; we should do both a continuous assessment and a final assessment, not just a final evaluation, as the development of our learners´ skills takes place along their individual learning process, where we can observe and take notes of the improvement they make.

WEEK FOUR

RUBRIC

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Since the first time I started Primary Education, most of the things I learnt were off by heart. Fortunately, I was able to concentrate enough to pass the exam successfully but not everyone has had the same experience. For this reason, I think that a good way to assess tasks could be through scoring rubrics. These are seen as evaluation´s guidance and as an opportunity to modify your assessment in case it does not work properly.  There are nothing but to descriptive scoring schemes that are developed by teachers to guide the analysis of the products of student´s efforts. The evaluation it has to be seen as an objective process and depending on the criteria followed, judgements related to tasks can vary considerably.

Students can benefit from this assessing tool in several ways, first of all, the rubric support the examination of the extent to which the specified criteria has been reached and it can provide feedback to students. This may help them to make some future improvements. By the way, they should be able to evaluate their own work as well, being critical with themselves and with their classmates. This is a collaborative learning when one learns from another.

I would like to learn more about creating rubrics because I will use it in my future as a teacher. Rubrics are more specific, you can just focus on your assessment in terms of what you what them to learn. This leads me to ask myself this question; what is the purpose of education? Is it to teach people to know a lot or to create individuals to be able to do things?

All in all, I personally believe that teaching is all about enable pupils to do different things and be aware of their own skills. Hence, is very difficult to evaluate how well somebody does something, for this reason we need to put a big effort into that. Indeed, we have to provide students with a better understanding and they must know what is expected from them, this would lead us to make the most of their learning.

WEEK FIVE

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At present, interactive boards are flourishing education technology more and more. They are new and have a very good response in students. Being a mere combination of the simplicity of a whiteboard and the power of a computer is what makes the lessons dynamic changing either teacher´s or students´ motivation significantly.

Whiteboards have many benefits for the teaching practice; they are very fflexible and versatile, teachers deliver the content in the lessons with the support of a wide range of resources and visual materials, such as pictures, texts files and videos whatsoever is the topic and subject. Furthermore, teachers and students can easily manipulate it and they also are beneficial for lower ability groups and children with special needs. In general terms, teachers can adapt the content when necessary.

Nonetheless to say, time is gold when it comes to teaching, for this reason making use of interactive boards enhance teacher’s time management allowing them to organize the class better, to differentiate their instruction easier and work quicker with writing in digital ink and save the work done. In this case, students try to write accurately improving your handwriting. Apart from this, there is a corrective tool which corrects mistakes if made. With a simple touch of a finger you can do it all. This is very useful when you want to go back to any work done to review or use it in another class. Thus, the teaching process gets faster, in other words, is time saving is not time consuming

As a matter of fact, this tool provides an added value for teacher´s creativity and practise. It helps one to broaden their imagination having no limitations to create new interactive activities; they can listen to songs, watch videos, play online, use a software such a group quest, use blogger or else develop collaborative work tasks. All this helps students to understand the content better and integrate it making the most of this technological enhancement.

Talking of collaborative work, it is important to mention that whiteboards are very advantageous. Students can work in big groups participating in several discussions and working collaboratively around a task. As they are touching sensitive, it affects them to learn positively and there are more `hands-on´ opportunities.

Both students and teachers have changed their roles in the past few years. Now are the youngsters who own their learning process and the elderly who serve as guidance during it (not being the authority as it used to be decades ago).

However, there are downsides which call for need in this subject. Firstly, there is the need for adequate training, teachers are not well-prepared for them and they encounter some technical and practical problems that prove this lack of training. Secondly, you may happen to find visual problems that are compounded by the inappropriate color and technical difficulties. Thirdly, apart from being a must-have item in the school, they are quite

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expensive devices and not all of them can afford it. Lastly, it is remarkable the fact that once students have got used to it the motivation may decrease.

Many activities can be done through a whiteboard, getting to know all the possibilities it has just by touching the surface. Here are some examples of the activities that you can carry out with the whiteboard. These were created by my group and me and presented to the class.

1. Multiple choice activity to get the definition of exercise

2. Matching activity to learn the benefits of doing exercise

3. Filling the gaps on aerobic activity

4. Crossword on words related to exercise

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5. Develop a mindmap on ´exercise´ giving oral instructions about number of branches, colors, thickness and thinness

On the whole, interactive white boards lead more teacher-student interaction providing with a visual learning, there is more student participation and can conclude with teachers´ time bandits.

The wiki is a very practical tool for teaching, as it enables teachers to develop many tasks with students with the aim of enhance their learning process and learn from others.

At present times, we all are aware of the importance of new technology is having in children’s lives. We are living in changing times and we must be up to date in terms of technologies. New resources and tools are emerging considerably and the School cannot leave it back. Teachers are the ones who need to bring these latest breakthroughs into the classroom otherwise pupils wont totally live in a real life situation and learn in a real life context.

In this case, the wiki is one example from a million. It can be easily used by students who may well be at home, in the school or in the library. What I mean by this is that you can work through it wherever you are and whenever you wish as a long as you have internet connection. Due to this fact, students can continue working on a task that has been sent for homework and the teacher can see how well they are getting on with from different places, even make appropriate corrections.

As teachers, when it comes to starting working with the wiki there are some aspects that we have to bear in mind beforehand. First of all, we need to know our mind and make it clear what we want our students to do with this tool and for what purpose. It is essential to set the rules and give further explanations on how they can succeed working with it. Hence, we need to

WEEK SIX

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spare some time to let them experiment and familiarize with the new tool and make discoveries. Then, some questions would arise and this is the time to help them.

In fact, more than anything it is important to be well-trained in the use of the wiki. If you do not get to know it properly, you can barely teach how to use it.

From my experience as student and as a future teacher, I can assure that there are lots of tasks to be developed on the wiki. Pupils are capable enough to carry out with them but as I said, a clear instruction on the activity is totally required. First of all, it is important to take into account that a wiki is a collaborative tool, and this makes our learners learn to work in group, in a cooperative way and have social values: respect towards the others’ opinions, for instance. This is the reason why creating collaborative stories or investigating about a certain topic can be appropriate tasks to do with our students.

Indeed, as practise makes perfect, working on a story collaboratively is a very good starting. It consists of writing a story among the members of your teamwork, the teacher also can take part in. This exercise helps them develop not only their language skills (reading and writing), but also their creativity. Moreover, this activity can be targeted at any age, even if level and accuracy are considered. For instance, we did one in groups but we were given the first and the list lines set by the teacher. The rest of the content was entirely up to us.

We also created more activities such as a recipe that they have to work on the ingredients needed to make pancakes and measurements; write a postcard from a summer camp to their parents; enjoy a text and answer the questions and finally, make a list of the things they need to go on a camping excursion.

On a personal note, not only is the wiki a collaborative tool but it also gives us the chance to add exercises to be done individually, for instance, we could create a section nothing but to reinforce learners process by setting activities for their practise. This would help those students who might be encountering some difficulties as they would take their time to do the exercises and would improve step by step on their learning process. Those learners, who, on the contrary, are brilliant, would be able to do more challenging and difficult tasks that we could add for them to cover.

Apart from this, I realized about the importance of paying attention to tasks that can enhance pupil´s pronunciation. For this reason, podcasting is a good method to work on this. It uses visual displays which can help you to show specific sounds and the patterns of prosody and automated speech recognition (ASR) tools, are very useful because they show your sounds comparing them with native speaker sounds.

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Podcasting gives plenty opportunities to create and publish for a real audience, learners can receive feedback from other partners and from their teacher and they can also listen to their voices several times, find out and correct their mistakes. This new methodology is getting into schools either universities which are becoming a way of improving listening skills and pronunciation.

During my internship period I discovered that more pronunciation classroom practice is required and that is why I think that podcasting must be used in class in order to provide feedback to the pupils. It would also be required working with phonetics and training on specific sounds.

In conclusion, I believe that the impact of podcasting and its benefits for improving pronunciation will be worth investigation and discuss deeply.

As I have been mentioning before, podcasting has many educational benefits. One of the main ones is that this medium encourages teachers and learners to work together to accomplish the task of creating a podcast. Teamwork is essential in the real world today and by learning to work together as a team from an early age will be a great advantage.

Podcasting also helps to engage our children in active learning. Learners can actually be involved in creating podcasts either way can create a fun learning environment. It seems that they can learn more when they have fun while learning. Another important benefit to using podcasting in education is that children can enhance their creative skills, even more; it is also a good tool to help to develop children's critical analysis and reflection skills. With podcasts you can have the children interact; include sound effects or music to help enhance the learning experience.

For this practice, podomatic is a very good tool to search, create and share podcasts on a variety of different subjects. We made a task to be developed in podomatic, this is really motivating. You can describe the task itself, make any comments, record yourself and share it with a real audience. I designed one aimed at second course of Primary and it is about learning the process of the wool through a song that I made up. Students need to listen to the song first, write the lyrics and record themselves when singing.

As the current generation of young children is growing up in a digital environment they are expose to a variety of technologies, that is to say, today they have many opportunities. One of these is clearly podcasting but it is also the electronic book (e-book). It has the advantages of a printed book with the capabilities of computer technology.

The electronic books can be suitable for learners who are reluctant to reading books in a traditional way. It has also been proved that they help to

WEEK SEVEN

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promote different emergent literacy skills. In contrast, some may have a more critical view on e-books due to their incorporation of features like animation, sound, music and other multimedia effects, which may be a mere distraction from the reading content and story understanding.

In my internship period I discovered that e-books are used for learning to read by beginners and with reading difficulties. A good website to work on this is Oxfordowl, there are a lot of stories for all tastes. They provide students with a motivating reading and they are hooked on the story from the very beginning.

Another benefit of this digital generation is the social learning platforms; edmodo is an example of this. It is a website for teachers, students, and parents in a safe and controlled environment appropriate for school.

This is very useful for online classroom discussion because teachers can invite students into private groups. Moreover, it is really easy to work and parents are allowed to monitor their activity. This platform is meant as a secure offline classroom that intruders cannot access. For example, students can post messages to the group or the teacher, and group ones can be moderated by the teacher.

As teachers I think that we could use edmodo in our classroom because it is focused on learning. Thus, it has several practical advantages; we can build online learning conversations with the whole class about a specific subject, place digital resources for students to access or download, write summaries of lessons or information for those in their absence, post homework and create polls to know students ‘opinions.

In addition, there are some platforms such surveymonkey where you can create surveys safely. Letting your students speak up they can tell you what they actually think without being under any pressure. Questions can vary depending on the subject or topic, learners are engaged and parents can be involved in. Likewise teachers know their honest opinions; they can make some improvements in their methodology, aiming it at student´s necessities, interests and difficulties.

In other respects, Microsoft excel offers a lot of benefits with its functions, formulas, graphs or charts and tables. Excel worksheets are of a great help for teaching practice. In the process of teaching and learning, both teachers and students find it easier to make use of these. The activities, such as, preparing lesson plans, assessment papers, creating graphs or tables and many more can be carried out effectively and efficiently by using excel spreadsheets.

As regards teaching English, excel is a great tool. The rows and columns of its worksheets are well suited for providing various examples in relation to different grammar structures. The spreadsheets can be used for creating

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sample sentences and linking with other sheets. While giving lessons on vocabulary and explaining different forms of words, teacher can make use of worksheet columns. In general terms, excel is more used for assessment papers to score activities done in class and to get final marks of the whole term.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CLASSROOM

The proliferation of technology and social media has changed the way educators teach, how the content is transferred, how students learn, and the way teachers and students communicate with one another. The aim of this report is to discover how technology is shaping primary school and classrooms around the Saint Mary the Real School, Navarre.

In such, teachers are absolutely concerned of the importance of the use of Technology as a support and somehow, this is the key of success in getting pupils involved in their own learning. Its suitability for children at any age makes it more and more demanding to the extent that activities are thought to be carried upon a technological support.

During my internship project I conducted a research on how new technologies had been implemented in the school classroom. The school has 24 classrooms with interactive boards integrated, 4 ICT rooms, 16 classrooms with projectors and a good WI-FI network all over the school.

I slightly observed my tutor when giving the lessons. He made use of the whiteboard most of the time. This is the main resource in Primary classrooms. By making use of this interactive support, pupils can complete activities created in Microsoft Word because the whiteboard has several options of writing and highlighting in colors, changing the thickness of the pencil and sliding words or sentences. Besides, it allows you to draw, coloring, erase and shape in different sizes. Indeed, when you finish your work, you can save it in your desktop or else, USB.

This interactive whiteboard is also used for the creation of mindmaps. In Science, he worked through the content by developing mindmaps on the topic. This mind map sets different branches depending on what is concerned to study. According to the importance given, these go from the thickest to the thinnest ones.

At present time, youtube is gaining importance in the English classroom. The teacher used this for a listening purpose. English songs with its lyrics are played in a daily basis and students are encouraged to sing them aloud. On the other hand, when it comes to Science, all the videos were related to

REPORT

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the topic. Those, played on many occasions such as ´The process of getting the wool´, ´The process of planting a seed´; Once Upon a Time ones on ´ The digestion´ and ´The muscles´ in order to develop the units further. This fact is making the learning process more and more engaging.

English as a subject itself is developed throughout different routines. For this reason, they make a dairy daily with the parts of the class which are repeated every day. My tutor used Microsoft power point to show the different tasks for a day. He has also used this for telling a story, reading aloud or explaining grammar contents such the present simple.

However, what came as a surprise to me is the fact that he used a website for reading resources. Such is entitled Oxfordowl, it has plenty of electronic books aimed at primary students, with listening tracks and full of implausible pictures. This is great for those who present difficulties on reading and for a better understanding.

Apart from the use of these resources in class, my tutor made use of prezzi for an educational purpose. He is very keen on developing Science topics through this technological tool and he uploads them all to give some guidance for those who find it necessary.

In the assessment period, he used Microsoft Excel to reflect pupils´ marks on and different objectives achieved. Teachers also have a school platform where they can upload the assessment, they can email parents to arrange a meeting or inform them, and they receive emails into their inbox from the school principal. In other words, they are updated thank to this platform called PSP.

In my tutor´s personal work time, he used to download different songs from YouTube and look for recreational activities by using Google Search. The projects he created by Microsoft Word where mainly booklets, cards, and information charts.

As I have experienced, new technologies are chiefly used for a teaching purpose but in contrast, my tutor employs Microsoft Excel for organizational purposes. He created many tables to assemble the class in groups for a class activity purpose. They were divided into six groups with five members in each. She used colors for the groups and a different table for assigning the role of the person in the working groups.

Regarding non-teaching purposes, he uses his Smartphone to take pictures of the work done in class and store them for showing them all in the forthcoming interviews with parents. Furthermore, he takes notes about odd facts and meaningful things.

To meet the needs of her students I suggest making some improvements in the lesson planning. More technologies could be used, for instance platforms such as edmodo, blogger, dotsub or skype. By creating a class blog and using dotsub video editing program, I would upload lectures to the blog and

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assigned them as homework. The dynamic of the class should be reversed by adding new technologies. Instead of lecturing in class, and do it traditionally, I could teach them easily from their homes, and even more, problems would be sort out together either in the classroom or commenting on the blog. If we make these improvements we will be gaining a lively, engaging and motivating classroom when discussion and communications will be implemented.

On the training side, teachers should take up a course to learn more about new technologies, because many of the teachers have poor knowledge on using the interactive whiteboard and they do not make the most of it. Likewise, some new technologies could be integrated for both teaching kids and for the teachers’ use.

Talking of my experience, when I entered a classroom for the first time I had no idea of how an interactive board worked. Then I was given the chance to use it and It was undoubtedly one of the things I learnt most. I could also create power point presentations, I recorded myself singing a son and played in the classroom for a teaching purpose, I started learning how to use prezzi and I felt quite confidence with technology and with students response.

In conclusion, I think that in present, when it comes to using new technologies students are more productive than they were in the last few years due to the reliance on technology in the classroom and teacher´s positive attitude towards this subject. Indeed, as a teacher, we need to raise the sense of curiosity and give children the best chance to their lives in this technological era.

CONCLUSION

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[NEW TECHNOLOGIES 2014-15 ] ANA SATRUSTEGUI

The first time I entered the class I had poor motivation. The lack of knowledge on this field drove me to be demotivated. When the days went by, I started having a positive attitude towards this subject when I proved myself that I could be good at it. I knew that it was not going to be a golden road but I decided to stick to my guns and give it a go.

This subject made me walk through the steps of learning how to use different programs either tools that I will use in my future as a teacher. I would really like to highlight the ones that I enjoyed more; podomatic helps students to improve their pronunciation and listening skills; interactive whiteboard is the best tool to deliver a lesson having fun at the same time; story jumper is for learners a good experience to create stories supporting by images and texts and blogger is a great tool to share their knowledge and children´s own work.

I have to thank this subject for the relevant things I have learnt not only on the technological use but also on a personal level. Before taking this subject I felt like a fish out o water when developing a task using technologies. After being working through many resources given, I feel very proud of my own work. Needless to say, I built up my confidence to start working with technology and henceforth, I can be in constant contact with it.

As we might know, society is in a developing situation and this is highly noticeable in the classroom environment because technologies are becoming essential in children´s lives. School is given a wide range of possibilities to adapt to any changes and addresses the limitations that may appear in their learning process.

Teaching has an important role in our society, it is a vocational job and not easy at all. Taking advantage of technology is very useful to deal with difficulties in the classroom but you should also be competent enough to develop authentic tasks for a better learning. Knowledge is more than facts and figures, new technology can transform it into opportunities but there is the need to empowering teachers as the only path to come this true.

All things considered, along the course of this subject I have learnt that no matter how much you know about something, there is always room to grow, but you have to learn something; never limit yourself.