Week 7

This week I was exposed to two important instructional aspects:

1) Teaching large heterogeneous teaching.

2) How technology can improve instruction and student motivation.

I learned about interactive PowerPoints and Google Docs. I have never used Google Docs before. Now I can use it instead of geeting many emails or faxes!

I have one concern related to technology. Technology should viewed always as a tool and it should not control the teaching process. Teachers should apply backward design. This will keep the control in the hands of the teachers.

I believe that having computers in schools or homes where teachers/parents are not qualified to best use the technology can be disasterous in terms of academic outcome.
Technology can improve learning exponentially when teachers/parents know how to integrate it into the learning/teaching process.

Ahmad Amer

Week 6

Learning styles and Multiple Intelligences are of paramount importance for me as a teacher to keep in mind. Although I do not totally agree that different learners have different learning styles all the time in every topic in any subject matter.
What I mean is that although different learners have different learning styles, some topics need to be presented in a way that most learners benefit from. Namely, what determines the teaching style can be placed in two categories:
1) The different learning styles among learners
2) The characteristics of the topic being taught

My project details are as follows:

1) particular class to work with: 10 graders in Kafr Qasem high school - the school where I teach

2) an issue they have: writing. They face difficulties and mainly lack of motivation to write

3) a technology tool use to solve the issue: Class blog. I will give permissions to and only to the students in this class. I will give them simple writing tasks to motivate them to write. Now they have audience to read their inputs

I am very enthisiastic about my project and I am positive that my students will benefit from this experience both in terms of learning outcomes and motivation.

Ahmad Amer

Week 5

PBL and Webquest are great teaching methods that are based on task-based methodology. Task based teaching is very effective since it integrated the accuracy components (grammer, vocabulary, spelling, pronunciation) and the fluency componenets (reading, writing, speaking & listening). The accuracy componenents serve as means to an end, which is the fluency componenents.

I learned about the free sites that allow teachers to create webquests. It's great since I can integrate multi-sesory teaching with my students. Having youtubes link in webquest can enhance motivation and language learning in my context

Ahmad Amer

Week 4,

Although there are many ESL and EFL excellent sites, we often are not aware of their existence. We there are two many trees we do not see the forest (something close to the original idiom). The skill building sites are great to complement what we teach in the classroom. For many of my students, it's very motivating to learn together in the classroom and then learn individually on their computers at home.

One thing I need badly is a webpage where I can keep records of the students who come late. I teach the first lesson three times a week of a tenth grade and most of them come late. I would like a webpage where I and the students (and maybe their parents too) can keep track of how often each students come late.

Ahmad