Tech Log Week 7

This is a different week for me! I’m finally leaving to enjoy my well deserved HOLIDAYS!!!

However I’ll take everything with me to continue working! I have no idea what I’ll manage to do, but I’ll try hard not to fall behind in my work!

Weeks 6 and 7 (so far) have been mostly dedicated to creating my Project Plan. It’s giving me a great pleasure working on it and trying to picture it in my mind. But I confess it’s rather difficult to think about something that will only happen in a year’s time! I’ll be back in school only in September 2012 and so I have to write about something that is going to happen in a distant future. Portuguese schools are undergoing some major changes right now, and so I don’t know how things will be when I go back. Another problem I’m facing is that my Project is to be developed throughout the school year, and so, I’ll have to think about different strategies to use each term. This would take me at least a whole month to design, because I would have to plan my lessons for the whole year in advance. Of course this is impossible! I don’t have that time and I’m going to be on holidays the next 2 weeks. My family deserves having me around without the computer on all the time. :-) I’ll do my best to be as clear and detailed as possible, but some activities and strategies will only come to me when I go back to school.

This week’s topics are Learner Autonomy and the One-computer Classroom, something already discussed in previous weeks, although in relation to other topics. We have seen the importance of students’ autonomy and the strategies we may use to promote it. The novelty this week is the definition of autonomy. Yes, autonomy is important. Yes, it is our role, as teachers, to develop activities that make our students more and more autonomous. But what is autonomy after all? As Thanasoulas shows, the definition really depends on the theories you use to describe it. For me, the most important is to understand “that autonomy is not an article of faith, a product ready made for use or merely a personality quality or trait.” To achieve it certain conditions must be met: “cognitive and metacognitive strategies on the part of the learner, motivation, attitudes, and knowledge about language learning, i.e., a kind of metalanguage.” So, as we can easily understand, autonomy is something that we acquire and learn. It is a lifelong learning process that starts in the family (primary socialization) and never ends. Therefore I think teaching our students to be autonomous learners can be a very difficult task if we are swimming against the tide: other teachers, parents… They will be confused! However, we must never give up no matter how difficult things may be. We want our students to have their own opinions, to fight inequalities, to be active citizens and help change the world for the better.

About One-computer classrooms, well, I believe most strategies and activities we have seen and experimented so far can be used in classrooms where there is only the teacher’s computer. Even the Jeopardy games we created last week can be used as a whole class activity, having students use the classroom computer one at a time. I think teachers are well capable of dealing with this situation as this is probably everybody’s working environment, or was in the past. The most important here is to let your imagination fly! :-)

This week was also time to choose partners to work with in the next stages of our Project Plans. Hard choice, as I would love to work with everybody. It turns up I will work with Laura-Cristiana and Natalya. I’m looking forward to it! I’m sure we will learn a lot from each other!