Week 6: Engaging Students

Look at this word cloud and try to guess what the topic of Week 6 was. :-)

This world cloud has been created based on the comments ten of us made in the discussion “Engaging students” on Nicenet.

One thing is for sure: the key word is STUDENTS and the most important message is that students are in the centre of our attention even if this course is about using technology in teaching. Modern technology is just a collection of tools that help us improve our students' knowledge. But very interesting and challenging tools. :-)

This week we looked at different ways how to engage students in large classes by using different technology aids including interactive PowerPoint.

I’ve been using PowerPoint for a long time and engaging students has always been important for me.

Last year I attended a course where I learnt how to use the interactive white board. Since then I have been using PP less frequently because the “Smart Notebook 11” program offers similar features and more. I have just heard about Microsoft Office Sway https://sway.com/ and I intend to get to know it as well. The point is that using technology really motivates and can engage students.

A couple of days ago I was shown a program called “Kahoot!” https://getkahoot.com/ that aroused my interest and I started experimenting with it. It has been great success among my students. I am mentioning it here because I’d like everybody visiting my blog to have a look at it and try it out. It’s wonderful for engaging students. My username on Kahoot! is Angolinda. You can find my “kahoots” if you want using the programs built-in searching engine. What I have created by this time are all about conditionals.

We have to modernize our methods that worked well in the past with newspaper-cut-outs, paper word cards, hand-outs etc.; and expand those with new ones that help us reach our goals.

This week’s topic are so attractive for me that it has been the first time when I’ve looked at ALL the work my course-mates created. I enjoyed the variety of ideas in the different PowerPoint presentations as well as the comments on Nicenet. Many of them gave me new ideas and I am very thankful for them.

 

I should have begun the actual work on my project. I am not saying I haven’t done anything yet but I’ll have to speed up putting my ideas into words and into practice. I have started collecting material for my planned “Improving Writing Skills Through the Interactive Web” workshop for my colleagues by asking some English teacher friends to fill in a questionnaire I prepared by using GoogleDocs. The outline of the workshop is initially taking shape in my mind but it is far from being the one I’d like to share with you now. 
Would you mind filling in my questionnaire? 
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1sMjq4vKIpALePVd8v5U3o16VZ_ll7V28_aO1tPYHp-A/viewform?c=0&w=1

Many thanks in advance.