Monthly Archives: November 2013

Wow, I cannot believe the semester is coming to a close. It’s a great satisfaction to know that I made it to the end. This semester has been one of my busiest semester ever and I’m elated that I managed to keep up with my four classes in two different colleges, the MCC Soccer Club, Mi familia, the POT Program, etc. I feel accomplished today. 🙂

When assessing my contribution I felt like I could have done more, but overall I believe my contribution was satisfactory. My posts were insightful and I was able to communicate ideas that I believed were relevant to the assignment. I wished I had made more time to comment of other posts and giving more thoughtful insight. I attended all the workshops that POT offered this semester, which made it possible to meet Lisa and Laura and other professors. I was able to find very cool tools and resources that helped me grow, and it also helped me to re-ignite my passion for technology: Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever.

Finally, I am very happy for the opportunity to work with great professors that gave me feedback and new ideas. Thank you and I’ll see you next semester.

Week 1: A little about me
Week 2: Pedagogy and a bit more
Week 3: SLO and culture in my class
Week 4: Creating my course on BB
Week 5: Creating an interactive syllabus
Week 6: Fun activities
Week 7: Online vs F2F
Week 8: Creating community
Week 9: Skype and VoiceThread
Week 10: Create and share should be our motto
Week 11: It took me a while to complete but it was worth it
Week 12 🙂

It took longer that I expected to create and upload the video presentation to my blog, but it was all worth it. Please if there are any comments or suggestions, they are all welcomed. Thank you for watching.

http://youtu.be/brbyEdcCmZY

I really enjoyed Larry Lessig’s video. He argues that it is important to take content/music and create something new.  That is how we learn and create. An idea enables us to create a new one, enhance one, remix one or modify one. As an instructor, I want precisely that. I want my students to get my content, spread it and use it often. I want to spread my knowledge.

I also agree with Lessig when he states that no one should be able to take someone’s work, package it and sell it for profit. I am fairly aware of copyrighted material and I strongly encourage my student to be conscious about plagiarism and using content that does not belong to them. Copyright laws are in my opinion very vague and after reading chapter 8 I felt a bit more educated on the matter. As I get more into online teaching, I know more questions about copyright and intellectual property will arise.

Open Educational Resources (EOR) are great. I in fact have bookmarked and downloaded many free resources. I spent a great deal of time searching the vast amount of interesting resources for Spanish. Here are some links for Spanish resources: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=spanish and https://archive.org/search.php?query=spanish

Over all this week was extremely informative, and I am pleasantly surprise for the resources provided to us. For next week I am thinking of uploading a Slideshare. It will be a very interesting week as well.

This week we had to reflect on student activities. Fortunately, for language courses we have a great number of resources that we can provide to our students.

The downside of online language courses is the limited communicative experiences students could have.  The challenge for me is to find different activities to promote and encourage oral and written practice.

These are some potential activities:

1. Meet-ups with groups or with a partner to complete an oral activity or activities. In our reading, it mentions that working with large groups is not recommended. I also agree that large groups do not work. The students will keep a log to register their time and describe what they accomplished. The meet-ups can be via Skype, FaceTime, or other means arranged by the students.

2. An oral presentation. This activity will allow students to talk about themselves and by the same token learn about their fellow classmates.

3. Creating Discussion Boards, Journals or Blogs. I intent to create a Discussion Board for students to comment about their personal tips on studying, progress, struggles, etc.

4. Having a guest speaker sounds great. I can introduce a former student or Hispanic student and allow questions and answers.

I am sure that with some experience that the number of activities will grow and will become more efficient. If you have any ideas or activities that definitely work, please pass them along.