Final Project

I used Google Form to create a “getting to know you” opportunity to collect contact information from students. I have taught a grammar concept called the direct object pronoun during my extended practicum, and the result was intriguing to me. It is not a difficult concept, and some students sailed through it while others did not seem to grasp the concept despite all the different modes of delivery and number of times we revisited the concept. I anticipate using WallWisher to build the foundation for students in understanding the different parts of speech that is involved in a sentence. First, the students will brainstorm as a class for a motley list of verbs and nouns they know of (except for proper nouns as they are too obvious to serve the subsequent purpose of the activity) Next, they will be asked to sort through stickies with nouns and verbs so they can look at a Spanish word and be able to tell whether it is a verb or not. Then I will further train them to identify the agent and the direct object with a sentence, through a podcast.

listen to ‘Spanish Podcast: Direct Object Pronoun’ on Audioboo

Day 9 Reading Brown (2011)

Brown, B. 2011. Powerpointlessness. Ben's Blog. Retrieved from http://bbrown-5.blogspot.ca/2011/03/powerpointlessness.html on 8 August 2012.

This article is quite spot on in derailing the easily achieved pitfall of using Powerpoint. I remember vividly a course we took in our present programme, in which the instructor would come in to class, encounter numerous setbacks in powering up her loaned laptop, and click through her loathsome Powerpoint presentation on the lesson's theme. She read through her Powerpoint, often muttering her surprises when a slide came up with texts scrawled down to all four corners of the screen. She would also read through the texts, and for three and a half hours, we were all bored to tears. Bored is not the right word - rather, we were uninspired, as we felt she was not inspired by her informative Powerpoint presentation. I am never one to "hide behind the Powerpoint", as my UBC Faculty Advisor coined the sad teaching strategy. I find that the article put this phenomenon to the front, and it is nice to know that we in that class had a voice on the Internet.

Image source: http://tricksforthetext.blogspot.ca/2009_11_01_archive.html

Inspiring teachers

Linking a list of ten Ted video published on its facebook page!