Week 6

This week's assignment was to read about "Using Technology in Teaching Large Classes" and "Best Practices with Interactive Power Point" .

I was impressed by the way teachers deliver lessons in large classes. In Azerbaijan teachers ususally teach the English language to 30-40 students in the primary school but starting from the 5th form classes are always divided into 2 groups which makes teaching much easier (but not easy at all!) since then we have groups of 12-13-18 students depending on the size of the whole class.
I liked the "Think-Pair-Share" approach very much and though Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw introduced it as the way to enhance lecture classes, I liked the approach and will use it in my lessons when possible, just to make a difference in the lesson procedure.

As for Power Point Presentation I find it very useful and can say that teachers in my country widely use this technique nowadays, but, the thing is,  not everybody knows how well to use it. I remember taking a seminar at the British Council on giving a Power Point  presentation and we were given  2 nearly  identical videos with the same presenter but with a different attitude towards the audience. I understood that using the PPT in the wrong way may bring to rather negative results than posititve. If the speaker delivers the lesson in the monotonous way, or if the speaker uses too many slides, or if the speaker doesn't interact with the audience then the advantages that PPT can bring to the students will be lost. I think using PPT the teacher not only delivers a lesson in a more interactive way but also develops in students a sense of presentation skills.

This week we had to implement the technology-related change in our classes. As my students need to develop listening and speaking skills I decided to start with introducing my 10 Grade students
http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/

Their first assignment was to listen to the video, take notes to be able to discuss the video in details.
http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/freetime/video-zone/lunar-new-year-celebrations-begin-china
I explained to the students that they would get such tasks regularly at the end of the week so that they had time to get prepared for Monday. This time I assigned the work in the middle of the week and the result was as I expected. Some of the students were not prepared explaining they didn't have internet access or the speed was slow and they couldn't watch the video. The majority of the class was able to watch the video and enjoyed the lesson very much as it was different from our usual textbook stories and grammar activities.
Though part of the students were not ready I enjoyed the lesson, too. The students were enthusiastic, willingly talked on the topic and at the end of the lesson they did all the post listening activites that the website provided.

I am happy to take this course as it provides me with interersting articles and webpages on how to improve my teaching style.