Some Notes in My Paper Teaching Notebook

 Preplanning the lesson helps us minimize many unexpected troubles. 

Using too much material to save time is likely to make you talk too much and center the teaching and explain for long, instead of involving the students in the TBI, or bring them progressively discover things by themselves depending of the type of lesson.Also, I consider very important to check the level of difficulty of each activity we will carry out as well as the level of the English required on the part of the students to carry it out as this may be the cause why the momentum is lost.

Reflecting on a lesson is relevant. Richards (2011) says that "reviewing your lesson and reflecting on it can help you build some constructive guidelines to trigger a better understanding of what worked well and why, or to prompt you to rethink a teaching strategy if aspects of the lesson did not turn out as well as you expected".

The teacher must be varied in his teaching, using as varied activities as he can

it is important that teachers understand a student's strong and weak points in each multiple intelligence. It is also important for the teachers to address student's multiple intelligences and learning styles in the classroom in order to provide activities to facilitate learning.

Padlet, Google Docs, or Nicenet should be prepared. using online tools which could be http://piktochart.com/ , http://www.easel.ly/ or https://www.canva.com/, it would make an infographic project enjoyable and convenient for the students to create one of their own and publish online. 

In a project the students work in groups so they can share the work taking their learning styles into account. In a well-structured project there is a wide variety of different tasks.

ANVILL.

ANVILL (A National Virtual Language Lab) is a speech-based toolbox for language teachers. With the help of it students might leave oral messages. If I understand it well, the teachers may offer the chance for the students to decide whether they would like to write down their answers or record their voice.

After studying some articles of this week (e.g. Learning and Teaching styles in foreign language and second language, learning and teaching styles in college science education written by Richard M. Felder and learning styles and strategies by Richard M. Felder and Barbara A. Soloman) we are enriched with the concepts of learning styles and strategies. Here we get the ideas of sensing and intuitive learners, visual and verbal learners, active and reflective learners, sequential and global learners and inductive and deductive learners.

Different learners have different learning styles. Again different teachers have different teaching styles.I think in cooperating these two is the best style for learning/teaching. In the article "Student learning styles and their implications for teaching" Susan M. Montgomery and Linda N. Groat teachers should incorporate their teaching styles with learning styles. In this regard they mention four models (i) Myers-Briggs Type indicator (ii) Kolbe/McCarthy Learning Cycle (iii) Felder-Silverman Learning style model (iv) Grasha- Richmann Learning Styles. Among them I prefer Grasha- Richmann Learning Styles because it is based on students' responses to actual classroom activities rather than on a more general assessment of personality or cognitive trait.

To me depending on the characteristics of learners and topic of teaching in a classroom using technology can play vital role to prompt learning. I can use blog, nicenet, webquest, padlet , QuickTime Karaoke in my class. Moreover, power point and audio-visual presentation of the topic can facilitate learning.

According to Patricia Greenfield, a developmental psychologist who runs UCLA's Children's Digital Media Center, every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others. Our growing use of screen-based media, she said, has strengthened visual-spatial intelligence, which can strengthen the ability to do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of rapidly changing signals. However, that has been accompanied by "new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes', including "abstract vocabulary mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem-solving, critical thinking and imagination.(the abstract is taken from the text "Is Internet making us stupid? Preparation for CAE exam).

If we take into consideration Patricia Greenfield's research findings we should concentrate on weaknesses and try to eliminate them with the help of technology. One of the students weaknesses is reflection – so we can ask our students / pupils to create Reflective Blogs after being introduced to some Web 2.0 tool. It will certainly foster the development of their cognitive skills.

Provide several tools for pupils to enhance their abstract vocabulary skills. One of them is Wordle – a free Web application that allows creating a word cloud based on the frequency of words on a particular text.

A teacher may start a lesson with a cloud already created before the lesson. Students will guess what the new topic of the lesson is going to be about.