Final reflecction 2

The second part of the course was very interesting and useful too.

We learnt about other kind of tools to use in the classroom as teachers, like subtitling, for example, but lots of tools for the students to use like mysimpleshow.

I personally like editing videos, so all the tools related to that I thought were very good. I always use Windows movie maker to edit all my videos, but I recognize if takes quite a lot of time and you have to know a bit of the programme to use its full potential. That's why I found all those tools to edit videos very interesting. I didn't know that PowerPoint also allows you to cut videos; I thought you could only upload videos to the slides, so it was surprising for me that other option.

As I have already said, I have an interest in editing videos, so I was amazed with things like Dotsub for subtitling, as my previuos try to subtitling was just adding pieces of text to a video in Movie Maker that I had to give up because it was very difficult to add them in the correct time, and for the correct time. We experimented that subtitling is not easy, but with this tool, it is easier than the way I tried.

Another tool I knew about was Kahoot, which I think has become very popular, however, Quizizz, being similar I think it is better, because you have the possibily of assigning it for homework, which is a cool way of doing homework. Moreover, you can get the results your students had and keep records of their learning progress.

Excel is something I have used before, and I thought I knew quite a lot of things, but no, there were things I didn't know, like how to turn the cells o how to add a condition to the cells to know for example if a student has passed or not a subject.

I think using Excel to evaluate is very convenient. It is quite intuitive to use and it saves you from a lot of work, and time, with the calculator and a tedious task can be much quicker and easier with it, another tool I know I will continue using as a teacher too.

In general I think that in classrooms is not worked a lot, is pronunciation, sometimes it is worked just as a repetition of words, but with some online tools. We can make students to like more pronunciation if we approach them with activities where they have to record their voices and we tell them pronunciation is going to have an important weigh in their marks. To do this we have tools like podomatic or Skype that as strange it might seem, I had never used before we used it in the course.

Although we can also work with the voice and pronunciation with voice to text tools, I don't like them very much. With them I have problems even in my mother tongue, so I think it can mislead students to think their pronunciation is worse than it is.

Something that all of us liked a lot and probably students will like too was Voki, the idea of being another person, or having  a character that speaks for you it is very appealing, and at least I was attracted to that idea of having and avatar, the possibility of choosing the accent. This last thing can also help students to be aware of the different English accents around the world.

The thing that I have more doubts with is the wikis. I do understand how they work, but having tools like Drive, where a group of students can work exactly at the same time, I don't really see the point of using a wiki where you have to wait for your classmates to finish editing something so you can write on it too.

The most useful thing about this part was, as well as the first part that the tools presented have the possibility of using them in other contexts which is not the educational one, and also the most important one, the possibility of creating with all these tools several learning opportunities where the students can benefit from.