Final reflecction 1

In this first part, we were presented with different tools to use online.

Some of them were familiar to me, for example, I already knew about Quizlet, because I used it as a student, so it was good to use it as a teacher, I mean to create the exercises myself, and see the possibilities it has, and not using it with the topic someone else created for their students to practise and learn.

Another tool I knew about was Blogger, as in other subjects we have worked with it, apart from a course I took several years ago where I learnt quite a lot of things about blogger and I started my own blog, although I stopped posting 3 years ago, due to the lack of readers and time to create content. However, I have used blogger lately but in the private version of it to share some content that I didn't want to be public to everyone, only to some people, as it was related to my job.

One of the most useful things of this first part of the course, as a student, was the use of Mendeley. Although some teachers mentioned it to us before, we had never had the opportunity to explore it and really discover how to use it and how useful it can be. It's a pity that I didn't know about it before as it could have been very helpful in some previous assigments from other subjects. Besides, something else I didn't know about was the creation of an index in Word, I always had problems with titles, subtitles, the number of the page they were in..., and it is that simple to create and update an index. Another thing that would have been very usefulful I was taught that some years ago.

Also I liked the presentations where our classmates presented alternatives for some tools, because like that, you are able to choose the one you think it is best. Our knowledge of different tools increased and our choice too. All of them were very good and have helped me to see the advantages and disadvantages without having to explore them myself, which saves a lot of time.

Hot Potatoes is another tool I'm sure I will use as a teacher. The kind of exercises you can make with this tool is varied, and it is quite easy to create the exercises, the problem cames when you have to share the exercises you make, or when you want to create a Match exercise with the pictures. But as we learnt it in the course, from now on I won't have any problem.

I think that all we have done in class was useful, but there were some things that I think are not worth to work in class, because we have been using them for a long time, like online dictionaries. For example, knowing about Merriam Webster, was good, as it is not as known  here as Oxford or Cambridge Dictionaries are, but I think there were other more important things to see or more time to experiment with other tools (for example the Interactive White Board), than them.

Nowadays all the classrooms in most of the schools have an IWB, so it's vital for us as future teachers to know how to use them. I consider we haven't spent a lot of time before the presentations with it, and that personally I didn't make the most of the possibilities it has. Although at least we could work with it,not like other classmates who didn't have the possibility of using it at university for the first time before we go to the "teaching" world.