Reflection Weeks 01 & 02

Audio and Video 

Regarding audio and video making/editing, I believe they can make great tools for helping teachers create their own educational material. However, we need to be aware of how time-consuming they could be. In this frame, I believe that a team should be made up to join efforts and come up with relevant, well-elaborated and significant educational material. What is your opinion on whether or not teachers should be the ones creating their own videos?

Screencasting

I find screencasting really helpful as I can make either knowledge clips or tutorials to assist my students on line. Nowadays, MOODLE has been implemented at the University of Cuenca to support language learning, concretely English, and I foresee great benefits in using screencasting as I have the need to accompany my course contents with both knowledge clips and tutorials for either instructions or creation of projects/assignments. I will soon start creating some demo ones to try them out once I start teaching again in December.

Do you know what screencasting is?

Have you experienced it?

What else do you think screencating can be used for?

Online resources/Videoconferencing

Nowadays, there are plenty of educational resources out there in the web; however, we could easily spend months trying them all out. I would like to ask both my fellow colleagues and classmates to start commenting on the resources you have used so far and why you have used them. If further drawbacks are to be mentioned regarding one of them, please do not hesitate. Possible categories could be: online platforms, websites, and applications. Please pick a category, add the link to the site, mention what skills can be developed, list your resource and briefly explain why you believe it is useful. For instance

Website: Storybird https://storybird.com/ EFL classes (English as a Foreing/second language) for developing writing and reading. This website offers the possibility to create stories. Teachers and students can create their own stories by means of text and pictures to build up on both the writing and reading skills at different levels.

Educational Technology

Globalization has managed to take over every single field and education is not the exception. Nowadays, different types of technology are being used around the world to help students learn. However, there are still questions that need to be cleared up, for instance what does technology integration imply? What are the most suitable technological resources to be used? Are these resources available or not? How do we (teachers) create virtual environments? To what extent can blended learning (b-learning, e-learning) help students develop different skills?

These are the questions that I am looking forward to answering with your support. Pick one question and post a comment on it. I will be, at the end of each week, collecting and summarizing your responses. Hopefully, we will build up on the scarce knowledge on this topic towards improving the learning process of our students at our institutions…