In terms of lesson planning, I wanted to know how to teach a foreign language through a project-based methodology, and also how to respond to individuals learners’ learning styles by creating adapted and motivating activities. In this way, the bus metaphor has helped me to bear in mind all the aspects that I should take into account when planning a didactic sequence. Plus, discovering the different learning styles and thinking of suitable activities has opened my mind and has made me think about the different kinds of activities that exist and that I must plan to attend diversity. I have also realised that scaffolding the activities is more complicated than I expected. Before starting the course, I thought that children do not need much scaffolding because they need to build knowledge by themselves without too many models and guidelines. However, I have seen that this is impossible, at least when learning a foreign language. Students need clear guidelines to carry out the activities, and I think I still need to master how to do it because I think it is difficult to find the balance between guidance and autonomy, and also I find it hard to decide which is the best way to make guidelines.

 

When it comes to integrate technologies into teaching, I wanted to learn how to organise integrative interaction in order for students to engage with 'distanced partners' in collaborative problem and project-based learning. Telecollaboration has helped me understand which way I could achieve this previous purposes, and technology showcases helped me find lots of resources to integrate not only in the English lesson, but in any other. However, I still cannot see 100% clearly to apply this kind of projects if the availability of technology is not appropriate. Although I have learnt that it is essential to have a plan B, I would like to see these kind of projects in a real school. I think it might help me to trully learn how to deal with technical problems and a lack of technology, and see whether is possible to carry out a project of this kind. Maybe applying our TEPBLL projects can be worht it so as to check it!
Nevertheless, I think that finding real communicative situations to practice English is difficult, and precisely telecollaboration gives us an interesting approach to do it. The collaboration part is what I still need to learn more in deep, because I know the features of collaborative learning and its differences in contrast to group work, but I think I need more experience to put it into practice and promote real collaboration.

 

Focusing on assessment, my idea was to learn how to create a constructive feedback so that learners could really learn from their mistakes and improve; and also how to support language learning processes (spoken and written) and communication. I have realised that formative assessment is needed to successfully develop the learning process. For instance, peer assessment, self-assessment and teacher assessment are all interesting ways to achieve the objective, and are enriching ways to improve. To co-assess or self-assess makes you aware of what you know and what you still need to learn. And also, you need a guide (mentor, teacher) to supervise all the process. But then, it always needs to be time to make changes to your work taking into account all the advices given. In my personal experience, I learned a lot while trying to comment on projects from other groups, regarding their strong and weak points, because I could better understand who to apply the theoretical concepts studied. However, I still need to reflect on how to better assess the students, specially in oral skills, because I think it is quite complex.

 

Finally, regarding the fourth group of competences which refer to the supporting role of the teacher, I selected two competences related to self-evaluation as teachers to improve our practice. Through this course, I can say I have learnt to accept feedback from my classmates and this will help me for the future when trying to reflect on my teaching practice. I would also have needed results and feedback from children once applied, but at least I have been able to reflect on my plannings thanks to the comments from peer-assesments and also because I now have a more solid criterion. Once again, the TEPBLL final project has been a good oportunity to do so.

 

All in all, I can say that this experience has been a great challenge. It was really stressing (flipped tasks, peer assessments, etc) but at the same time it was enriching. I trully felt that I was able to learn interesting concepts and aspects which I will use in my profession for sure. If I needed to say just two things about this course, I would take the huge amount of possibilities that technology offers such as the resources learnt in the technology showcases. Besides, also the approach to language learning that prioritizes communication as the main objective of language, which implies that the language teaching needs to change its traditional academic way to a more practical one.

 

Nevertheless, as we all know, learning is never ending: it is life-long. Thus, although I have already finished the course and learnt a lot, I still need to learn more things but this time it might be inside a classroom! 

Keep on learning!

Diana