Week 5

A half way home

The 5th week's reading assignments have given me a clear picture of the implementation of a Project-Based Learning in EFLsettings. To implement PBL in the classroom, it requires a careful step-by-step collaboration between a teacher and students. I think that when involving students in a learning process, we as a teacher have to work so hard to handle and manage things well enough. In practice, it is possible that we cannot make every single student satisfied, so it may be alright to just look for better, not the best. To successfully implement PBL, it also means that our students have to prepare themselves to be active learners. They need to stand up to express themselves and share their voice. However, many Thai EFL students are dependent learners and they rarely express themselves confidently in the classroom. That's going to be my job to tackle this problem finding a way to encourage them to participate more in PBL classroom.

Besides, to make students participate more in classroom, the role of authentic assessment or alternative assessment is important. By focusing on students' performance, it gives students more opportunities to gradually develop themselves along the way to the learning destination. A rubric is therefore needed to help guide the students to self-check whether they are moving to the right way to the expected learning outcomes. There are many tools online to help teachers create a rubric. Many rubrics shared make it easier teachers to choose and make use of ones they are interested in. Honestly, I would like to thank all teachers and educators who have shared their experiences and provided many useful materials, instruction ideas and the things relevant to English language education, including rubrics online. They are all useful and helpful.

About a technology-related solution that I am going to implement to help my students increase their reading skill, I have decided to use "infographics" to be as a learning tool to extend my students' reading experience and ability. Apart from improving my students' English skill, I have my own expectation to make my students have some content knowledge so that they can catch up with what is going on outside of the classroom wall. An infographic presents contents in an attractive way and can surely attract my students's attention. They then will be motivated to read and learn in an enjoyable way. However, I expect them to be able to share thier knowledge by creating infographic as a way to check their understanding towards what they have read, too. It's going to be a right tool for my students, I hope.

Now, I'm learning how to creat an infographic using www.canva.com, though I find http://piktochart.com/ and http://www.easel.ly/ more user-friendly. Well, I've chosen 'canva' because it is more challenging. Anyway, I may change my idea -- I am not sure. Just give myself a trial and error.

Ta, Thailand