Didactic Use of Technology

This week  I am head over heels with technology no matter what anybody says .
My laptop went black last week and I thought I had lost everything , actually two technicians told me it was gone for good, I was in shock !!
Somehow someone I am happy to have in my life , did the impossible , he fixed it !! He recovered my information and backed it up, and believe me, I had a lot !
Although I had " my precious" back , not all was solved . As many of you, or maybe not, I have everything personalised and all my accounts are opened automatically : Facebook, Flickr, IGoogle, Netflix, hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail, Skype, LiveBinder,blogger,  my bank accounts, etc , I know, I know ...I need to know and remember my passwords, but I have so many, that I just allow my laptop to remember them for me, much easier , right ? So, I panicked !! but thanks God for the Internet , all those 500 bookmarks were recovered ( I rarely go back to them ) , my Igoogle account gave me access to my YouTube channel, to my Gmail, Google+, and to my Blog. The websites I DO use, were all in my LiveBinder, and the passwords for all my email accounts were recovered by only remembering one password.
I had to struggle to set all my system and my IGoogle and search in English ( my native tongue is Spanish ), but I finally managed to. Now , the order has been restored  !!
Considering all this, my job and my studies, I haven't been online much , yes guilty as charged ...now, sorry for the deviation.

Well, now focusing on the question of this week , I think that we talk a lot about technologies, we are plenty of tools and resources that we can categorised as Web 2.0, but we should focus more on the methodology ,how are we going to use them with a pedagogical objective. Somehow, just present the tools to our students is not enough, we need to instruct them of to use it and what for. 

I remember some Laboratory classes in which the teacher only uses the lab to keep the students entertained but no methodology or objective whatsoever ! 

Considering that my students are teachers to be, I think , and I am trying to answer the question now, that one of the best tools I can use with them is a blog/ Padlet. My students are fourth year students of English Pedagogy. I have been trying to develop critical thinking with them by using Ted Talks and workshops, then they  work and discuss in groups, analyse certain topics, they think globally, and then locally, share ideas ,they work cooperatively and at the same time, I have asked them to keep a Padlet with the topics seen in class.

Here is an example : 

Student Padlet Example

So, basically, in my case I would choose tools that promote creativity , evaluation,  creation, reflexion and autonomous learning. I have been using Padlet, as most of my students happen to be visual , but as you can see , they can add whatever content they feel like and in the way they want. Padlet is free and easy to use.

Padlet Tutorial YouTube

Learning Styles and Strategies ,What is your recipe ?

Yet another hectic week, so I'm late with my weekly blog .
This week topic is to reflect on what do we do in class to promote different learning styles and strategies.
We all know that none of our students learn the same way, they are all different , therefore teachers been aware of that very important fact should, at least , find out what kind of student they have, and how do they learn. Sometimes we tend to forget about them and think only on how do we teach, selecting what we like in order to teach, but the focus should be in the students . As I mentioned before, if we use the same strategy over and over again, I woudn´t be doing a good work.

What I do and seems to work  is selecting some resources trying to focus on different learning styles and then let them decide what suit them best . They seem to be more willing to work with a tool, website or resource when given the chance to decide for themselves and in that wayy they feel valued and confident.
The job of the teacher is nonetheless, to supervise and to monitor that the student's choice was appropriate.

Technologies are a great source to find a lot of information, resources and activities to complement student's learning process , it seems that we can find everything we need and everything we are looking for, if we are good at searching and selecting information. That is why we need to be careful when allowing our students to select themselves.