Universities Research English Courses

The first course that I picked is this: The arts past and present.

This English course is based on the arts throughout history including paintings, history and BOOKS.

http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/aa100.htm

The second course is about science fiction literature.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-003-reading-fiction-fall-2008/

the third course is about technology for professional writers, I choice this one because I think that it is important for writers to evolve and learnt o use technology to write.

http://ocw.usu.edu/English/Technology_for_Professional_Writers/index.html

Open mind article New York Times

Reading this text in the New York Times., I was wondering if education should be free or not. The discussion about this issue has been for a long time but many people want to learn and as the world works around money, the more people interested in something the more money you will get.

This is the awful truth about the world, there are many things that are consider being free, moreover as the world is getting more and more capitalist everything is starting to be around money. In the text the studies, classes and worksheets were given by free. These kinds of things are against many capitalist ideologies of some universities.

In other words, this time, this moment of humanity is a time of knowledge. More and more people want to know about everything and as knowledge is power. I believe that in time this system of paying for learning will eventually fail but until then knowledge is still a privilege that not everyone is able to get.

Rubric for the technology presentacion activity.

As we present a way to use YouTube, and how to download a video using a web page. We develop this small rubric to evaluate the development of that activity.

Class Research Observation Form

1. Research topic:

· Student motivation and engagement

2. Field Notes:

Wednesday, April 6^th

First video number 1:

• student do not look really motivated
• Students do not speak at all
• Students begin slowly to talk among them about the pictures
• Teacher try to keep everyone in silence
• Teacher try to motivated students but they do not answer
• Teacher finally say that they should raise their hand to talk
• Students do not feel confident to talk
• One student was motive to talk by the teacher
• A girl talk shyly but nobody else wants to talk
• A lot of noise is among the students but no one want to talk
• One by one are starting to participate in the activity
• The teacher comes to a student to motivated him to talk
• Another teachers suggest not to do anything else but participate
• Teacher call the attention of one student
• Some students participate because they want, but others give their opinion because the teachers call them to talk
• Students start easily to make some noise
• Teachers handle very well the noise in the classroom
• The activity call student’s attention even though they are not fully concentrate
• Students participate but mostly when teachers call their name

Monday, April 11^th

Second video number 5:

• Students stand up
• Teacher call to silence to talk
• Teacher explain the activity
• Teacher asks one student who is in the back of the class to participate
• The student in the back says that she does not want to participate
• The teacher does not pay much attention to her motivation
• Teacher gives the instruction to the activity
• Students start to see who are they going to work with
• The student in the back continues just watching
• Teacher tells the students t be with the partner
• The student in the back participate because one teacher asked her to do it
• Two teachers show the rest of the class what kind of activity this is
• One student is laughing all the time about the activity
• All the students answer “yes” if they understood the activity
• All the students participate laughing
• All the students participate with big smiles
• Teacher tell another student to be the judge
• Teacher tells another student to say the rules
• Students laugh and participate

4. Analysis:

To begin with the focus of this analysis is the students’ motivation and engagement. In this two classes that I observe the students motivation is really different, the first one was a really interesting activity but the respond of the student was not enthusiastic at all. The second class was much more focuses in motivating the students to participate, physical activities in the classroom are always motivating for students especially small kids.

Now referring to the first class teachers used a strategy that sometimes works when students do not want to participate. In this case teachers were calling names in order to push the students. There were minutes when the students were interested in the activity but those minutes were not used for the teachers to increase their attention in the activity.

Regarding the second class, the activity was much more useful. Students engaged with it because it was physical and intellectual at the same time. The advantage of the physical movements is something that most of the times work as class activity. In this case the only problem that teachers face was a single student that did not want to work. The students’ behavior was almost invisible for the rest of the class; even the same teachers did not pay much attention to it during the explanation of the instructions.

But something good was that the teachers talked to this girl after they finished the explanation. This was the best thing to do this way the class was not interrupted and the girl participates without much complaining.

5. Conclusion:

In order to give a full conclusive answer to this point it is very important to remark that the students in this class were not a real class. This important issue change the behavior of the students and the class in general which unable me to give an empirical a realistic analysis.

In the other hand if I am to analyze the techniques used in those two classes, I would say that in the first one the motivation of the students was really poor and almost compulsory. But in the second class teachers did not do much to push students to participate. A real good motivating class would be the one where students participate just because they want to.

In conclusion the first class complete the activity without many problems but with a lack of motivated students, in the other hand the second class complete the activity with fully motivated students that were laughing and enjoying themselves.

Learning Indian languages on Internet

The web page I choice is “Learning Indian Languages”. The first thing I was actually expecting to see was a whole list of activities. Moreover the only valid thing to appreciate is a vocabulary translation list.

I have seen many other web-pages to learn English and all of them show the students more than just vocabulary. In other words what a student needs to learn a second language is much more than just vocabulary.

To focus the acquisition of a second language in vocabulary gives the students tool to read en probably to understand a text or a small book. But pronunciation is left a side, comprehension is almost forgotten and listening is not even mention.

This web-page is completely based in grammar translation, which is not a tool to learn Indian as a second language as the title said.

In other words, if you are looking for a grammar translation web-page this is the one. But I do not recommend it for schools or to actually learn Indian languages.