Week 6 Reflection

 

The semester began this Wednesday and I am able to try out what I have learned in this course into practice.  I created an interactive PowerPoint.  I added hyperlinks, action buttons, images and videos, and also used high contrast colour (black and white) as suggested in the article “Creating Interactive PowerPoint Presentations for Teachers and Students” instead of the fancy backgrounds that I found online.  I think it is better because it is less distracting.  Another new thing that I learned is to press the ‘B’ key to blank a screen when I want to draw students’ attention or keep them focus on their discussion. Before reading the articles about creating interactive PowerPoint, I have no idea that PowerPoint can be used in such a creative way.  However, one of the problems I encountered is that if I insert a hyperlink to an external source, e.g. a Youtube video, then it may take a very long time to load the video. 

 

 

For my project, I will use Voxopop to engage students in speaking and listening.  I will create a TalkGroup in Voxopop.  Students will read a passage on ethics, then they share their opinions about the topic and comment on other students’ opinions.  I have this idea because when I reflect upon the reason why students were passive and not very responsive in discussion, I think it might be due to their lack of vocabulary and knowledge of that subject or discussion topic. I hope that with Voxopop, even quiet and shy students will gradually become more confident in using English to express themselves.

I had the first lesson with my students on Thursday so I was not able to implement the change this week.   I will use my interactive PowerPoint next week, though, and will introduce Voxopop to my students by the end of next week.