This year I could only watch the recording of the Virtual Conference MMVC19. It is in August and it lasts three days.
I could see some interesting speakers who spoke about online learning, using Moodle for teaching and presented interesting experiences online thanks to using some apps like Google.
My reflections about some of the webinars are in the blog I have where I present some ideas about the use of technology in education.
Here is my short presentation created for my reflections online : MMVC19 is a community of educators who are open to share and learn together.
I belong to a generation of readers. Reading was my favorite past time during the summer and I read plenty of books as a teenager while I was not at school.
Today my students are not so fond of reading. They love surfing the web and chatting online. Most of them just read a book because they are asked to write a short summary about it.
Some have many books and read them in their free time while others just go to the library and borrow what they need to read. Some sell the books they have bought as they do not love books.
They are asked to read a book and this is bad as they will never enjoy the pleasure of touching and reading a book. This approach to reading will influence their reading habits as they will never develop as learners and will not be ready to continue learning and reflecting on what really matters.
The article presented online in the website about self-development underlines that there many reasons for underlying the importance of reading: just check it and you will agree that reading can be an important activity and you will also develop as a learner
When teaching languages we do need to rely on activities that can enhance reading: a reading club can be something we can work on. An English reading club could help my lazy learners as we could choose among the books to read and we could interact on what we have learnt.
Edutopia has presented some ideas shared by educators dealing with the issue of literacy and reading:
Which are the main advantages for working on developing reading skills?
learners can learn from mistakes
learners can learn about grammar while reading
by scanning texts learners can build bridges between their language and the other language that they are learning
An interesting activity shared online is Collaborative Reading: check this video released by Edutopia- the young learners are getting engaged and are learning while reading.
I feel that teaching needs to find new bridges into the learner's paths as today's learners are different and they might not love reading but they also need to be trained and helped to develop their critical thinking skills.
Learning and reading about heroes and important people who are admired by our learners is the first step to find reading texts and topics to cover for our syllabus: Shelly Terrell has given a lot of tips in her blog and you can read more about this online
