Week 3: Hot Potatoes and Telecollaboration

(21/9/15-25/9/15)

On this third week of class, we have been working on some new resources, such as Hot Potatoes. This program includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web.

It is a completely free program that I guess is going to be very useful for me in the future. When you learn the basics, it is very easy to use and to create different types of activities depending on the objective you have. 



This week we have also started with the telecollaboration with some students of the Cisneros University of Madrid. The task consisted on commenting with them the answer of a questionaire that we completed about CLIL basic concepts via Skype. We had to record the conversation with debut (a video capture software). 

We had a lot of problems to do this task: internet connection failures, problems setting the cameras and the microphones, difficulties with timetables with the students from madrid to set up an hour to do the activity... etc. Finally we could do it. I find this experience very interesting and I think I will do it in the future with my students if I have the opportunity. In my opinion, connecting with other students enriches a lot the learning. 

However, from this experience we have also learnt that New Technologies have a lot of limitations, and as teachers we must be aware of that and have alternatives to use in our classrooms in case they don´t work. 


The reading of this week was titled "Computer assisted English language learning in Costa rican elementary school: an experimental study". It was about a study carried out in Puerto rico with different groups of students using computers in class. 

To sum up, the only resource that I had used of all the things done this week was skype. Is for that reason that it is the part of the class that I´ve found less useful, as I consider nowadays almost all of us know how to use this program. 

 I didn´t knew Hot Potatoes, neither Debut. Both of them are very interesting, but the one which I find the most useful is Hot potatoes. I think as a future teacher I will use a lot this program, as it allows me to create different kind of activities and evaluate their skills and knowledge.