Personal learning journal - Fifth week

During this first week after the internship, there have been some changes in the subject, due to the sick leave of our teacher. From now on, we will be with other teacher that will try to carry out the development of all the contents that the previous teacher had set. As a result, this week has been difficult for us and for the new teacher, and we have been talking a lot about the blog, the tasks and the assessment.

The topic of the week has been Interactive Whiteboards (IWB). We have had two presentations about them – one about reading 4 and the other one about the tasks that that group had prepared.

As I said in a previous entry, IWB have lots of possibilities, but from my point of view, we cannot base our classes and tasks just on that tool, because we need to provide students different ways of carrying out tasks. In addition, nowadays children are in constant contact with technology, thus IWB won’t catch their attention for a long period of time; they would get used to it and they would see it as boring as the traditional blackboard.

Tools can motivate children, but that motivation is brief; the only way to motivate children is to base the classes in a good methodology and provide challenging materials and resources.