Educational Studies

The Class

There was different kind of students in the movie. Teacher had different techniques to deal with the variety in the class. He was trying to make jokes to motivate the students and trying to care about the level of the students when he and another teacher were talking about the book they have to choose for the lesson. When the students didn’t like something in the lesson, he was asking for their suggestion. He was trying to motivate students by encouraging them in the thing they are interested instead of punishing. Nevertheless, he was sarcastic to the students occasionally, which could decrease the motivation of the students. He was also not impatient enough with the students. He was rude to the students instead of keeping calm when the students were rude to him. 

The students were teenagers which was a challenge for the teacher. The students think that they are mature enough to do whatever they want. The second challenge was they had different backgrounds because of it was difficult for students to understand each other.

I would like to relate the movie to the group work. Students were studying individually during the class. They didn’t have any group task and activity. A group task could be good to make them to know each other as there were new students in the class in the beginning of the semester. Also, they could understand each other better, if they would have to work together and see view point of the others. However, the organization of the tables was in pairs and this can lead students to work in pairs. Sometimes they were asking to each other about the things they didn’t know so it was a good way of learning. They also could learn from each other in this way.

I also would like to focus on Esmeralda. She was a teenager who has her own opinion. She was hardly affected by the others but she also was so passionate on her opinion. I would like to relate her behaviours to the identity. There were a lot of different identities in the class. Each of the students had different identities. One of the students named Arthur was trying to defence himself against to criticism about his appearance. Arthur had a different personal identity and Esmeralda was insulting him because of his personal identity. The same happened with Wei, he said Austrian as a word that he couldn’t understand and Esmeralda insist on the common knowledge of the word Austrian. It was a negative attitude to his personal identity, again. Our communicative interactions help us to establish an identity. It can change in many ways during our whole life. Esmeralda’s opinion about the others was a criticism about their identities and she was not aware of the varieties of identity. She was thinking her identity is the only one and she usually didn’t respect the others. 

Educational Studies

IDENTITY

• Identity is something that is not static à

• Environment, culture, personal experience can affect your identity.

• It is multiple: it has so many aspects – student, daughter, citizen, female, supporter...

• Your personality changes according to your role in situation .

• As teachers the identity helps us to understand that every child reacts differently.  

• Identity is a social construction: the people who are around us affect how we act.

• There are lots of categories; gender,cyber and fantasy, organizational,regional, national,ethnic,racial, personal, communal, relational and so on... 

How do we learn?

We learn by the way of à

• Interest,

• Wonder,

• Doing,

• Research,

• Discovering,

• Understanding.

What is learning?

• Gaining new knowledge,

• It can happen when you wonder something,

• Applying something new,

• Explain ,

•  Mastering ,

•  Remembering ,

• Making sense. 

Educational Studies 2

Subject: English and Environment

Age / Grade: 13-14/7-8

Aims :

• Ability to use the knowledge in the target language.

• To be able to understand and appreciate other cultures and others’ cultural view of the world.

• Students will be able to view cultural values.

• Ability to think critically and discuss in the target language by using a cultural perspective. 

• To be able to understand each other and work collaboratively.

 Activity

Every student will choose a picture from their culture and prepare a little explanation of the picture in English. The teacher will form some groups of five to six members. Then the students discuss the pictures of the new knowledge and choose the most interesting one. The whole group write a presentation of the picture and present it to class.

We choose the group investigation approach to combine English and Environment. The students can make a written and oral presentation. Teacher can help the students and observe them. The teacher is a guide for the students and students are more active in this approach. The students work in groups which is helpful to share their knowledge. They can have cooperation in complex groups.

Made by Arda Işık and Jsabel Mühlheim

Family

ICT - FAIR

ICT - FAIR 

We had an Ict-Fair on 21st november. We were so exited since we haven't been in an activity like this before. We set up and orginised our own stand, present our ethnographic studies through the programme that we chose. People visited our stand and we presented our presentation, programme to them. Our programme was Prezi and our ethnographic study was about Christiania. There were two more stand that present prezi except for us in the fair. 

We had a lot of fun with our awesome erasmus friends and it was a lot of fun to present our programme to people. We also visit other stands and got knowledge about different kind of programmes. I have learned new programmes that I would like to use. I have also learned different qualities of the programmes that I have already known. It was both entertaining and instructive.  

This is the link for our presentation, you can watch it through this link. 

http://prezi.com/obfdgvotqnbp/christiania

We also created a handout for the people who were visiting our stand. This is the handout which includes an overview of our programme, has a look in the qualities of it and looks out how to use it effectively in the classroom. 

PREZI 

Prezi is an alternative web tool to boring Powerpoint slides, and it lets you prepare impressive, rich, visual and interesting presentations. You can prepare more effective and attractive presentations than you do with ppt.  The file types that you can use in your presentations are jpg, pdf, video and swf. Prezi needs membership, but you can get into the Prezi world without any payment. You can share your presentations on the web pages and you can use your Prezis without any internet connection by downloading on your computer. This web-based tool allows the user to fly from location to location and to explore the relationship between ideas on the presentation, sometimes with turning elements upside down, sometimes zooming in or out. The theory behind Prezi is that our ideas are not linear, but rather bundles of interconnected concepts that are better captured as a whole with many parts. Prezi allows the user to illustrate the relationship of concepts to one another.

Benefits of Prezi in Education Settings

1.  A lot of movement
2.  Ability to share with a large group
3.  The meeting feature allows multiple users to edit it at the same time
4.  The marker feature allows you to circle and highlight important features
5.  The zoom feature lets you focus in on certain topics
6.  The versatility
7.  Keeps people’s focus longer than PowerPoint
8.  Non Linear slide arrangement
9.  Looks more professional than PowerPoint

10.  Allows endless creativity!                                                                 

Ø  Prezi can be used with either a PC or Macintosh computer. Users need a high-speed Internet

connection, an up-to-date supported web browser and operating system, a minimum of 1 GB
computer memory, a scroll mouse or touchpad, and a recent
version of the Adobe Flash Player program for Prezi to be more effective in a school practice.

Educational Studies

HOMEWORK

Last friday we talked about homework in educational studies which was so interesting. I haven't thought about homework in detail before. Why do we have homework and what is the negative, positive effects of it ? and of course what is homework ? We tried to find a contemporary definition of homework. I thought about this and I think the comtemporary definition is;


Homework is any kind of activity ,which is supposed to facilitate learning, make students to have much more knowledge, create a link between home and school, develop different skills,given by the school to be completed outside of the class.

Theory Into Practice

        THEORY INTO PRACTICE 

A Behaviourist Lesson

According to Skinner who is one of the most known behaviourist , the most substantial procesess in language developments are imitations, practice and positive / negative reinforcement. Children acquire the language by imitating the environment. They practice the behaviours of adults, sounds coming from environment. In this way, it becomes  a habit for children after a while. As they are learning, they affect from the external factors. If they get positive reinforcement, children will be encouraged so learning will take place at the highest level. However, children may have errors and make mistakes. If the teacher gives negative reinforcement, it may cause children to lose their motivation.

For instance;

Teacher explains the daily routine thorough a dialogue. Firstly, teacher reads the dialogue aloud and then wants students to read it aloud. Students try to imitate the pronunciation of the teacher; they do it more than one time to practice. Then, the teacher asks students about what’s going on in the dialogue by making some sentences like;

–teacher: Mike goes shopping, right.

–that’s right, Mike goes shopping.

–Teacher: Very good, Mike goes shopping and buys coffee, right.

–That’s right; Mike goes shopping and buys coffee

–Teacher: Mike goes shopping and buys coffee every day.....................

In the example, students learn the subject through repetitions, imitation, and reinforcement. But there are also limitations. One of them is overgeneralization which is when students learn a rule, they can imply the rule for all of the cases. As an example, students may use the present tense which is used in the example above for past or future event, too.

An Innatist Lesson

In the Innatist  Perspective, there are five hypothesis in Krashen’s monitor model. I would like to explain them in an example ;

Teacher would like to teach colours with some colourful cards, and she shows cards to students just by speaking in target language. Through this way, students can understand the message that is wanted to be learned. This is called input hypothesis in Krashen’s monitor mode. Also the affective filter hypothesis is efficient in learning, students should be motivated. If they aren’t motivated enough, they can have difficulty in learning

At the end of lesson, teacher shows some colourful things in the class and asks them the colour of the things. Students answer in target language. Thus, students become aware of their learning , which is given name the monitor hypothesis. Students try to explain the colours by using their grammatical knowledge and that is called  the natural order hypothesis.  The students learn the language consciously/ unconsciously  and this  is called the acquisition-learning hypothesis. But it also has some limitations, the teacher gives priority to fluency rather than accuracy.

A Socio-cultural Lesson

Socio-cultural Perspective is a theory in which students learn from interaction, environment and experiences. We will explain the perspective with an example that is a classroom activity;

The topic that the teacher teaches is how to order something in a restaurant. Teacher makes groups of two students. One student will have the knowledge that provides him/her to support him/her partner so that zone of proximal development can occur. Zone of proximal development is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help. Teacher gives instruction and asks students to create a dialogue about the topic. When students need a help while creating the dialogue, the teacher helps them. Students read and try to dramatize the dialogue in front of the class. It becomes an experience for them, which gives a chance to students to be able to imply it to their real life. 

My comment;

English has different parts like vocabulary, grammar, translation, pronunciation that’s why I think I need different perspectives of teaching. As a future English teacher I think, all of the perspectives can be useful in some situations and I will use a mix of these perspectives. However, I would like to use socio-cultural perspective mostly. 

My Intercultural Experience

• MY INTERCULTURAL EXPERIENCE

• FEELINGS 

• 
  

• o It's my first travel to abroad and it's an exciting experience to be here in Denmark.I'm having so much fun by knowing other cultures.People are so relaxed and free ,this makes me feel free,too.

• oActually I haven't feel homesick yet. People are friendly and welcoming to others.They are care about you and interested in your problems .

• o There are much more Turkish people here than I thought. We went to the bank to open a new account and we had difficulty in expressing our problem just for a second then the woman spoke turkish suddenly. We were shocked but it was also good that our problem solved.

• KNOWLEDGE

• o In daily life almost eveyone knows enough english to express themselves and helps you.If you ask for help ,they will do their best. It’s important to make students feel comfortable and teach affectively in school life.There is a positive classrom atmosphere which reflects both quality of learning and affective teaching.Every student must be relaxed, feel safe and important in the class in order to facilitate learning.

• o Bikes are important in daily life and you can find bicycle lane almost everywhere.There is nothing about the street design that can bother you when you ride a bicycle.

• o When you walk on the street,people usually greet you without knowing you by saying “Hi”. It's a bit strange but at the same time so nice when it's compared with my country.

• ACTIONS

• o So far I haven't had any problem about different cultures and I hope I won't have :)