Materials are the best tool for teachers, imagine an English teacher without materials trying to get the attention of their students without implements only doing gestures, speaking in an unfamiliar language to their students. Now we not only have a marker and a board, we have many useful tools that we can make with our hands and if you don’t want to create them, you should dive in the technological space.
What are the most common materials we know or use in our daily life? We have dictionaries, box of rods, picture packs, course books, Cds, and also some teachers have access to a computer with internet of course or, a laptop, a video been or in the worst case a Tv could be a nice tool for you.
In my opinion, working with some materials is very important to motivate students, to increase their abilities because we are teachers no magicians, so we need some helpful tools to develop our students skills. I have learnt that not all the materials are perfect for all students, we have to select previously according with the task or ability or the aim that we want to achieve. In my school I have some materials but the real problem is that I have to adequate them to my linguistic goals.
Finally, I can say that we are in a new era where a teacher must be updated to the tendencies. We have a big challenge that is to innovate in our methodology and way of teaching. Only with creativity and knowledge we can make a difference or a point of reference for other teachers that haven’t change their paradigms. We have many opportunities to innovate and fulfill our students needs, and designing new materials is a good start.
Finally, I can say that we are in a new era where a teacher must be updated to the tendencies. We have a big challenge that is to innovate in our methodology and way of teaching. Only with creativity and knowledge we can make a difference or a point of reference for other teachers that haven’t change their paradigms. We have many opportunities to innovate and fulfill our students needs, and designing new materials is a good start.
What about you? What kind of materials do you use to get success in your class?
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I completely agree with Gina, the teachers need to use materials and specially the English teachers. It is up to us the challenge of looking for the most interesting and useful materials for our lessons. There are lots of sources where we can find appealing resources; however we can forget that the simplest materials like markers, board, newspapers can make the learning process easier and funnier.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting issues can arise from this topic. One of the roles teachers now have is the one of material designer. A very important one indeed. I agree with Hugo that the effectiveness of the materials we use in the classroom is not determined by how showy they are, but how they contribute to the achcievement of the goals of the lesson.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Gina, Materials are very important in our classes, but I consider that the way we introduce them to our students is as the same importat as themselves. So the wonderful aspect here is to take into account our students learning styles that in convination with material could be a marvellous tool. a question I have is that I do not understand why you say that adapt materials is the real problem.
ReplyDeleteactually, it is one role of English teachers, becoming in designers rather than searchers witout transformation so, I agree wit most of you,
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your comments and along the specialization, I have realized that this topic is very interesting for us. I think we had to invest more time in this factor instead of developing presentations about some readings so complicated that we didn´t take advantage of them. I expected to learn more about methodology, materials and other topics which are related to what we do in the classroom. Well, theory is important but we could learn more practical things to improve our job as we did in the last module...
ReplyDeleteI consider that good materials are useful for our classes, because it focus students' atention. However desing its is demanding for teachers we spent lot of time do it but the results are amazing
ReplyDeleteWhen we think on designing materials sometimes it scares us because we think on very elaborated issues. When we try to offer the students the posibility of learning in a "different way" and we show them different ways of doing so, we are already designing materials. As ELT says, they do not have to be very showy, it can be very simple but effective.
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