Diary September 19th

Finally yesterday was the final project presentation, in most of the cases my students had a good performance, although in some cases they decides to do the presentations memorizing the information. It was an interesting exercise but it makes me wonder how effective the last activities were. It was clear that the “stage fright” affected their normal performance but the question now is what can a teacher do to avoid the effects of it in a situation like this one.

Diary September 8th

The trimester is about to finish, and the students have to prepare the final presentation of their projects, including an abstract in English. The software programming students created apps and databases for small companies around the neighborhood, and we started to prepare those presentations. It is clear that most of our students do not have many skills in oral presentations and they do not feel confident enough when they are in front of a big audience, and it becomes even harder when they are doing it in English. So the challenge for me is even bigger. We started creating the initial draft of the oral presentation, and one of the most difficult things for them is to understand that when they are talking in a second language, they need to use a vocabulary that matches with what the already know, they tend to use “too sophisticated vocabulary” so the first task is to make the revision of that vocabulary.

Diary September 5th

Continuing with the topic of simple past tense, yesterday my students talked about any accident that they remember from their childhood, and the partners asked them additional questions to find out more information of it. This was a successful activity and it was meaningful for them, all of them had many stories to tell and it was easy to make them talk. I had done the same activity in the past but this time I made some changes like organizing students in pairs, and have them prepare some questions in advance, and it was very useful.

Any activity can be transformed and improved, it is important to understand what went wrong, and next time you use it, think in the best option to make it better.

Diary September 2nd

In this week I have been working on past experiences of my students, and storytelling. They are creating their own autobiographies and they will create a video with it. It has been very interesting to dig deeper in their personal lives and I have discovered things that I did not even imagine about them.



Yesterday they created a cooperative story, in which they wrote a paragraph of a text an then they had to switch papers with the next partner, then I gave the instructions to continue with the next paragraph. After some minutes they had to pass the paper to the next person and continue writing, and so on. The activity was good but the time given was an issue that I need to thoroughly revise, because in some cases the time was too short for them to fulfill the objective.

My Profile

My name is Fredy Roa, and I am an English teacher at SENA Centro de Materiales y Ensayos Regional Distrito Capital. I studied in the "Universidad Pedagógica Nacional" and finished in 2004. But I have been teaching for the last 12 years. M main experience has been with adults in universities.

I started working in Vocational teaching since 2011 and it has been a very interesting area to work on. In these moments I am working with Software programming students. My purpose in this course is to acquire new knowledge in the teaching field, and learn how to apply it in my professional life.