Computer room

On the 13rd October I had the first contact with the students to whom I’m going to teach. They are the group A of 2nd of ESO. They were about 25 and I had the feeling that they were quite childish, although they were about 13 years old. However, we have to take in account that some of these children have problems in their families and some difficulties to learn.

This lesson took place in the computer room and I would like to say something that I find very interesting, every group go weekly to this room during one lesson and they do some exercises related to grammar and reading topics in a “virtual lesson”. I was very surprised, because every child has a computer for his or her own and it shows that things are changing nowadays, because when I went to the school we had to share the computers in pair or even in groups of three and it made more difficult to work.

The students work in the following website: http://www.iestarradell.org/moodle/, where they have to do some exercises online and after that they have to fill a piece of paper with the answers and hand in them to the teacher.

Now, I would like to talk about Núria’s methodology, because I think that it’s very interesting. Due to the financial problems of the families, a lot of them couldn’t afford to buy books or some material to their children, so Núria decided to photocopy each unit of a course book and give them to the students. When they finish the lesson, the students have to give in the exercise book in order to be allowed to do the exam. What about the royalties? The book is not sold anymore and the editorial allowed the high school to photocopy it, because of the financial situation of these students.

During this lesson I was with my classmate and two teachers, Núria and Àngels, in the computer room. They had to do a virtual lessons and it consisted of doing a reading and some grammar exercises. In my opinion, it is very positive that children can work with computers, because they learn to use them at the same time and they are more motivated. During this lesson I got in touch with my students, because they asked me some questions about the meaning of different words and I tried to explain them in English. However, I felt quite nervous, because I have doubts about the language that I had to use, because I can’t speak Catalan, so I decided that I tried to use English and Spanish as well, when they had problems to understand it.