Task 11 - What Are The Goals Of Classroom Management?What Do You Think Are The Most Important Principles Of Classroom Management?

First of all, let’s think what classroom management means. Classroom management is the process of ensuring that classroom lessons run smoothly despite disruptive behavior by students. 

Classroom management is a pretty important part of a lesson. If the classroom management is fine, the lesson that is being imparted has a high probability of being successful.

Classroom management helps teachers to keep the affective filter low for students to learn.

Some of the most important principles of classroom management are the following:

• Discipline 

• Limits in the relationship between the teacher and the student. 

• Arrangement of material 

• Fairness in evaluations 

• Treat every single student equally

I just like what it says, it is a 100% true:

Task 10 - What Are Your Motives For Teaching? What Rewards Or Incentives Do You Get From Teaching? How Might Your Motives Interfere With Your Ability To Put The Needs Of Your Students Ahead Of Your Own?

Inspiration. That is my main motive for teaching. As many of my teachers have inspired me trough all my years to keep trying hard, I want to inspire my students to keep trying hard and not to give up with the first problem they have.

I want to change some students’ lives. I know that trough teaching I can do it. IN others words I want to teach to help other people.

Moreover, it is true that most persons choose this career just because it is known that teachers can get a very good wage. And why we deny it? It is true that it is part of the rewards it gives but for me, it s not the main reason. The best reward a teacher can receive is to see his or her students being successful and fulfilling their goals. 

And finally, I don’t think my motives are going to interfere with my ability to put the needs of your students ahead of my own because if I already stated I want to help my students, I will not let anything to stop me, even if they are my motives.

Task 9 - What I Like and What I Do Not Like about Working With Teenagers

There are many positive and negative aspects about teaching teenagers. Either of them will make us grow as teachers, no matter if we don’t like them or if we do. Apparently, working with teenagers should be easier than working with little children because you can be understood easier, students can catch the ideas faster and so forth. That is the idealism we all have crated but in fact, working with teens is quite more challenging, complicated and stressing but at the same time rewarding and satisfactory. The bigger the problems or barriers we face, the bigger the victory will be.

There are some positive things we can list:

Teenagers are curious. Teenagers are always trying and looking for new things to do, or looking for things to experience or try out, but sometimes this curiosity can go too further and therefore it can create some problems in the classroom.

Teens are energetic. They do not like to be still, sometimes it can be taken as a negative characteristic but in fact we, teachers, just need to know how to canalize and take advantage of that energy.

Teenagers can make their own decisions. Teenagers do not need much help to make decisions as children need it. That makes the job of the teacher easy.

Teens are very creative. They can make up an activity or an answer very fast, interesting ideas that can be applied in the classroom.

But there are also negative things:

Teens think they are the last Coca-Cola in the desert. They want to do many things just according to their judgment, and sometimes they do not like to be corrected.

Teenagers are quite more irresponsible. Sometimes they do not do activities or homework just for being doing something else.

Teens get distracted easily by any simple thing around them.

To sum up, working with teenagers has as many positives aspects as negatives but if we really like teaching and we know how to teach we can turn all those negative aspects into positive aspects and take advantage of them. Personally, I like to work with teenagers better rather than with children because it is a much more challenging experience and as a consequence a more rewarding one!

Task 8 - What Can The World Wide Web Offer ESL/EFL Teachers?

Teachers nowasdays are involved by technological aspects and tools that they didn't know years ago. The the World Wide Web is only one of them. The World Wide Web allows persons to search, share and download any information they want, therefore teachers must take advantage of such technology.

We can not say the Word Wide Web offers limited things to ESL/EFL Teachers because there teachers can find as much information as they desire. There, teachers can find from simple activities like warm ups and time fillers until more complex things like lesson plans or solvings of problems.

World Wide Web is a very useful tool that teacher who are not used to using technological things should use because it gives a lot of opportunities not only for teachers but also for students. And also beacuse it, somehow, make teachers' job easier.

Task 7 - How Can The Standard-Features Word-Processing Programs Be Exploited For Teaching Writing Skills?

Writing, one of the four main skills, has always been a problem for ones and a piece of cake for others. But why is it so? It is so because of the lack of vocabulary we have.

Nowadays, there are many technologicals tools to better our writing skill, one of them WORD-PROCESSING PROGRAMS.

Word-Processing Programs are many, we can go from free to pay programs ( Calligra Words, Lyx, Quicksilver, Microsoft Word,etc). All of them can be used in the educational field, especially Microsoft Word wich is the most famous and manageable nowadays.

Teachers can ask the students to create paragraphs, essays, etc. These programs automatically will help the students with the mistakes they make and the students will be corrected instantly.

Undoubtedly, word processing is one of the most important technological tools that can have been applied to education due to it offers freedom to write and can be used without the help of a teacher.

On the other hand they have some disadvantages like:
- Students can get used to being corrected automatically and not pay attention to their mistakes anymore.

-Prevent student writers from revising their superficially neat-looking but unfinished writing.

- Not all the students have equal access to these programs.

But anyway, they can be applied, as I already stated, by teachers trough asking the students to write an essay, paragraphs ,etc. And students are helped because we can check and check our work before submiting it and if we have a mistake we would not have to make a total rewritten version, just modify the problems.

They should be applied more often in the classroom as a technological tool.

Task 6 - Should technologies play a central or a peripheral role in second language teaching and learning?

It is true that we, human beings, are involved by a big wave of technology and therefore all the aspects that, as humans, we face are involved by such technology. Educational aspects are not away from these reality and our students are exposed too.

Many years ago, we did not even though we would be able to have such technology, but now we do have it and we have to take advantage of it. Specially in our case, we could use many technological resources to make our classes more interesting and make learning happen. Videos, computers, etc should be used in the normal classrooms, but I think in a peripheral way. Because if we use them all the time, many normal situations may stop taking place, such groupal work, social interaction,etc.

Technology makes our lives as teacher easier due to nowadays it is not difficult to find , for example, an audio to play in the classroom, a video to be shown or even lesson plans are avaliable specially in the internet. We could make our students to read an specific article or task we want them to be develop in their houses in order to have more time in the classroom to discuss it or to teach another topics that require time that we often dont have.

Students, as I stated, should take advantage of this too. They shouldn't spend many hours doing something non productive but doing somenthing productive. We as students have many tools we can use, such tutorial videos, explanation videos, educatinal videos and so forth , that we can use to better our learning.

Technological tools should be taken into account when developing a class because it catchs our students' attention easily and make learning better.

But let's be careful, because if we want to make technology the center of all methodologies, it wont work because students could get bored by the overused of it, as all things in a high quantity bores us!

To sum up, technology should not play a central role in a second language teaching and learning, but a peripheral role.

Task 5 - What do you think is the role of research in improving our understanding of teaching?

Many times we assign some homeworks in which students have to make use of "research", according to us. But we are miss understanding it! In fact, do we really know what it involves and what it really takes?

"Research" is not only for students but (should be mainly) for teachers. It is quite important for us, as teachers, make research. 

By doing this, we will be able to keep updated and therefore to have better results in our classes and in our own understanding of teaching. What I mean by "keep update", well it means that we will know what strategies, approaches or techniques might work in some instances and wich might not.

Researching also allows us to get familiar with topics that we have to develop and we dont know very well. In addition, it helps to improve our way of teaching and consecuently it makes our students to learn more and to have a learning not mechanical but for life. Anyway, our goals as teacher is no other than make our students learn the most they can and "research" takes a great part into it.