Week 5 Reflection

   It has been the most productive, and demanding  week since April 7th. I can honestly say that I have made it through, up to now, thanks to the professor's help and my classmates' support. I was pushed-no doubt- beyond my limits to read important new types of information like alternative assessment, PBL, and WebQuest.  At times, I felt like it was too much; yes too much of great information that I have contact with now and that I hope I can put into practice with my students and share with my colleagues. Here, the most important information with its advantages and highlights that we were exposed to:

   Alternative Assessment: encourages one´s students to become more independent tremendously. To begin with, it is authentic because it "replicates the world communication context and situations" (The Essential of Language Teaching: Alternative Assessment). It also measures what the students know, that is; their strengths and not what they don´t know (Huerta-Macias, 1995, p. 9). In addition to this, it highly emphasizes the final product and not what they can learn for a given final test and then, once it is passed, it is gone. Likewise, it is more interesting than the traditional assessments as it fosters the integration among peers, teachers and self.


   Project-Based Learning: motivates students to work independently a lot as it offers certain aspects that are flexible and interesting to them. Firstly, it provides the students with an extended time to work on the complex question or problem they are trying to analyze. In other words, they don´t feel pressured as to meet the teacher´s goal with the time frame of 55 minutes. Similarly, they don´t just sit in the classroom and hope someone could tell them the skills they have to gain in order to be competent. On the contrary, the students are the ones that grab knowledge according to their own inquiries. Also, they can manage their own time and the type of product they want to present to the teacher provided that there are some guidelines and supervision from him/her and finally the students will be confident enough as to present their findings to other people apart from their peers and teacher (http://bie.org/about/what_pbl). I would say that PBL is the best way to encourage students to work in class as they are co-authors of the learning-teaching process carried out in and outside the classroom.


   WebQuest: stimulates students' interest in working on their own as they have to use a lot the computer to find answers to their inquiries on the Internet, and I am positive; they enjoy every second of it. Gone are the days in which one had to go to the library and had to check out books to answer the teacher´s questionnaire. Nowadays, everything is in the World Wide Web. That is why, it is very important to motivate students to try WebQuest as it fosters creativity with its open-ended questions like "What can be done to stop people from polluting Mother Earth? Here, they will find out many possible solutions and not just one dictated by the teacher. Apart from that, by doing WebQuest, students will be working on higher levels of Bloom´s taxonomy like analyzing and synthesizing, and not just the very basic ones like knowledge and comprehension.


   Finally, I would really like to highlight two sites that are spectacular for the creation of rubrics and for the implementation of WebQuests in the classroom. At www.rubistar.4teachers.org; one can pretty much create and customize rubrics from scratch and, at www.zunal.com, one can develop WebQuests for students to utilize as other types of assessments apart from traditional ones. All in all, I am very content to belong to this extraordinary course. My academic life is being fulfilled.