INTRODUCTION

CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) is often considered a language teaching method, and its role has moved from the “input – control – feedback” sequence to management of communication, text, audio, and video.

CALL offers the language teacher and learner a number of activities that when carefully planned as part of the pedagogical room will help the learner learn a language. It is a great possibility to make language classes more engaging and lively but it requires the language teachers to become computer literates.

With this scenario, my strongly recommendation to you is that you acquire or improve  your ICT skills and get some useful guidance on using Information and Communication Technology in the language classroom, which I hope I can contribute to during this course.

 COURSE OBJECTIVES

My main aim is to give you some guidance and advice on how to integrate interactive publishing , digital audio , video , multimedia , PowerPoint and other aspects of ICT in your language lessons.
Also, it is my intention during this course , to teach you by example and share my personal experiences of the benefits of different learning approaches.
Therefore as participants in this course, you will benefit most from specific examples from what we are currently practising or will be practising in our classes. The emphasis will be on the practical nature of this course and instructions will be clear and straightforward.

You should come to this course with an open mind as regards hard work. Most of the taks imply time and effort on your part but I can guarantee you that this will revert in your teaching.I will appreciate if we all agree on sharing the resources that we create and leave this course with a great bank of activities.

These are some of the more specific objectives for this course:

• Get to know one another: Who are we professionally? Who are our students? How do we use computers in our teaching? Why are we participating in this course? What are our expectations of this course?
  Why not start a network of sharing , giving and taking , a project with our students in different schools in
  Catalonia sharing our knowledge and resources?

• Promote an atmosphere which encourages participation and professional development among all course participants and allows for enough flexibility to meet the expressed needs of participants as the course progresses.

• Provide you the opportunity to explore a wide range of on-line resources which can be integrated into classroom teaching.

• Examine techniques for designing classroom materials to take advantage of the unique resources that exist on the World Wide Web. These techniques differ in some ways from those used in a paper-based environment.

• Explore ways to find additional on-line resources for use in the classroom and to tailor those resources to fit the instructional needs of your students.

• In the process of exploring on-line content resources, try out different tools (applications) for delivering and discussing course content.

• Create materials and develop activities, specifically tailored to participants' individual teaching situations, for immediate use in the classroom

• Engage in ongoing discussion as we proceed through the workshop and develop a pool of resources and insights which can be shared among all participants.

• Develop professional relationships among the participants which will continue beyond the time frame of the course . This will be facilitated by the completion of pair assignments.

TIMES AND DATES

This course will be delivered to you both online and offline.Dates are as follows:

Offline sessions at Joan Pelegri School at Escola Joan Pelegrì, Consell de Cent, 14 Barcelona
24th February , 7th April ( to be decided ), 28th April

Online sessions 3,10,17,24 , 31 March and 14,21 April

Chat available upon request during online sessions

FORMAT / COURSE DELIVERY

This course is being delivered in modules.
Each module deals with something specific, be it; visuals , video , audio etc.
Modules sometimes last more than one session.
A session is 3 hours work approximately.
Each module has different tasks to be accomplished.
Some tasks are obligatory and others are optional for fast finishers.
Everybody can choose what to complete if only the obligatory or the optionals tasks too. This will depend
on your level of expertise and the time you have.

Tasks for each session have to be completed and emailed to the teacher on Tuesdays ( the day before each session either online or offline ) That is you have from each Wednesday until the following Tuesday to complete the tasks for that session.Sometimes tasks are to be uploaded to the Moodle site. The instructions to each task tel you so.

Other tasks that involve embedding or linking resources in yout PB Works website , the course summary tells you which.

When sessions are offline tasks will be completed and delivered to the teacher on that day.

PROGRESS

Depending on your knowledge and experience with Internet and computers, some of you may take less or more time to do the tasks.
I recommend that you tick in your logsheet whatever tasks you were able to complete and if you did not what were the causes for not being able to.
Please don not despair if you find something difficult. Send me a quick email if you don't get through the tasks

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

Remember that when trying to do some of tasks with your own computer at home or at the school, you may not have the necessary software installed. There are many different versions of software and sometimes things just don' t work the same way.
Just remember that you can always email me and I will happily assist you.

ICONS AND NAVIGATION ELEMENTS

You will be able to navigate through the course on a weekly basis; that is, you can only access the contents for the current session but not for the future ones. As weeks progress I will be opening the next modules for the next sessions.

TASK SUMMARY