Sorry, I' ve lost my diary but this is a short summarize of it. Enjoy your reading!


My experiences on my course in Brighton

During my first week in Brighton I have adquired new knowledges and refresh some I had forgot, and all of them have made me think about my work at school. Besides that ,I have learnt a bit more about English culture and about English real-life. For instance, some comments I have heard from English teachers in some meetings in Spain or England make me think that British teachers are quite concerned about security and safety issues, because they must have gone through difficult situations.
Talking about cultural aspects, I have discovered that Brighton is a lively, cosmopolitan, happy city full of students and amusements. But you can see quite poor people in the streets, as well. We’ ve been told that there’ s a big gap between poor and rich areas.
On one hand, English people seem to be quite aware of their cultural heritage. They always refer to their history and seem to be very proud of their monuments and landscape. We should imitate them!. We have visited some really nice towns and villages and we found charming places with incredible views. People keep them tidy not only for tourists, but for their own pleasure.
On the other hand, I have realised that in Brighton city lots of young people leave rubbish on the beach or in the street and it makes me think that perhaps things are changing now. Perhaps, people who do that are mostly foreigners or that is one of the remarkable differences between cities and villages.
I have found that people from different countries are not as different as we may think. We were enjoying a karaoke session in a pub in Brighton and I realised that songs and music have a great attraction for people of all ages and nationalities. No matter the country you are in, people feel the power of music and join together when they are singing. It was a fantastic experience!
Talking about what I have experienced by being here in terms of professional development, I had already heard about most of the theories I came across during this course. In some cases, I had put them into practice before without knowing their exact name, depending on what I wanted to get from my students. I think we should keep a flexible attitude, taking what we think it’s the most useful theory for us in every moment.





There have been some ideas I have taken into account for my teaching in the future:
-I like the idea of working with the language from the sound level first, and word stress in order to keep the rhythm of the sentences. Children find it quite interesting and it can be fun for them.I do it in my lessons with the “Jolly Phonics” method for my youngest students and I think I’m going to start working on short sentences too.
-The use of children’s recordings as a model for other students could be a quite motivating activity for my kids.
-I have discovered quite useful websites to work with IWB but I think I need to be patient and get ready for this new technology.
-I realise that I have to improve my pronuntiation. With the help of our language assistants at school I’ ll try to show a good model to my students. I’ m not very worried about using American or British English, as long as they can be understood by English speakers,and they enjoy learning a new language. My main aim is to motivate my students to carry on learning English after they leave school.
-An enjoyable activity should start by setting a collaborative task, making the students take decissions in groups.
-I could use video clips from BBC news for my oldest students.
In Spain we have a great lack of this technological resources, so we can’ t use them as much as we would like.
However, I find them quite useful and attractive for them.
No matter the media we use, a good way to start each activity could be getting the students to make questions about what they’ re going to listen first, or anticipating what’ s going to happen.
-Working with the Interactive White Boards! has been quite exciting!. I couldn’ t help thinking of my students working with it. It’ s magical!. Definitely, that is the future tool we’ ll use for our lessons. Sooner or later they will arrive to our schools and we have to be ready for it. I need time to get used to it and I’ ll suggest my school colleagues to get one of them.
Reading through all this text I realised I have learned a lot!
Learning a language implies the deveplopment of social skills and the respect to other cultures. A language is a tool to communicate with people from other countries. We are educating children to be citizens of a multicultural society and the learning of a language will contribute to open their minds and be more sensitive towards different countries in the world.
I have no doubt that the use of new technologies at school will contribute to improve our lessons, making them more up-dated and motivating for our students.