The importance of motivation.

Hello,
Welcome back to my blog.
This is my second post and I hope it finds you and your families safe and sound.
I have chosen to write about motivation. How are Albanian students encouraged  by their teachers and what can we do to increase their level of motivation?

We often hear children complaining about their school, subjects and even worse, their teachers.
This may be a problem, because it affects students' learning and process of building their personality.
According to Psychology, motivation is what guides us to accomplish a goal.
Erik Erikson, a well-known psychologist, strongly emphasized the fact that children need motivation, stimulation and valuation, in order for them to be able to develop a sense of zeal for work and achievement.
If children(students) are not appreciated for their best skills and they are compared to others, they will feel inferior and lose interest.
As a result, those students are going to hate school and even more those who discouraged them; teachers.

We all remember our teachers: those who gave us a hand, those who let us free to express our ideas and those who helped us to achieve our dreams. But, we also remember those who offended us for not being good at their subject, those who suppressed our thoughts and those who destroyed our dreams and made us feel worthless.
Now that I am writing, my literature teacher came to my mind. She was like a dictator. She just came at class without even saluting and called our names to tell the poem or the summary of a story by hard.
We, as future teachers, have the golden opportunity to change things. Maybe, we won't improve everything, but at least we should give it a try.
I cannot say that there are not capable teachers. I cannot deny the fact that there are also teachers who are always there for us behind their role as professors. They are rare, but they do exist.

What can we do to motivate our students?
First of all, I think we should be humans, we should know our students and understand their problems and difficulties.
Teachers may make students understand what they want to be in the future by having discussions about their dreams or their talent.
We should understand which is their skill and push them to master it.
Of course, the professional formation has its own importance and teachers should find innovative and creative methods to make students follow the lesson because they want so, not because they are obliged to.
Personally, I have been a shy student and even though I knew the answers, I didn't take the step to say them. I wanted teachers to give me an impetus. I think there are also students who learn better in group works rather than individually.
I totally agree that a teacher's job is not a piece of cake. He/she has to deal with different kinds of students, even with those who don't pay the smallest attention to what teachers say. If the relationship between students and teachers is a well-built one, this pushes students to be more attentive during the lecture and to interact.
We have to understand their 'weak points' and also what a student's talent is, by their reaction.
Praises and even a smile can be extremely motivating to boost students' self-esteem and good behaviour.
Students need to be valuated and rewarded for what they do.
For example: pupils of elementary classes can be motivated even in this way: after they finish their class works, we may allow them to play different games in the schoolyard.
A teacher should be attentive of who deserves to be rewarded more and who deserves to be motivated in order to do better next time.
Let's take another example: if students are given an essay ,the teacher may choose the best realised one and present it in the essay's competition( if there's one) in the capital city.
A teacher's job remains that of displaying what students know best and add what they don't know. Everything students do should be followed by an evaluation. Evaluation doesn't mean putting them a 10 or a 4. Students want to be evaluated by pointing out what they have achieved so far and by making them believe that by working hard they will always achieve more.
Teachers are students' leaders. It's very important to not just share a well-explained information, but even to allow them to have fun. Nobody needs a teacher who enters the class without saying hello and starts the lecture immediately. Nobody needs a teacher who brings his/her problems to the class and forget his/her duty.
It is true that a good teacher should be well-prepared and professional, but above all he/she should be human, should be communicative and to adapt to students' necessities and interests. A good teacher is empathic, innovative, all-involving and fair with everybody.
Above all, a good and beloved teacher is he/she who motivates his class to make progress and encourages each student to display his best, without being afraid of being prejudiced or that his ideas won't be taken into consideration.

For all the reasons mentioned above, I think it's time for teachers to improve themselves and give their maximum.

I want to close my post with two striking quotes.

*Tell me and I forget
   Teach me and I remember
   Involve me and I learn*
                (Benjamin Franklin)

*They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.*
                      (Carl Burechner)
P.s Feel free to share your opinions.
Thank you!

Integrating technology in teaching.

Hello everyone. I hope that you and your families are well.
This is my first blog.
First of all, I would like to say that integrating technology in teaching and learning is a great way to improve them. In our current situation it seems like online teaching is the only way teachers and students may keep in touch. This is my first blog, but this is not the first time our professors use online methods for us. Last year our professor Ogerta introduced us to 'Classroom App' and we used it most of the time and it was highly productive. This blog seems to be a little bit different, because we had to create it in our own and I encountered some difficulties in getting adapted to it. I did not know how to follow my classmates and also how to subscribe someone's blog by my email. I searched on YouTube, but there were only videos of how to make others subscribe our blog.
I am sure that we will solve this.
As for the importance of this blog, I may say that it can be really effective if it is used properly.
Here are some of its benefits, according to my opinion.
It is the only way of teaching for this situation which we are in. It will help us to keep in touch with our professor and to accomplish our assignments in time. 
Apart from this situation it saves time and it can be really comfortable.
Another advantage may be the fact that we are also able to see classmates' posts and to comment on each other's post. It generates peer discussion and knowledge exchange.
Technology-based language instruction can be as effective as teacher-delivered instruction. I can say that this type of learning and technology in general are not really used in our faculty. Teacher use technology mostly by generating power point presentations and there are just a few teachers who use online teaching platforms as well.
This blog may have also disadvantages.
We sometimes get confused, because as we all know, face to face conversation is more understandable and people sometimes misunderstand each-other when they communicate online.

As you can see, I am more pro of using this kind of teaching in our faculty.  Technology is part of our lives and we cannot exclude it. We should take its positive part and use it for our necessities and works. I think professors should use it more, because they have the tendency to use the traditional method of teaching (not all of them) by using only the blackboard in class. They may bring videos to us, they may use more online teaching, they may all bring power point presentations since the visualization helps students memorize things better. I am really excited that our faculty has involved a whole subject about how to make technology part of our teaching and learning.
I read the articles about integrating technology in teaching and what attracted my attention was that: digital multimedia technologies were used to make access to learning materials more efficient than print media or audio recorders, because multimedia presentations can create stronger memory links than a single medium alone.
Internet enables the learner to access authentic news and literature in the target language since the information in internet is widespread nowadays and it teaches us how to be selective in order to choose the appropriate information. 
Technology develops reading and writing skills since we can read online magazines and electronic books, we can be part of email groups or blogs or chat groups and so on.
Since students are exposed to the internet, they love technology being part of their learning. Technology helps students who are not very attentive in class to engage in activities . Technology is changing and  improving as the time passes by. We should not only use it to communicate,  but also to broaden our knowledge and to improve our way of teaching and learning.
Of course, using technology may have its difficulties and problems, but we should take the best from it.

P.s Feel free to share your comments. Thank you!