Week 4 - Reflection # 1 - Using CALL In Writing And Reading Activities

Hello Donna and classmates

I have found this week's discussion topic very interesting because English students regardless of their age or L2 proficiency have a hard time reading texts and writing in English. I have to admit that this is a cultural issue in my country since primary, high school and even college students are not encouraged to read and write in our mother language in the right way. I remember the time I was a high school student, my literature teacher used to make us read classic novels and then write summaries (that most of the time my parents had to help me do). Then for the monthly quiz or exam, we had to know by heart the whole book or plot, and the characteristics of the characters because the questions were tricky and sometimes we got bad marks because we paraphrased the information or didn't write the exact words of the author. To be honest, that situation discouraged me to improve my reading and writing skills. From my experience working in a private school, I can say that this way of teaching reading and writing has changed, but not enough to state that we, Ecuadorians, are keen on reading or writing every time we can. It is not common to see people reading books while waiting for the bus or on the bus, at malls, in parks. However, it is more common to see people reading local newspapers or tabloids.

After giving you a picture of the reading and writing interest among people in my country, I can express my opinion about the articles I read. Firstly, they offer teachers (either L1 or L2 teachers) a great source of ideas, websites and activities that can be applied in order to make these skills more appealing as well as authentic or realistic to our students. I think the idea is very simple: “MAKE IT REAL”. However, we should not forget to explain our students how to use different writing genres because this is important information they need to know in order to write accurately. These samples or writing tips are usually found in textbooks. After giving these instructions, the internet plays an important role in order to make our reading and writing classes more interesting and meaningful. Constant Teacher's guidance before, while and after doing the activity is a must in order to be able to achieve our goal.

What is "Earthish"?

Nowadays, learning English is becoming more and more popular among teenagers and young adults. In my country, parents are more concerned about enrolling their kids in bilingual schools where children are taught English from the early stages. This is an excellent way to guarantee their kids to succeed in life. However, English is also becoming a global language and it is not only the best tool to communicate with someone from another country, but also the most effective way to exchange information about our cultures, traditions, trends, habits, and lives. Therefore, English should be renamed and called EARTHISH from now on.  

Source: IT'S ON (http://zipadeedoo.wordpress.com/)

related link:
Earthish

Week 3 - Reflection # 2 - Delicious!!!

You might be wondering: “Using Cooking techniques & Recipes for teaching English?" "What a good and TASTY idea!” In fact, it is possible and there are many free activities related to this topic. (Food & Recipes)

However, DELICIOUS is a something very different from “a highly pleasant to the taste”. I love Italian food so that I posted a picture of my favorite Italian dish “Lasagna” in order to whet your appetite and curiosity about this great web tool.

What is DELICIOUS?

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. The site was sold to AVOS Systems on April 27, 2011 and relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

And the BEST THING about DELICIOUS is that this fantastic web service is FREE and EASY to use. Besides, you can create “tags” to categorize your favorite websites and share your links with your followers. This way you are able to have access to your bookmarks wherever you are and need to do research about any topics.  

Related Links:

Delicious

Making Your Bookmarks Yummy With Delicious

10 Great Bookmarking Tools for the Web

Week 3 - Reflection # 1 - CALL & Oral Skills

Hello Donna and classmates

This 3rd week of The Webskills Course has been interesting. I feel I am learning to use to new tools to enhance my computer skills as well as my classes.

This week’s main discussion topics were about websites for Oral/Aural Skills and the use of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) applications and Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems in teaching pronunciation.

It is widely accepted the fact that Listening is the most frequent skill that we use in everyday life. However, the resources and activities that have been applied in class for teaching this skill have not been the most accurate for developing and improving it. Most ESL/EFL textbooks include a CD or cassette to practice listening and pronunciation and also do different activities such as gap filling, answering questions, songs, chants, and so on. Now the big questions are: Does these activities reflect “the reality”? Are these activities created with authentic information and resources? Are these activities helping our students improve their listening and speaking skills? Can these activities help our students face and understand what is happening in the real world? Some of us might say: “Yes, they understand the instructions that I say and the activities that they listen in the textbook CD”. Some others might say: “well, they need more practice because listening and speaking are hard to improve”. If your opinion fits with the second answer, feel happy because you are going the right way. But how can we do it? Well… KEEP IT REAL!!!

Authentic materials and resources for teaching listening and speaking create a real environment and our students will be able to use English the same way that people do in the real world. It is advisable to use radio programs, TV shows, movies, phone conversations, the internet, and some other authentic sources of information. The next step is to create an activity using the following structure: PRE (before) LISTENING – WHILE (during) LISTENING – POST (after) LISTENING.

This structure helps students get more benefits from a listening activity. The reason is that they don’t feel stressed and the pressure to understand 100% of the information that they are listening to. These types of activities are meant to enhance our students’ listening and speaking strategies to interact in real situations.

                          

Related links:

Teaching Listening

Listening Strategies

Teaching Speaking

For listening & speaking activities created with authentic materials:

Listen A Minute

Breaking News English

Speaking Teaching Ideas

Teaching Skills - Speaking Strategies

Speaking and Communicative Icebreaker Activities

Week 2 - Reflection # 2 - Writing Objectives (ABCD Method) & Learner Analysis

These two topics were very interesting and surprising to me. Writing objectives has always been a stone in my shoe since they have to be written accurately in order to see the results that you expect in each class.

At first I feel I was very confused about this topic because I am used to writing “objectives” on the whiteboard before starting every class, but after reading some articles this week, I realized that “my objectives” were more similar to instructions or tasks that my students and I have to accomplish in each class.   

The article about Bloom’s Taxonomy and Bloom's Digital Taxonomy also helped me understand thinking skills and the correct order of these metal processes. Then this study was related and associated with the use of technology in class and activities related to this classification.

After I finished reading these articles, I dove into that new world of writing objectives. At the beginning, I could not understand The A.B.C.D. method quite well. Fortunately, Donna clarified my doubts and was able to accomplish this task. I believe this method of writing objectives is very precise and easy to follow, achieve and measure.

Related links

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy (Source: Penn State Learning Design Community Hub)

Bloom's Taxonomy Digitally (Source: Tech & Learning)

Writing Objectives: ABCD Method (Source: Minnesota State University Moorhead)

Write an ABCD Objective (Source: WikiHow)

My second task was also quite challenging. Analyzing learners is the first and foremost step to create instructional programs. Having a clear idea of how our students learn and what previous knowledge they have acquired is really important when designing a course or even planning our classes. It was not something easy because we have see beyond our students’ names, faces and behavior. This research includes other significant characteristics such as attention span, mental development, life experiences, literacy levels, skills, learning styles, etc.

We have to collect this information carefully and accurately in order to have effective and meaningful objectives as well as create successful programs.     

related links

Learner and Context Analysis (Source: Virginia Tech - School Of Education)

Learner Analysis (Source: Kristina Ford - EdTech)

Learner Analysis (source: Harold D. Stolovitch & Erica J. Keeps)

Analyzing Learners Characteristics (Source: EdTech) 

Week 2 - Reflection # 1 - Websearching

Hello, Donna and classmates

During this week we have covered three interesting topics that particularly have enriched my general computer knowledge and the way that I see my learners and teaching style.

To start, we had to try, analyze and discuss about different search engines and then suggest some of them depending on our teaching needs. I am a big fan of GOOGLE, but I found out that there are some other useful search engines and websites that are not so popular but helpful as GOOGLE.

I think that it is very important to know and keep in mind these other choices for web searching according to our teaching and students’ needs because searching on line can be fun and interesting but also time consuming and very frustrating when we feel that we are wasting our time and not going anywhere.

From the list we got, I tried some of the first options and searched for a basic grammar topic. I realized that INTUTE (http://www.intute.ac.uk/search.html) , INFOMINE (http://infomine.ucr.edu/) and ACADEMIC INFO SUBJECT GUIDES (http://www.academicinfo.net/subject-guides) are great sources of information for college and university students. However, I was more interested in brief and clear explanations and also extra materials for my English classes. Therefore I found very interesting and recommend using:

1) BING (as an alternative to GOOGLE)

http://www.bing.com/ 

2) ISEEK EDUCATION (you can target your search and get more specific “hits” and “links”)

http://education.iseek.com/iseek/home.page 

and

3) TWURDY (the “hits” and “links” are arranged from easier to harder to read so that you can choose the most suitable information according to your students ‘ English level.)

http://www.twurdy.com/

Sincerely, J.C.

  

Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need

This is a very useful and interesting link with a list of search engines that are classified depending on the topics and specific queries that you are interested in. It was provided by Donna Shaw, Ph.D., Instructor, University of Oregon. Thanks Donna for your support and encouragement.

Source: NoodleTools (http://www.noodletools.com)   

http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html

Are You A "Connected Educator"?

Hello, Bloggers

I came across this interesting article while browsing my Facebook profile and I found it very interesting. It’s about how educators can make an excellent use of technology for their classes and how we can make our classes more interesting to our students when we use these online and technological tools and devices. I hope you like it!     

A day in the life of a connected educator

Week 1 - Reflection

Dear Donna and classmates,

I am Juan Carlos and to start I have to say that I feel happy and fortunate to have been accepted to be part of this online course. I had some problems with my registration because I was informed one day after the dateline that I had to register. I almost fainted, but fortunately I could email Donna and she replied immediately and told me that I could still have a chance to be admitted. And here I am, enjoying and following this new and exciting experience (to be honest, I feel a bit nervous and frightened, too).

This is the first time I am taking an online course so that I am not very familiar with the kind of things or assignments that we are going to do or accomplish during these three months. I believe that education in my country has changed a lot in the last twenty years. I still remember the time I was a student and my teachers used to write on the board with chalk and we had to take notes very neatly. If I had to do research, I had to ask my parents for help or read books or newspaper articles to get some information. During that time, I didn’t have a computer so that I had to use a typewriter to type my reports. Do you remember how frustrating was to make a mistake and type everything again?

And now? What do our students use in class or at home? How easy is everything for them these days? On the other hand, I am pretty sure that most of us (teachers) have seen our students’ faces and reactions when we say: “OKAY, now open your notebooks and copy the exercise that is on the board”. I think nowadays the worst punishment for our students is to have them write something neatly in their notebooks or summarize a newspaper article using their own words.           

Therefore we have to accept that technology is here to stay, there is no turning back.

After reading the topic and objectives of the course, I wonder if I was ready and prepared for this new challenge. I am a technology friend and regular internet user, but how can technology facilitate my students ‘English learning process? Especially those who are professionals and their time and lives are already limited and hectic due to their jobs. For that reason I am very optimistic and sure that everything that I will learn with all of you will help me reach that personal goal.

Referring to my first week of the course, I can say that our tutor has been very supportive and willing to help everyone and her instructions have been very clear and well-detailed in order to avoid mistakes. I am lucky to be participating in this course with other teachers and professors from other countries. This is a great opportunity for me to learn from them and their cultures.

Our first assignment was to explore NICENET, get familiar with its tools, introduce ourselves to the group and also post comments on Ground Rules for Discussions.

Debating and making comments in a forum is a brand-new experience to me. My shyness can be reflected a bit in my writing, but I will do my best to share what I know and have learnt in my job.

So this is me and my blog and I hope you enjoy it! J