Saturday, October 22, 2011

3 Readings,Discussion,lesson plan & some issues *** Week 4

Dear colleagues,

During this week, I read the articles by Krajka and Liang. Krajka tries to explore the issue of the use of the Internet as a teaching aid, or as a teaching medium, through which students are taught how to write different writing genres. I especially liked the way Krajka combines online and offline tasks in his article. I enjoyed the articles of Liang as they were easy to follow and understand. She also gave us many web sites which contained much more activities, videos, games, stories. These activities can be used in and outside of the class. I think that very interesting. I especially liked the way she structures the tasks to create an interactive classroom atmosphere. The articles we read and discuss this week, give very good ideas on how to use the web for reading and writing. I think that I can adapt some or most of the activities for my classes.
First of all is http: http://www.manythings.org/songs/.This web site is for students studying English as (ESL) or (EFL). There are quizzes, word games, word puzzles, proverbs, slang expressions, vocabulary study, pronunciation practice, listening practice and many other things. Also, I checked the: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/ I recommend it because it has complete lesson plans to develop reading skills by checking some updated and interesting topics. Some of the lessons also include listening exercises. And teachers can easily copy and paste the parts of the lessons they want to use. 

The second task, I describe my class and I talked about my class issue and how I could manage to use technology with them to solve this situation. Finally we designed a lesson plan according to the model taken from http://edtech.tennessee.edu/%7Ebobannon/lesson_plan.html
 to consider technology when planning. It was a very productive week filled with attractive material and interesting tasks. 
     
Finally, I would like to thank Robert and our guest Rachel Drummond Sardell, this week for sharing all those good websites and the feedback she gave us in our comments on the forum.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

4 My class


2 I´m just a little fish swimming in it


LearnEnglish Kids is the British Council's website for kids around the world who are learning English as a second or foreign language. This site has free resources for children to use at home, or with family and friends. I can use activities from this site to children to do for homework, or during school holidays. Many of the stories, games and songs have worksheets that we can download and use in the classroom. Especially It has videos, and online activities designed to practise listening skills.And more in 


0 Delicious Course *** Week 3

For this week :
I read Aleyda Linares "Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web Project ' The projects goals are develop students' grammar skills, involve them to be better in using English by motivation and work in group.
The project was designed to support the various types of interaction that occur during the web-based learning process. The purpose of the project was to design and develop a web-based program and to examine the effects of interaction on problem solving and participation of students in the web-based learning process.
For the type of interaction, students showed different patterns of participation in the web-based learning process.Regarding the results for students' participation in the learning process, the differential effects were found.
I really liked this project , Aleyda expresses how the use of technology can change the mentality of the students about the foreign language helping them to acquire new important knowledge and have fun at the same time.
Another activity was to start using Delicious. com, a site to store your favorite web pages online. It is very helpful because you can access to your favorite website trough any computer with Internet connection. It was great to know that you can start a network with other teachers to explore their favorites and to get use of them in order to get more resources for class. You can visit and check my bookmarks on http://delicious.com/mariamalfarisia/



We read about CALL in the developing of speaking and listening skills. We had an overview of the different types of software that are being developed and some results that researchers have shown in relation to these teaching points. We also read some lesson plans whose main purpose is to exercise speaking and listening skills with some links resources such as http://www.elthillside.com/up/files/article4.doc and http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/speaking/teaching-ideas/
I had the chance to read good articles and explore interesting sites in order to have more resources to employ in class.
I´m ready for another week of great learning and new experiences.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

0 The Green School


4 Noodletools & ABCD ***Week 2

Hi everyone, I would like to share my experiences while week 2 for our online course.

First of all,I looked at www.noodletools.com " provides innovative software that teaches students and supports teachers and librarians throughout the entire research process"  
I really liked and enjoyed with http://www.worldcat.org/ .I tried to find very specific information on( using blogs to learn). One of the links that was helpful to me is: http://www.worldcat.org/title/iwrite-using-blogs-wikis-and-digital-stories-in-the-english-classroom/oclc/449284063&referer=brief_results .I tried several search engines and I found sites with vast amounts of information on that topic, including timelines, downloadable audio books, photos, local or historic significance, authoritative research materials, videos, etc.
I will recommend Worldcat search site as it gives a big choice of resources.
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Also,this week I have learned writing learning objectives in a clear and straight way, taking into account those 4 letters that stand for:
Audience (my students)
Behavior (tangible and measurable)
Condition (Circumstances or context)
Degree (how well the performance will be required)
We, as teachers, are always writing objectives or aims for our classes, but sometimes we leave out one of those four aspects mentioned above and that leads to students not knowing exactly what it is expected from them or what they will have to achieve by the end of the class.
Designing clear objectives for the class will help us organize a better session, planning more suitable activities or tasks for our students
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