Week 4

Do not be a faint heart, have a go and you will be surprised at your own ability.

I have started exploring this week material from the article of Jarek Krajka "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction”. This work answered to some of the questions that bothered me, since I became a teacher:

2) The issue why we should introduce technologies into the lessons (recency, authenticity, variety, choice and the absence of psychological barriers are brief answers to this question).

1) The role of the teacher in a wired classroom. (the teacher’s role is immense even though the technology plays a very important role, as the learner can “feel lost or overwhelmed by technology”).

I also enjoyed reading the ideas for teaching writing genres, it turned out that e-mail could be used not only for sending and receiving messages, but also for practicing writing skills. The suggested idea of writing formal letter was immediately taken into my teaching baggage.

“The Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Student Uding E-books” by Mei-Ya Liang was interesting to read and compare to my method of reading outside the classroom. I also suggest 5 books to my students, divide the class into five groups and each group choose one book to prepare the synopsis (a brief summary of the book or film). The following lesson we listen to each group’s presentation of the book and vote for one, which seemed interesting. The chosen book should be read during the semester. But I had a problem before, the problem of choosing those 5 books to read, so the websites containing literature from “Using Internet-Based Children's Literature to Teach EFL” by Larry J. Mikulecky were saved in My Delicious page without hesitation: http://www.magickeys.com/books, http://www.bygosh.com/index.html but the best site seemed http://www.tumblebooks.com/.

I also discovered www.elllo.org, which seemed the best, until I tried www.BreakingEnglishNews.com suggested by Nahla and http://www.english-to-go.com/tolesson.htm described by Kunie. I suppose sites I used before paled into insignificance.

The creation of a technology-enhanced lesson plan took a lot of time, but I enjoyed the process and even redesigned some moments, which didn’t work with my previous class, adding a website for recording the voice https://voicethread.com. 

But I absolutely loved reading the lesson plans of my colleagues. It was valuable exchange.

The last task was to describe the class, which can experience a problem the technology might help with. It was not as difficult as I suggested, since we had described the same class before, but the task made me think about the problem on a large scale. Moreover, I am not unaware of how to incorporate Internet technologies into my classes now.

Each week I learn something new, add a lot of interesting websites, and share my experience of teaching, I can tell with confidence that one can “explore the whole world just by clicking the mouse” by Jarek Krajka.