Week 3: Hmm..Delicious..

This week was both Exciting & Mind-gobbling.

I learned new things and that makes me glad!

The first thing is social bookmarking delious.com that lets you maintain a personal collection of links online, similar to the bookmarks or favorites in your browser, but they are also accessible to others. What I especially liked in the service is "tagging". When you save a link to your collection, you tag it with one or more keywords to describe it. Different people can use the same words, so you can search for everything tagged with "teaching" or "aural/oral skills" and get the collected archive of everything that anyone using the service has found using that tag.

Social bookmarking can be successfully used for educational purposes. The student could share the links with the rest of the class. It is very useful for collective projects or any other specific activity. It is also possible to get people from all over the world contributing to your class links list!

Another great activity of this week was reading articles about CALL for listening, speaking, or pronunciation skills, and evaluating some of the skill-building websites.
Very often our students are given practice in something (listening, writing etc), but they are not actually taught it. However, there are many choices of how to make teaching oral/aural skills more effective. I feel now, after reading the sources recommended by Robert, more confident in using some of them. First of all, I will try the following sites Randall's Cyber Listening Lab: http://www.esl-lab.com/ and English Central: http://www.englishcentral.com/. The former has a large collection of exercises on listening, the latter is a video site for English Language Learners, it lets users listen to parts of the video, then lets them repeat what the characters say and compare it with the original. My idea is to use the sites for building a more motivated and engaged learning environment.

This week we were given an opportunity to read the sample project reports from past Webskills classes. All the proposed projects were carefully structured, accurate, and easy to understand. I especially liked the Project Report for Graduate Students at the Jesuit University of Philosophy and Education by Joanna Zubel from Poland. The author described various techniques and approaches to using the web platform for teaching and learning processes.

Joanna has written in her project, "A good teacher is a life-long learner, an inquisitive person who develops teaching technique in order to meet the students` needs, their expectations and their requirements". 

 

I am sure we all hold the same idea.