Week 3

They say time flies. It's true. I can't believe that Week 3 is behind. Robert was right that gradually our study would turn into routine. I'm not afraid of the assignments as I used to in the beginning. I feel I'm getting more computer and Internet literate. This course pushed me to give my students tasks to search the Net in the lesson which I never did before. One of the tasks was to find a quotation for their essay. They were so surprised and excited that they would use the Internet in the lesson. Then we faced the problem that the Internet worked slowly as we used Internet Explorer. My students suggested downloading Google Chrome and we did it. I felt so proud when I had to insert my e-mail address and password to finish the installation as I had my Google account! Now I understand that the Internet attracts teenagers and it can become my friend  in raising my students' motivation.

Looking back at this week, I could say I have learnt a lot.

First of all, I have read  the articles "New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation" by Maria Grazia Busa and "The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills" by Julia Gong which made me put more attention to teaching pronunciation. I liked the idea of using "signal analysis software to teach intonation in discourse" described by Maria Grazia Busa.

Secondly, I have discovered so many useful sites for oral and aural activities, like www.esl-lab.com, www.trainyouraccent.com, www.esl-galaxy.com. I will definietly use them in my future job. I have already recommended www.esl-lab to my students who want to develop their listening skills at home.

The next step was to create my page on Delicious.com to Store Useful Links. I followed the instructions and fulfilled the assignment. I think it's a very good idea to have such a page for preparing for my lessons.

Finally, as my Project Task 2 I analysed the final project of a former participant,  Camelia Pagila from Romania. Her detailed work really impressed me and helped me to have a picture of what I am expected to do in the end. I have started thinking about creating my classes' blog. My next step is to define its contents.

This course is a good example of on-line learning and it opens new horisons for Englsh teaching.

Week 2

This week has been much harder than the previous one. Studying search engines was time consuming as I had to look through them thoroughly to find out the truth: to gooogle or not? The answer is: Yes, in most cases. Actually, I was surprised to learn that there are so many search engines and websites including search engines. For example, I discovered some useful ones like http://www.biography.com/ and http://www.gutenberg.org/.

The second thing I had to struggle with was writing the ABCD objectives. This theory is new for me and at first I didn't have a clear picture what to do, what to start with. This theory is quite general and I didn't know how to apply it for my class. Thankfully MengFeng and Elena were the first ones to post their objectives which helped me a lot. 

The next task was to describe my course and students for the Final Project. It wasn't difficult because I just described my work, my students' needs, the technology I have access to. I started to think about my final project. What do I want to do? What will my students accept? Will it make my lessons more effective? I have already told them that they would have to take part in the Internet project. They've got interested, though some of them worry about lack of time as they have a lot of homework to do in other subjects. I hope most of them will enjoy the project and we'll continue doing it after our course is over.

The last thing I have to do is to write this post. I think it's a good idea to reflect on what you have done. I understand that I have learnt a lot. Though, it's not the last one. Now I'm going to visit my dear colleauges' blogs. I'm in anticipation of good reading!

I'd like to thank all the visitors to my blog for their comments full of support and encouragement.

Week 1

Hello everyone!

It looks like I have coped with our first task. I can't say it was very easy as I have never created blogs. Actually, I have never created an e-mail account. The one I have used for many years was created by my husband. So, for me everything we are doing here is new and quite challenging. Thanks to Robert's clear instructions and help from some participants I managed to create my Google account and my blog step by step. To tell the truth, I visited several participants' blogs before creating mine to see what they have done. Their work impressed me a lot and encouraged to push forward. Of course it took me time to change the settings. I hope I have done everything correctly.  Also I faced some problems with finding the tabs as the lay-outs of the pages on my computer are different from the one ones in the instructions. Perhaps, I have a different version.

The next thing I'm going to do is to improve the design of my blog. I need to learn to add pages, links, files and other necessary things to make it more useful and convenient.

Now I'm feeling like a student who doesn't know the material of the lesson and maybe a bit at a loss but who is eager to enrich their knowledge. I think it's very useful for teachers to feel the way their students do. Then we can understand them and their feelings better and to look at the teaching process form the other side - the side of a learner. As for blogging, I have already started thinking how I will be able to use it in my work after the course finishes. Perhaps, it will be an extra way of communicating with my students when the lessons are over which will raise their motivation and interest in English. Great!

I'm looking forward to new discoveries.