Week 4

This week has brought new knowledge, new ideas and practical advice. It started with reading as usual. I find the articles "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction" by Jarek Krajka and "Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books" by Mei-Ya Liang very useful. The authors share some great ideas how to use technology for developing reading and writing skills and remind us to incorporate on-line lessons in the Curriculum.

Then I spent quite a lot of time searching for the sites which help build writing and reading skills. As I am teaching teenagers, I tried to find the sites suitable for their needs, age and interests. It wasn't easy because most sites were either for kids or for adults. I stopped at two sites: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com

and http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org. Both sites offer a variety of texts for reading with pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading activities, questions for discussion and writing tasks. The latter site also provides listening activities, video, games, exam parctice and a magazine for teens. I haven't had enough time to visit the sites offered by the other participants but I'm going to do it soon.

Next, I created a technology-enhanced lesson plan. In my lesson I used the site www.esl-lab.com. It was new for me as I had never used the Internet in class. Writing the plan helped me to analyse the actvities offered and understand how to deal with them. I chose the conversation "Exercise program" as these days the topic of my lessons is "Healthy lifestyle" and I intended to incorporate it in the curriculum. I was also able to create a google doc of my lesson which is very convenient for getting feedback, so I just posted the link to my google doc in Nicenet forum.

Another task was to describe the class I'm teaching, the problems it's experiencing and think how technology can help to solve these problems.  I find listening comprehension and pronunciation are the most problematic issue as we have lack of listening materials in our course books. Russian intonation affects their English speaking production. I started thinking how technology can help to deal with this problem. At the beginning of the course I was excited by the idea of creating a class blog, but now I understand this will help to improve my students' reading and writing skills, which is very useful, of course. But now I'm thinking on how I can use this blog or maybe find another technology to develop their listening skills. I would like to do a project which will expose authentic listening materials to students and will develop their listening skills as well as pronunciation. I'm thinking about a long term project for my students which could make them listen to authentic materials in class and at home in order to carry out this project step by step. 

I'm looking forward to Week 5 as I will have to decide on what technology to choose for my final project in order to solve the class problems .