Week three - New resources, new ideas

During this week of the course, we concentrated on Teaching Aural/Oral Skills, but not only.

We started the week with a great tool I had never heard of. I am a person that likes to collect things, therefore, I am constantly bookmarking pages which I visit or use later. And every time I switched computers, I would always copy the bookmarks to my new browser or write them down in a piece of paper for later use. So, finding out that there is a way to save bookmarks online was very interesting. Through social bookmarking, you can save all the links online, share them with others and see what the others have saved and shared. Delicious offers the possibility to do this and you can use the bookmarks from any computer. Until now, whenever I wanted to use a link with my students I would send it to my e-mail, however since the beginning of this week I have started using Delicious and it is much easier and convenient. 

The next topic we worked on was Teaching Aural/Oral Skills and the articles that we read offered insights as to why teaching pronunciation is important and we were also introduced to different ideas on how to plan a teaching lesson. The following websites offer great resources which can be easily modified to suit our and our learners' needs. I was able to prepare a very interesting lesson on Halloween using resources from the first two websites. 

One Stop English               

http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/speaking/teaching-ideas/

The Internet TESL Journal for Teachers of English as a Second Language 

http://iteslj.org/

American English - a website for Teachers and Learners of English as a Foreign Language

http://americanenglish.state.gov/search/solrf%5B0%5D=bundle%3Aresource&f%5B1%5D=im_field_resource_pedagogy_categ%3A88

As we have to write a project for finding and trying a new technological tool or technique to address specific problems in our classrooms, this week we had to read previous participants' projects. I had the chance to read a very interesting project written by a teacher in Burkina Faso, who was working at that time with a class of 80 students, coming from different backgrounds. It really made an impression on me how the teacher took the courage to improve students' writing skills through technology and e-mail correspondence, in an environment where the majority of students didn't even have the acquired knowledge to use computers or  the internet. This teacher found a way to boost the students confidence  and curiosity and trained them to use computers first and then helped them improve their writing skills. 

Until next time!

Krenare