Week 3: Communication is the key! Listening and speaking

             Well, it has been a busy, a little tiring but productive week.

We started with something tasty this time: www.delicious.com – one of the most popular bookmarking services. I must say I have not felt the need of using such a resource before but after checking the possibilities it offers I found it valuable. You can save your favourite links and have access to them from no matter which computer and the thing that I liked the most: www.delicious.com and other similar websites allow the users to share their bookmarks which is a feature that all the teachers who are interested in discovering efficient tools will appreciate. Also it is good that you can transfer easily your saved links to another bookmarking service.  Now, the participants in our course who know so many sites about teaching and learning English have a platform on which to perform an exchange of experience.
Moreover, www.delicious.com raised our interest for similar instruments that provide additional features.
This way I discovered www.diigo.com and I liked it because using this service you can highlight, add sticky notes, capture, save and share different elements of a webpage.

Passing to something that represents the foundation of teaching/learning a foreign language- developing communicative skills-we focused on two of them: listening and speaking.

Reading the proposed material and my colleagues’ posts I saw that many teachers were not pleased with the resources our textbooks presented for listening.
Fortunately we have the internet and sites like  www.esl-lab.com where listening activities are presented in a teaching sequence respecting the recommended stages (pre-, while-, post-) and are extended to speaking.

Finally, there was a moment to make another step in working on our projects. Intending to start and maintain a class blog I was very happy to discover that there were teachers from previous courses that had done similar things. The study of Camelia Pagila’s project was thought-provoking because discovering how she inter-related the compulsory syllabus with the use of technology I wondered if I would be able to do it as well. Another strong point of her work is that she managed to adapt tools to match different learning styles and skills because I think we must not consider technology a goal in itself but an efficient tool for developing communicative skills. This is my main conclusion for this rich week.

Best wishes,
Ion