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    

Week 2: Wandering down the garden path to watch the butterflies vs harvesting peas

This week I have tried for the first time some search engines from noodletools.com specialized according to such criteria like: type of information, timeliness, special search requirements, etc.
Well, I think I will check the rest in the future but for now education.iseek.com and americanrethoric.com proved to be reliable, at least in my case.
Though I am not still sure about the usefulness of using Boolean operators.
If you  can suggest something related to them  from your experience I would be very grateful. 

You may have wondered about the connection between the contents of this post and its title.    Well, it refers to something I have found while searching information on the ABCD format learning objectives.It is a file named writinglearningobjectives.pdf that you can download from http://www.unb.ca/ .
The authors Dorothy MacKeracher and Peter Gross stress the importance of stating clearly objectives by making this wonderful comparison: "They (the objectives) help the instructor stay on topic and avoid wandering down the garden path to watch the butterflies when harvesting peas was the objective.Watching butterflies is a nice break but detracts from achieving planned outcomes." 
That is the main thing to remember about objectives in my opinion: they must be clear, observable and measurable.

Finally, the beginning of this week has been a moment to think well and decide on a project that I am going to develop and implement in my teaching in order to make a change using technology. I thought of collaborating on a simple project related to culture, youth's life and interests with a school from a different country by working together on a joint class blog. I chose the blog because I thought  it had a great potential that would allow me to focus on different communicative skills. Also I hope that my students who are shy to speak in class will feel free to express themselves and they will be more responsible for what they publish. 

That is all so far. Feel free to comment!

Week 1: Reflections

 Dear friend,

Welcome! It is the first time in my life I have started a blog and I haven't learned yet how to give it an attractive design but I hope it will not be difficult to be done later.

I have named it "Technology in English Teaching" because I intend to use it as a platform for publishing different ideas and exchanging experience with people who are interested in implementing ICT in teaching English.

Later when the school starts (in Moldova we start it on the 1-st of September) I think it will possible to include a practical element in this blog (videos and photos from lessons, lesson plans, etc).

Also it would be great to use it for interacting with students: posting assignments, making anouncements, giving grades and feed-back, collaborating on projects).
There are so many possibilities and plans.
I think I should prioritize and try to implement them as well as I can.

This is all so far.
I will be very grateful if  you write constructive comments, suggestions and links to resources referring to the theme of the blog.

I hope it is an auspicious beginning. 

Thank you,

Ion