Week 3 Reflection

   I cannot believe week 3 is over! It has been a great week with tons of information about three different aspects that are forging my academic pyramid and that of my colleagues from all over the world, namely :aural/oral skills,delicious, and sample project reports. Below these lines, I will write a synthesize about each aspect.

   Aural/oral skill-building: My classmates and I were asked to read a lot of interesting articles regarding this topic, and to my surprise I came across a piece of information that was provided by Lindsay Miller´s "Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials". In it, it is mentioned that "more than forty percent of our daily communication is spent on listening".(Burely-Allen 1995). If this is the case, we-as teachers- have to implement more listening activities into our classes. With the help of the websites provided by the articles and suggestions done by colleagues, I tried some sites specialized in the aforesaid skill.. I personally tried the www.bbc.uk. and I got to play with it. However, thanks to Ency from China, I got to know the other website intended for teachers and students. www.bbc.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/) I just loved it! Authentic materials are a must in the classroom.

  Delicious: As I was figuring out how to create a delicious account, I realized that it is pretty much like twitter, but for professionals. It reminds me a lot of Linkedin. Here, what one can do is bookmark , and share interesting websites with colleagues. In fact, I booked marked some, but the one that stands out in my mind now is Randall´s ESL Cyber Listenning Lab at www.esl-lab.com. The listening activities here are aimed for easy, medium and advanced students. I am currently following 11 colleagues on Delicious and I have only 3 followers so far. To top it all, on Delicious one can also save websites by just going to the toolbar and clicking save to delicous. Thumbs up !

  Sample Project Reports: I read Tendouinde Bruno Nikema´s report, from the American Language Center, Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso and I loved it as he had to set two goals first: one broad, and one specific, before working on the project which involved a technological tool in his teaching. He worked on he use of e-mail with his pupils( they were not good at the internet) and writing business letters to invite English-speaking guests to give lectures in the targe language. This report gave me some ideas to work on with my current Introduction to Literary class. It will all depend now on the goals I want to achieve with my students with the help of technology. For the time being, I need to sit down and think about the ABCD Objective for that particular class. I know I have to be careful upon identifying their needs. Let´s hope and wait.

   It has already been my third week of this turning point course. I will make time this weekend to work on my goals for my class integrating technology. I hope my students feel motivated to use www.bbc.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/ to catch up with the current events. Needless to say, I will push my students to use Delicious as a way of bookmarking and sharing literary approaches websites as well as EFL/ESL ones. Final project, here I come!

                               

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