Week 4 Reflection

 

   It has been almost a month since I started with this online course and I can honestly say that I have been spending more than two hours per day researching with pleasure different sites on the internet for the benefit of my students as well as for my own professional development. This week has been, no doubt, the toughest of them all as I had to find a web page that could go with my Introduction to Literary Studies class. Thanks to the links provided by the professor, I came across one that I will be talking more about on the lines below. Week 4 focused, mainly, on three different aspects; namely: Reading, Writing and Vocabulary Skills, Problem or issue in my class, and the creation of a technology-enhaced lesson plan. Once again, I enjoyed every single second of it.


  Reading, Writing, and Vocabulary Skills: Jarek Krajka´s article "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction" gave me wonderful writing activities such as "letter to a friend", "formal letters", "biographies", and even "the description of a festival". However, the writing activity that I will implement- starting next week on- will be "The description of a book". I got really into it, as my first year students and I read four books per year and I kow for sure this writing activity will be one they like a lot. On this note, I checked the following site http://www.tv411.org/writing and, to my surprise it offers free videos about how to write ideas, and frequently mispelled words. What is more, it also has free download lesson plans of different topics about the writing skill. I highly recommend this site for any writing activity.


   Problem or Issue: In this section, I had to identify a problem or an issue in my class in terms of the use of technology. I reflected a lot on this topic and I identified one, which is the students´comments or feedback. What I want to point out here is that not all of them participate actively in the discussions of the class due to time-constraint, shyness or apathy. Nevertheless, I think I got the solution for that. I will give a try to Nicenet next week then I will see the pros and the cons either to implement it or to forget about it and use another one. It will be a pilot technology tool next week on. Let´s wait and see!


 Technology-enhaced lesson plan: According toWarshauer and Whitaker (1997), there are three components for successfully planning and implementing internet projects from the very beginning: 1.The goals of the class. 2. the way the integration of technology should be done in the classroom and 3. how the technology is linked with the teacher´s syllabus. In tother words, one should not just use technology for the sake of it. One should only use it as a mean to facilitate much better the goals to be achieved in the ESL/EFL classroom.. I totally agree with them. Regarding the technology-enhaced lesson plan I had to do, I can only say that I learned to think of a back up plan in case technology is not functioning. I cannot even remember the times I failed due to technical problems in my classroom. From now on, I will have a set or extra worksheet just in case.


   It has already been my four week and I can clearly picture some of the possible solutions for my student´s feedback problem. For the time being, my action plan will be to give a try to this pilot technology tool to motivate more to my students. Also, I will use more writing activities from http://www.tv411.org/writing and always have in mind that not always technology works in the classroom. Final project, here I come!

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