Week # 3 : Aural/oral skill, Delicious page, Sample project report

This week has been very important in the sense that I have clearly foreseen and understood what I will have to do by the end of the course. This week has been very rich and represents a turning point in the achievement of the final project.

The resourceful richness of the week lies in the qualitative and quantitative amount of teaching materials we have gone through, especially the ones for building aural/oral skills.

AURAL/ORAL SKILL-BUILDING

http://www.sinew.com.tw/e_plus_lab.html

We have been guided through abundant resources for teaching listening and pronunciation, taking into account stress, intonation and rhythm. I have found some of the sites containing the aural/oral resources very interesting and potentially useful for my students. The ones I selected are:

-http://www.esl-lab.com/ (Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab)
-http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/081222_download.shtml

In fact they fit the french-speaking context in which I am teaching. They are true means of giving exposure to real life conversations from native speakers of English. Moreover, they can help enhance vocabulary and grammar skills of learners of various levels of proficiency.

http://www.sinew.com.tw/e_plus_lab.html

MY DELICIOUS PAGE

Creating a Delicious page and adding links were a bit challenging, and I have met  the challenge.The address of my page is :
https://delicious.com/latavitalbeug

I notice that this application is very helpful in  storing important links and sharing them with a community.

So far, I am still fumbling and I hope I will soon master all the tips of Delicious.







SAMPLE PROJECT REPORT

I have chosen the past project report by Tendouinde Bruno Nikiema from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso because the audience and the context he described are nearly similar to my teaching environment.

He has included all the elements of the project report rubric and mentioned that he had taught his students the basic things to know about computer and the internet. He has succeeded in combining a practical goal with language requirements, reading and writing. What he has done is a great achievement that gives me a clear idea of what I have to do.

Week # 2 : Reflection

This week, the project of using technology to enhance teaching and learning has been put on the rails. From now on, we shall investigate any idea that could lead us to the final station.

The first thing to start with was writing a clear and precise objective that would act as a compass for both teacher and learner. So doing, the "ABCD method" was a great help. It has been an excellent tool in splitting or sequencing the objective into four segments, Audience, Behavior, Condition and Degree, making each explicit.

Besides, the "Revised Bloom's Taxonomy" has been helpful as well, for it has enabled an appropriate choice of key verbs to express the behavior that is expected from the learner.

Following these guides I have written this objective that I think could apply to my project:
"Given a mixed-up list of 10 steps related to creating a blog, my students will be able to put the steps in order without any mistake."

It is essential for students to create a blog through which they could get more care from teachers, peers and others if they wish, since the time allotted to lessons(about 3 hours per week)is not enough and the large number of students in classrooms make things difficult and nearly impossible for teachers to give each learner adequate attention and detailed feedback to written compositions necessary to enhance students'competences.

 The blog platform appears as a tool to address these problems.

Week 1

My first trial of a blog lets me notice that it is a large opening to the world and at the same time a worldwide view on my ideas. Obviously, that can be a nice tool for teaching and learning from everywhere.

From what I have heard and read, in the traditional classroom, the teacher is the unique audience for students as far as writing is concerned. On the contrary, with blogs the audience is larger, more varied and more realistic since not only the teacher but also peers, parents and possibly all the people having access to the internet can be a reader and feedback provider.

How could blogs be used efficiently for teaching and learning in a given environment? Can we create  a blog then post with a smartphone? In a nutshell  how could we get the most of this tool in our classroom?