Week 3: More reflections on another very interesting and productive week

This week was extremely hard because of a very high temperature in Tbilisi – around 40⁰ C and even more! I felt that I had to mobilize all my strength and energy to manage to do my week assignments successfully.

As usual, I started with reading the assignments plan carefully. The first task was quite easy to do: to create my own page on www.delicious.com . It’s a social bookmarking page, which I found very practical. I used to bookmark the links I needed to refer to later on my computer. But the inconvenience of this kind of bookmarking is that you can only use it on your computer, whereas you can use Delicious bookmarking tool from any other computer. Besides, it gives us the possibility to join other people’s bookmarks too, which considerably increases our search options for the necessary topic and information. And, of course, tagging our bookmarks is very necessary – this way we can easily and quickly get access to the search point.

Having successfully completed this task, I got down to my reading materials – a sea of information (somebody used this metaphor). It took me a couple of days to digest all the information before I could start to do other required assignments. While reading the material I constantly bookmarked all the necessary and interesting links, which saved me time while working on my discussion posts. This week was dedicated to teaching aural/oral skills with CALL. We were to read at least one article out of the following three:
Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials (Word .doc file)
http://www.elthillside.com/up/files/article4.doc, New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation http://www.openstarts.units.it/dspace/bitstream/10077/2850/1/bus%C3%A0.pdf , The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/research/resources/student_res/postscriptfiles/vol3/vol3_1_gong1.pdf , as well as to look at some of the lesson plans at: Speaking lesson plans at One Stop English,
Conversation lesson plans at esl.about.com, Communicative lesson plans at ESL-galaxy.com, and explain how technology could be helpful in improving our students' listening, speaking and pronunciation skills. I followed the instructions and posted my comment to the discussion forum.

There was one more discussion topic for us: to explore and share with the group the pages we thought would best meet our students needs, and the ways of using technology in our teaching. Most of my course mates (including myself) commented about Randall's Cyber Listening Lab: http://www.esl-lab.com/. It’s a real treasure for teachers and students alike. And other resources as well, provided by Deborah: Listening RealEnglish video http://www.real-english.com/reo/1/unit1.html, Pronunciation links - http://www.uoregon.edu/~dhealey/138/pronlinks.html, Pronunciation Tips from the BBC - exercises, videos, quizzes http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/, Best Sites to Practice Speaking English (Larry Ferlazzo) - high use of tech
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/the-best-sites-to-practice-speaking-english/.

This particular assignment I found extremely helpful for me: while exploring these sites, I followed the instructions to see how it worked and found that, besides being very rich in content, they were also very easy to use, even for people with minimum computer literacy skills. Surely, it’s impossible to do everything at a time, and this is not only a week’s task – I will return to them many times after I finish this course.

However, the first thing I will do when I meet my students in September is that I will tell them how to use the social bookmarking tools to their advantage. By this I will be able to share with them all the necessary information and material, that will be related to our curriculum, and many things beyond it!
That’s all I wanted to say about this week’s work. I hope it will become a bit cooler next week and my working process will become more efficient and enjoyable.

All the best
Bella