Week 4: To Bend Over Backwards

I would like to preface this week’s reflections with this idiom, which means ‘to do as much as you possibly can to get the desired results, perhaps more than what would be expected’. This video is uploaded from http:// www.manythings.org/b/e/4647/.


Why have I chosen this particular idiom?

Because :
1. It reflects exactly my efforts undertaken during this week. This week, alongside my course assignments, I started to do e- marking of the writing essays for the National Exams, which are taken annually for those who wish to continue studying at higher educational institutions. And this marking process will probably go on for several weeks. For this reason, this week was particularly hard in terms of the great amount of time spent in front of the computer.

2. It demonstrates how actively I can use the indicated links: http://www.manythings.org/ is also one of my favorites. This particular piece is a demonstration of teaching pronunciation with idioms.

3. If I succeed in uploading the video, it will also demonstrate how my web skills are developing.

This week’s assignments focused on’ Skill-building Websites for Reading/Writing Skills and Technology-enhanced Lesson Plans’. As usual, we were given four blocks of assignments:

a) We were to read some articles about using CALL in writing and reading activities:http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html/.
http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Liang-ExtensiveReading.html/.
and discuss our ideas in our posts on the Nicenet.

b) We were to explore several websites on reading/vocabulary, as well as some of the multi-skill websites (which I have bookmarked on my Delicious page:
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/.
http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/.
http://www.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html/.
http://a4esl.org/.
Then we were to look at some technology-enhanced lesson plans: http://ledtech.tennessee.edu/~bobannon/lesson_plan.htm/.
and prepare our own lesson plan with technology.

c) In our Project task we were to think about some teacher-related and student-oriented issues that technology might help with.
d) And traditionally, our Reflective Blogs.

Thus, I had to bend over backwards to do all these assignments before the deadline, which I have managed, and now it's for Deborah to judge whether I did it successfully or not this time.

All the best

Bella

P.S. Sadly,I wasn't able to upload the video this time, but I'll keep trying and I hope, I can do it.Meanwhile, you can watch it on the link I gave above.