Delicious Week for Listening (Week 3)

Hello Everybody,

I always had the problem to bookmark all my favorite sites on my computer, because I never remembered the URLs whenevern I wanted to access them from different computers. This week, we learned that we can bookmark our favorite pages and access them any time from any computer. You need to have internet of course. We can do that using Delicious.com. It is easy to use and you can share your sites with colleagues and students. I also want to thank all the participants in this class for sharing their delicious pages. I found very helpful sites for teaching the different skills, especially listening.

Speaking of listening, it is amazing the number of resources we can find online to help our students develop this skill. We can also expose the students to authentic material for them to use in or out of classes. As I have mentioned in one of my posts, this is the only chance our students might have to have contact with native speeakers of the target language.

In her article Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials, Miller suggests a process for presenting listening activities in our classes, pre, while, and post listening activities. I have found this process very effective for the students to activate their knowledge of the topic in the pre-listening activities, the second stage, students are given different tasks related to the recording, and in the third stage, they can do activities which allow them to know how well they understood the recordings.

I am looking forward to the next week to continue learning about how we can implement the use of technology for our classes.

Cristian

Web Searching and Learning Objectives (Week 2)

Hello,

This week we had some very interesting tasks in our course. First, I learned how to search for information for our classes using different search engines. To be honest, I had been using only Google to get the information I needed. Now I know that I can have access to different sites depending on what information I am looking for my classes. I can also share these information with my students and colleagues in my institution. I am sure they will be surprised to know that there are more specialized sites depending on their needs.


The second task this week was on learning objectives. We learned how to write clear objectives using the ABCD method. I found this method easier than the one we are using in my institution. It can be an alternative way for us to write objectives and I will propose it to the other teachers. Guess what? Next week I will have the opportunity to share it with my teaching practicum class because the students asked me to give them some extra practice on writing objectives. I am looking forward to hearing their comments on the ABCD method.

I also want to thank my colleagues and the instructors in this course for the valuable information and reflections. I am learning a lot from all of the comments you post.

Cristian

My First Experience with Blogs (Week 1 Reflections)

Hello,
This is my first experience creating a blog. I must say that I thought it was more difficult to create one, but it does not take much time to do it. From now on, I am going to encourage people to use bolgs and start this new experience with the web.
I am looking forward to posting the different assignments and comments from the online course that I am taking. I also want to receice feedback from the other teachers taking the course.

So, let's start learning about the different applications that blogs can have to improve our teaching-learning process!!