Week 4 - Reflections

Hi, everyone.

Hope that you all had a great week!

We completed a lot of tasks this week.

1.        An investigation into four new websites that we had never used before. I personally liked Breaking News English, and I found that it would be helpful at any level and for any purposes.  The focus is on reading, but there are many activities which students can do for pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading fun.

2.        We read two articles, one about using CALL for writing and one about e-books in the classroom.  Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction (2000)
http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html

Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books (2004)
http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Liang-ExtensiveReading.html

3.       Next, I tried to do some extra reading and looked at the following articles:

• E-mailing to Improve EFL Learners' Reading and Writing Abilities: Taiwan Experience (1999)
  http://iteslj.org/Articles/Liao-Emailing.html
• Using Technology to Assist in Vocabulary Acquisition and Reading Comprehension (2007)
  http://iteslj.org/Articles/Constantinescu-Vocabulary.html
  
  
• Microsoft's "Lesson Plans for Teachers" page, for augmenting your lesson with technology:
  http://www.microsoft.com/Education/en-us/teachers/plans/Pages/index.aspx

4.        I created a technology-based lesson plan based on a model being used by Baltimore Public School System.

 

5.       Finally, I thought more about my final project for this course. I looked at the needs of my students and thought about a problem that could be solved with technology.

 

Outside of this class, I am presently attending the International Writing Centers Association Conference in San Diego now.  I am presenting about a paper that I have written about “Utilizing Tutors in the Classroom.” This is a new initiative which I have started the past few years, first at my previous university in Atlanta, Georgia and now at my current job at the University of Macau.  Now, that I have the basis for tutors in the classroom, I need to think of ways to incorporate technology into this project as well.

Overall, this was a great week. I enjoyed it a lot and learned many things.

Back to Hong Kong on Monday!  I hate that long trans-Pacific flight!

 

Take care, everyone!

Evelyn

 

Week 3 - Reflections

Hello, everyone.

This week was a challenging week for me, but I found that I really did learn a lot.  First, I had a great mixture of not only online instruction from this course but also of in person training at a conference this week.  I am happy to share my experiences with you this week.

The first thing I did for our Webskills course was to read the following articles:

1.        Technology Tip of the Month by Deborah Healey at http://pages.uoregon/edu/dhealey/techtips/sept200.html

2.       Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials by Lindsay Miller

3.       New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation by Maria Grazia Busa

4.       The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills by Julia Gong

After reading these articles, I chose two websites that help with listening skills and commented on those on our discussion thread. I later chose two more and commented on those accordingly, for a total of four new websites that I have added to my “favorites.”

Next, I read a sample final project from a previous webskills course, and discussed my opinion of that sample.

On Sunday, I finally had time to open my Delicious account.  My account can be found at www.delicious.com/borntotravel1970.  However, to my surprise, it was harder to figure it out than I had expected.  I hope I have time later this week to try to figure Delicious out.

In addition to a busy week in Courtney’s class, I had a busy week of presentations and conferences.  First, I was invited to deliver two lectures at Wuhan University of Technology in Wuhan, China.  I talked about some of my research on teachers’ beliefs on Focus on Form, grammar instruction and error correction.  I also got to share my experiences in using a writing program called “Criterion” and how that site is great at helping learners to find their written errors.  I later provided a workshop to undergraduates at the university on globalization and being an international citizen.  The technology that I shared with them included Blogger and Nicenet, and they told me about a Chinese site called QQ.  For Japanese majors, I shared with them a site called Mixi which is a social site as well as a blog site that I have used for many years now.

However, the best part of my week was spent in attending the Chinese International SLA (Second Language Acquisition) conference at Huazhong University of Science and Technology also in Wuhan.  The highlight was that I got to hear Douglas Biber speak about Discourse Analysis, and I spent some time with him afterwards in discussing applications of discourse concordance tools in academic writing courses.  This was amazing for me, as I had never used concordancing much in my classrooms.  I had always thought of Discourse Analysis as a great research tool, but never as a teaching tool.    I hope that after experimenting with some of the activities which Dr. Biber and I discussed that I can share some of them with everyone here in our Webskills course.

Well, as you can see, it was a busy week.  I am glad that I could learn so much in just one week!

Take care, everyone!

Evelyn

Week 2 - Reflections

This week we have been learning about utilizing different search engines for finding information about a variety of things.  We have studied the A-B-C-D model and used this as a basis for writing outcomes for one of our own classes.  Finally, we have taken the first step in our final project - which is to analyze our students and write in detail about the technology which the students have access to both in and out of the classroom.

What this means is that the week was busy but very productive.

In my position overseeing the English Language Centre at my univeristy, I am particulary interested in writing outcomes, not only for the classroom, but also for the entire programme.  I think that I have always been good about addressing outcomes and making sure that students understand the outcomes both for the end of the semester and for individual classes.  For example, I always write the day's agenda on the whiteboard so that students know what to expect in the class period, and they know what goals I have set for them to be able to accomplish by the end of the period.  However, what I think that I still need to learn is how to write outcomes for my program, and how to make sure that I follow through on these outcomes and make sure they are accomplished.

This semester, I am hosting Professional Development seminars for all of my faculty on Independent Learning and Autonomy.  We have workshops one a month for two hours on this topic.  I have objectives for each meeting, although only clear ones for the topics which we have finished already.

September:  Teachers will use discussion and research findings to explore the amount of autonomy which we are currently giving to our students.  By the end of the session, we will be able to accurately put a percentage on the average amount of autonomy we are giving.

October:  What resources are available to students?  Through handouts and looking at our independent learning site, we will be able to accurately determine which areas we have abundant resources and which are lacking.  We will work as a team to fill in the gaps of missing features.

November:  Regarding assessing independent learning
December:  Guest speaker - Phil Benson - will educate us more on IL
December:  Round table discussion - what have we learned about IL

So, what I want to do is work on writing better outcomes for this PD series, and I want to adjust my current program outcomes.

I hope this course can help me in this process.

Clickers

Hi, everyone.

A new technology that I have recently learned how to use in the classroom is clickers.  I assume that most people have probably heard of clickers even though they might not have used them before.  I took part in a teacher training session on clickers a few years ago when the instructor used the group of teachers to compete in a game using clickers.  He monitored our progress through race cars.  After each question was answered by us using the clickers, our race cars would either advance or stay the same on the race track on the screen.  I remember at that time thinking what a wonderful technique this would be for students, who really could enjoy this type of competition. 

However, years past, and I had forgotten all about clickers - until recently.  I am attending a professional development series at my current university, and we learned how to use clickers from the teacher's side.  We developed our own questions via powerpoint, and learned how to set up a clicker game.  My university has hundreds of these clickers available, so now I finally feel confident in using them in my classroom.

In November, I am going to lead a teacher training exercise in my department on using clickers, and I want to see how creative my teachers get in using them.

Clickers are a great way to get information fast from a large group of students.  Not only for games, but you could easily do a survey or even a quiz with clickers.  Anything that is multiple choice would work with clickers (as long as there are only 6 choices).

I am wondering if any of you have used clickers yet, and what your students reactions were.

Thanks!
Evelyn

Evelyn's First Blog on Blogger

Hello, everyone.

This is my first blog on Blogger. I have done some other types of blogs before. For example, I keep a travel blog on a Japanese social site called Mixi, and I have blogged a few times on Yahoo. 

As far as professionally, I have my writing students at university keep blogs on Moodle.  The problem that I have had with this, though, is getting everyone to participate fully.  Since blogging is usually only about 10% of the grade, many of the students don't take it seriously.  They think, "Oh, 10% is just not worth the effort."  What they do is just upload a photo with a few sentences, and then they think they are done. They don't truly interact with other classmates, but just leave some simple comments like, "That's cool."  It also seems that they expect me to edit everything they write, even though I explain to the students that blogging is to help develop fluency and to encourage group discussion.  I don't want to spend time correcting all of their blog entries.  I want the students to feel "free" to write what they like, whether the grammar or spelling is correct or not.  Does anyone have any ideas about how to encourage students to blog more freely?

I am interested in using Blogger and seeing how I can apply it to classroom settings.