My reflection on Week Three

My third week on Web Skills

          Web skills! It gets better with this course every single day as each day opens up into a whole new surprise. The exposure is something beyond expectation. Now I feel different and changed my somewhat limited perspective of our world into a wider scope. The web is undeniably a very big world with stocks and piles of resources of every sort, and means of communications.  One can simply say, “Man has digitized his world.” Accessing to information has now become at a click further.

          The reading articles for this week were supportive to our learning. To begin with the article on the use of authentic listening materials at fostering the listening skill was indeed very helpful. I believe it brought some perspectives to our teaching endeavors.  Authentic materials such like TV, radios and other related materials apart from what they contribute at keeping students abreast with the current news and updates they also are very instrumental at boosting the language proficiencies of the learners. The article was on the pros and cons of each authentic material and was very informative. Actually such phenomena were never new for me because in my teaching experience I had implemented such method.  It was when I was an English teacher in Holy Savior High School in Asmara. They were 12^th grade students and it means a lot to them to become successful in the mastery of the four basic language skills because they were in their transitional time for tertiary education.  Thus, to help improve their listening and there by boost their speaking skills, I let them watch the BBC news. The class was in the afternoon so they had to follow the GMT news from the BBC news desk. They followed this twice a week for a half semester. It was like a pilot program, and I found it   very rewarding particularly at enhancing speaking in class. For the post listening involves their views on the eventualities of the events they followed there in the news. Yet, such method also has its limitations. One of which is time constraint, for to include such a method as an ongoing learning process, it requires a lot of time. Either the students must come to school to learn nothing but English. As a solution the teacher may assign the task of following the news to be done at home, still this also deprives the pre listening activities (brainstorming questions) students must have before going on with the listening. The second reading article that I read was on computer assisted language learning (CALL). I found that article timely and important for teachers looking to see the significance that technology has to their language teaching. Integrating technology into ones teaching makes learning simple and enjoyable.

          The websites we had to search for this week were quite different from the previous week. This is because they are particularly focused on English language teaching. We have come to identify websites that we can use as resources in our teaching endeavors. Each web site has its qualities and area or skill it emphasized and all organized to serve the various English learning levels. Especially there was this particular website: http:www. Esl-lab.com, which stood out for me out of all the other sites. One particular reason I liked this site is for it targets the listening skill across all learning levels. It also follows the right approach to implementing a listening lesson beginning with some brainstorming questions as pre listening, then the listening itself usually in the form of dialogues which makes it rather interesting to follow, and finally provides post listening questions.

          The task assigned to us for this week involved getting our Delicious page and linking it to our course’s wiki. As one of the tasks required of us to do, I have read it during our first week when we had to search the whole course website‘s contents. Back then there were a lot of words I couldn’t find a single meaning for. One of such words was the word “Delicious.” After all, I understand the word delicious as a common compliment after taking a morsel of food. Still I can’t get it how such word ended as a name for a page. I would greatly appreciate if anyone who has an idea on it to write me as a comment. Anyways it seemed quite scary at first signing into Delicious, but practically it is much easier than signing up for a blogging. Whenever I access into certain websites I commonly come across this message that says “Book mark us”, I never understood until now that the purpose of delicious is to bookmark websites that you think will serve you a purpose in life. It also makes it easier for you to sign in from the URL there in your delicious rather than trying to remember each URL or write it on the piece of paper or mobile phone, and if either of them gets lost  get frustrated; simply to explain a bank of URLs’ that someone can access right away from. In short, it was quite a privilege for me to open my delicious page successfully and link it into our course’s wiki. I had a great time and experience!

          Last but not least, the project task #2 was something enlightening. It gave me a glimpse of what my project report must look like. I read a number of projects there in our course website for week 3, and out of all I specifically chose to respond on one project from Burkina Faso entitled  “Working with a Large Class of Grade 13 "Terminale" Students” by Tendouinde Bruno Nikiema. The action research basically focused on how technology can overcome the barrier of large class size at attaining certain instructional objectives. The teacher in that research explains how he has used the email at boosting learners’ writing skills. The stages he followed to study the significance of that technology has helped him arrive safely at achieving something at the end. He managed to instill team work and self-motivation amongst his learners, the two qualities that are cherished a lot at creating supportive learning class room.

          To conclude, like the past few weeks, this week has also been quite interesting and remarkable at broadening my outlook towards the web and my general perspective of the world.