Week 4 ... Reading and writing websites and planning lessons incorporating technology

Another Sunday afternoon and I just finished doing my homework for this week in my online course. This week has been really challenging for me as I have been really busy at work teaching, administering tests and checking them. Because of this, it has been a little hard to catch up with my course. Nevetheless, I have learned many important things week with the readings and suggested websites focused on reading and writing exercises. At the beginning of the week, I had the opportunity to read two very interesting articles, one was about using the internet in ESL instruction and the other one was about using the internet to teach literature to children. Both articles share very helpful ideas for teachers in order to incorporate activities to enhance the reading and writing skills in their students. On the other hand, we were also provided another two articles on how to incorporate technology to our lesson plans. It was a nice experience to read them because I also had a the opportunity to check how this works by checking one database with lesson plans from the Baltimore County Public Schools Office of Instructional Technology. 

Besides this, I designed an ABCD objective based on one of the two websites I shared with my classmates of the course.  The two websites that I found really interesting were: www.manythings.org/ and www.breakingnewsenglish.com. Both of them present lots of activities that are focused on assisted learning activities and they provide very useful tools to teach our classes. We can find lots of readings and listening exercises. 

What caught my attention about the first website is that it brings activities that can be developed by using iphones, ipads or cell phones. This is really good because this is "trendy" nowadays and it may be really useful for the students. The second website is really amazing and I simply loved it because it presents updated news with lesson plans and all the activities to develop the class. 

As a last activitiy for this week, all the participants of the course were asked to design a lesson plan based including technology as much as we could. To be honest, it was not difficult at all because I sometimes include technology in my classes and I am planning to develop this lesson plan focused on simple past this coming week with my basic English students.

As I mentioned before, it was a very busy week but the best of all is that I am enjoying my course and I hope to continue doing it this coming week. 

Week 3 ... Oral/aural skills websites and Delicious

It is Sunday afternoon and I am done with my third week on my webskills course. Frankly, I never expected I could learn so many things in such a short period of time. This week started by reading two out of three articles that were provided by our tutor. I chose reading By Maria Busa on New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation and the other one was written by Juila Jong that was focused on the employment of CALL in teaching Second/Foreign Language speaking skills.  We were also asked to take a look at some lesson plans and suggested websites that are related for English language learning and I put especially attention to two of them. One of them is Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab (http://www.esl-lab.com). I highly recommend this website because it presents different kinds of listening exercises for different levels. On the other hand, we can also find listening quizzes, listening quizzes for academic purposes, videos, teaching tips and links for supplementary material. Additionally, we can also download the tracks and videos clips by installing some plugins to our computers. 

The other website I am recommending is found on the Best Sites to Practice Speaking English(Larry Ferlazzo) and its name is The Art of Storytelling (http://www.artofstorytelling.org) This website may be useful to develop the four macro skills and it can be implemented for any kind of student who can structure sentences in English. The best of all is that you no not have to Log into the website and it is free. The peculiarity of this site is that you can create a story by recording your own voice or typing a script. It is really funny to do so because you are free to choose the genre, background, characters and objects to the story. Besides that, at the end there is an option in which you may select sending your story to several e-mails so people may read or listen to it.

Additionally, I also created my account on “Delicious” (www.delicious.com). This was the first time I saw this website and I find it very interesting because it has many features that are not found in other site. Perhaps the most peculiar characteristic is that users do not need to keep a record of their favorite websites in their web browser. That means that I can easily log into this web space and click on the previously saved link and I can have access to it. Having managed the bookmarks efficiently is a good way to avoid having problems in the future. You can also tag the links you save and at the same time look for information by typing any Key word.

Besides all the readings and activities I had during this week, I could analyze one final project report from a previous Webskills course participant. By reading this project, I have been able to start thinking about my final report as well. To be honest, I have not made up my mind but I am expected to have a better idea in the following weeks.  

Second week is gone ... ABCD and Web Searching

Well, this is my second reflective post. Up to this point of the course, every has gone well but I am a little bit concerned about myself and the tasks that I am "supposed" to do as a teacher. My word in quotations comes because I sometimes take for granted that I am doing the right things but suddenly I get to know that conformism comes to my teaching style. I try to be honest to myself and what I learned this week has helped me to have a different perspective about writing clear objectives and searching for valuable information on the web. This week has been an eye-opening experience and I am looking forward to applying all the things I am learning.

I have been writing course and class objectives for my classes since I was in studying in the university and I have used different methods. In fact, it was difficult to come up with class objectives at the beginning but I got used of doing it because I was asked to design lesson plans when I started working. However, writing objectives became monotonous and sometimes tedious for me in the last couple of months because I was following the same model. Fortunately, this week I learned a new way of writing clear objectives and it has changed my perspective on how I have to work. Our tutor from the online course provided three very useful documents related to this issue and they helped me going back to my starting point to see why class objectives are necessary not only for myself as a teacher but also for my students as learners. The method I learned in my online course is called “ABCD” and its name comes from the “Audience, Behavior, Condition and Degree” acronym.

To be honest, it was the first time I see this method and that is why I am really concerned because there is still much to know about this area and I have not been constantly upgrading my knowledge about teaching. Luckily, courses like the one I am taking are focused on helping teachers, like me, to have the opportunity to learn more about being a better professional. Furthermore, if I contrast this new method for me with the one I was implementing before, I can see that the ABCD method is more concise and specific which is better for me because I am a very practical person. I really like this method because it is a starting point to understand who my students are, what I expect them to do, how they will learn based on the learning environment and how much the students will accomplish.

Moreover, to see if the participants of the course understood how to apply this method, we were asked to design one objective applied to one of the classes we are teaching. For instance, I design one and this is the one I came up with: 

Description: 
In my Basic English class, there are 18 students who are 17-20. This is their first 8 hour weekly class in English in the university and they are studying to become teachers of English.

ABCD Objetive:
"C:Given sentences in simple present tense written in strips of paper, A: the students, B: will be able to re-write the sentences in simple past in their notebooks D: with no spelling or tense errors."

The second task assigned for this week was to think about the search engines we use to gather information for our classes. In order to do so, we were recommended to visit the website http://www.noodletools.com and we were asked to analyze two of the websites presented there. I took a look at some of them, and two that caught my attention were: 

http://www.intute.ac.uk
This search engine is very helpful and simple. It provides very technical information from many academic sources that come from universities and very reliable institutions all around the world. The information can be gathered specifying the title, description or keyword about the topic. On the other hand, the site itself tells the researcher that there is another option on the site itself if there was not enough data. It also specifies that this information does not contain the same quality as it does from the main source on the page. As this website was new for me, I was curious to try it out and I searched for information related to English consonants classification. The result showed more than fifty websites with journals, reports, projects, researches and articles. I really recommend this web page because it may be useful to find information about different areas as it shows studies and academic papers. 

http://www.ipl.org/div/askus/
It is a really interesting web site in which we may find solutions to doubts related to specific topics. A person needs to fill a simple form in which you type your question and e-mail and trained professional librarian volunteers and graduate students in library science programs will answer the questions. Personally, I tried this tool by typing a doubt I had about my phonetics class. Surprisingly, in less than one day I found an answer in my e-mail account. I found this website very useful because it is very efficient and accurate. I am planning to use this tool more often to have personalized answers with reliable information that is hard to find in books or in the web.

I have to admit that I have learned many things this week and this makes me feel happy and satisfied because this course has been really useful to me. I hope to continue learning more new things during this coming week. 

First week reflections

Well, this is my first post in my blog. It has been a little bit difficult for me to catch up on posting information in previous logs, so keeping this blog updated is going to be really challenging for me.


This blog is going to be focused on sharing my experience and thoughts about the online course I am currently taking. This course is provided by the University of Oregon on the spring of the year 2013 and it deals with helping teachers to build skills through the interactive web.


This has been a week for the participants to know the generalities of the course and the procedures to follow during these 10 weeks. At the beginning, I was sort of scared because this is the first time I am taking an online course, and I had some doubts last week. Hopefully, I have been receiving very useful information in my e-mail from my tutor, Ms Donna Shaw, and this has reduced my anxiety a lot.


I had lots of expectations before the course started and I have been learning many things since the very first day. I learned how to log into http://www.nicenet.org and alll the information and tasks are assigned there, so I have been constantly checking the updates in this website. Furthermore, I introduced myself to the group and I also commented in a couple of posts that other participants have made. On the other hand, I have also read very relevant information about online discussions, weblogs for ESL teachers, and to create a blog.


I think this has been a very interesting week and I am looking forward to continue learning more and more in the following weeks