8th week ... first draft, online exercises and technology tools

This week has been with a lot of work on the webskills course. We presented our first draft for our final project. It was a little hard to write it because of the time. Fortunaley, I could finish it and I was able to continue with my blog project class. There were many positive reactions toward it from my students and I was really glad to listen to them. They are working hard on the blog to develop their listening and on the Facebook group discussions they have about the listening. My Basic English students also presented their first listening answers sheets from last week and they did really well. I hope they may continue working this pace in the following two more weeks that are missing to finish our semester

In our webskills course, we reviewed may online exercises that can develop students' fluency and we also checked some really interesting websites. I particularly found that some of them provide relevant help for teachers to create different activities like crosswords puzzles, elaborate flashcards and exams and I found them really helpful but the one that highly caught my attention was the "Hot Potatoes" program because its six different applications may give a wide variety of autonmy on students.
Before I installed it, I thought it was going to be difficult but it was not at all. I tried almost of all them this morning and to be honest I liked them all because they are meaningful and they also help students increase their autonomy and they make them feel free to make mistakes and try to develop the activities over and over again.
Also, I checked, but I have not tried yet, ANVILL. This seems to be a great tool for teachers to implement more interactive classes because it allows teachers to incorporate different tools that may help students build their confidence and creativity. This resource looks interesting but it takes more preparation and it seems to me more time consuming than other resources.

Also, I created an online exercise for my class using Jquiz. I read a little about how to embed it into my class blog and I created one reading comprehension practice for an exam we had last Friday. Some of my students mentioned they did pretty good and they really liked it. They also mentioned that we should have some practices for out written test on that way because they could practice more and more. I did not expect them to tell me that but I am seriously thinking of helping them getting prepared for this exam as well. This week has been with a lot of work but unfortunately two more weeks are missing to finish the amazing course.