Week 8: Learning Tools

This week I spent a lot of time to try new things in our areas in terms of  online-learning tools.

I have created wikispaces for preparing to teach my students. Moreover, I have designed Nicenet as well because the poor and vulnerable children. Nicenet is a greet to use because it is free for all.

But I really like the WeQuest beasc, it has good style.

Week 7 :This week I have learned three things

This week I have learned three things

Learner autonomy: Learning autonomy is not easy to make it happen for the students unless they have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in doing it. I have learned many useful websites from it. They are http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/elp/ is about the portfolio which is used for free, http://livemocha.com/ which is port, and many others.

The one-computer classroom: If we have only one computer to teach our students, we need to know how to manage it first. Then we need to plan and organize our tasks for both our students and ourselves. Next we need to take measure for what we have planned. And finally we need to check or evaluate our action.

Mobile devices are playing the important roles in helping students learn a second language, but teacher or students themselves should know what kinds of mobile phones to use in learning and what applications are suitable for helping their learning. We learned that Hayo Reinders suggests 20 ideas for using mobiles phones to learn a second language. Those ideas are as following:

            Idea 1: Use the Notes feature to collect everyday language

            Idea 2: Use the Camera feature to take pictures of text

            Idea 3: Use free programs to organize language samples

            Idea 4: Use the Voice Memo Recorder feature to record language from media outlets

            Idea 5: Use the Voice Memo Recorder feature to record conversation outside the classroom.

            Idea 6: Use the Text Messaging feature to reinforce vocabulary learning

            Idea 7: Use the free programs to make flashcards for mobile phones

            Idea 8: Use the Text Messaging feature for circular writing

            Idea 9: Use the Text Messaging feature for tandem learning

            Idea 10: Use the mobile phone to keep a blog

            Idea 11: Use the mobile phone for microblogging on Twitter

            Idea 12: Use the mobile phone for social networking

            Idea 13: Use the mobile phone for a language exchange

            Idea 14: Use the mobile phone for “phlogging”

            Idea 15: Use mobile phone memory to distribute listening material

            Idea 16: Use mobile phone to distribute reading material

            Idea 17: Use the mobile phone to play games

            Idea 18: Use the Voice Memo Recorder, Notes, and Calendar features to keep a portfolio

            Idea 19: Use the mobile phone to check student comprehension and get feedback

            Idea 20: Use mobile phone memory for research and data collection

I really like the website : www.gutenberg.org because it offers 47,338 free ebooks to download for teaching my students. By the way http://www.polleverywhere.com/ is very helpful for teachers to pose their survey questions to students.

Week 6: Student-centered large classes and interactive PowerPoint

I have learned many new points related to techniques of teaching large classes and how to make the interactive PowerPoint to teach students. Furthermore, I did many tasks as well to make improvement in my learning.

Techniques of instructing large classes are important for teachers to know clearly in order to teach students well as the five points(reduction of coercion, active learner involvement, experience before interpretation, avoidance of oversimplification, the value of silence) suggested by Alan C.McLean. So teachers need to scrutinize those points carefully before starting teaching. However, I have ever learned some techniques by Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw. I could also understand the importance of collaboration, small group learning activities through the tactics: Think, Pair, Share.

For technology, I have learned how to  set up the presentation slides on the web.

I hope these points are important for my plan because I am considering of using the WebQuest, Edmodo, or Moodle for sovling my problems.

Week 5: Project-based learning, WebQuests, and rubrics

We are in hope of getting familiar to new sources of ideas and tools to use for helping us to teach more effectively because this week have learned 3 more things:

1. - Project-based learning (PBL), "students work in groups to solve challenging problems that are authentic, curriculum-based and often interdisciplinary" (Sheppard and Stoller, 1995). This lesson can make us know the ten steps of PBL by Sheppard and Stoller(1995). 

• Step 1: Students and instructor agree on the theme for the project.
• Step 2: Students and instructor determine the final outcome of the project.
• Step 3: Students and instructor structure the project.
• Step 4: Instructor prepares students for the demands of information gathering.
• Step 5: Students gather information.
• Step 6: Instructor prepares students to compile and analyze data.
• Step 7: Students compile and analyze information
• Step 8: Instructor prepares students for the language demands of the final activity.
• Step 9: Students present the final product.
• Step 10: Students evaluate the project.

      We could know the seven traits of every good project needs by  John Larmer and John R. Mergendoller ,2010,http://www.ascd.org/cache/publications/educational_leadership/sept10/vol68/num01/Seven_Essentials_for_Project-Based_Learning.aspx. We have  also learned Purposeful Language Assessment about types of assessments, testing formats, and testing procedures from John M.Norris, 2000,http://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/50_3_10_norris.pdf. Moreover, we have learnt about the Twenty Common Testing Mistakes for EFL Teachers to Avoid by Grant Henning, 1982, http://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/50_3_8_henning.pdf.

  2. WebQuests, we have learnt that making a WebQuet is really helpful for teacher and students to help their teaching and learning go smoothly. We can make a WebQuest by  Zunal.com or we can go to http://www.webquest.org/ to learn more about making it.
 
3. Rubrics, we have learnt how to design our own rubrics for our own class through website: http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php. Here we don't need to spend much time on it to design any kinds of rubrics we want.

Week 4: New things learned this week

This week I have learned many new things such as the reading and writing websites and technology enhanced lesson plan. 

I can know more resources to teach my students and my staffs. Those are http://www.rong-chang.com/tutor.htm which is helpful for students to learn and improve their writing by themselves, http://www.edutopia.org/ which is useful for teaching reading and writing from kindergarten up to K12, https://www.academia.edu/ is what we can register to learn from many researchers and we can upload ours to share,too,  https://www.edmodo.com/ is wher we can make as our own classroom template for teaching and learning. I like www.edmodo.com the most because it can help me to create my own classroom template for teaching my students. I will use it for my teaching.

Moreover, I can also learn a new idea related to writing lesson plan based on technology. It is great thing that we can do to make an ease for teaching career. We can even learn techniques and format of writing lesson plan using technology.

I found that this week lessons can make our teaching career go smoothly.

Week 3: Reflection for this week

This week is really nice to move to the next step of upgrading my career. I have learnt new things _ Skill-building Websites for Aural/oral Skill and Saving Bookmarks with Delicious.

Through the lesson of Skill-building Websites for Aural/oral Skill, I can know the importance of teaching pronunciation, word stress, sentence stress, intonation, and so on. The websites which interest me a lot are http://www.pronuncian.com/Podcast/Default.asp, http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/english/english.html, http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/03/31/the-best-websites-for-learning-english-pronunciation/, and http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/speaking/teaching-ideas. They are very helpful for teaching pronunciation.

Moreover, I can learn how to save bookmarks with Delicious which can help me to keep bookmarks for reading and searching references. By the way I can also learn some ideas shared by my course mates.

I hope I will use those websites and ideas shared by my course mates for my teaching and sharing to my staffs to upgrade their own knowledge and their students'learning.

Thank all friends and instructors for making it happen.

What I have learned from the course up to this week.

I have learned a lot from the course since I started since 6 October 2014. I could know how to create the blog for my learning course for the first week. Then this week I can know how to use ABCD method as ac indicator to set clear objectives; moreover, I can describe the three kinds of objectives ( cognitive, affective, and psycho-motor) and Bloom's Taxonomy. I expect that I can use this method to define objectives well enough to teach my students and to share to my staffs as well. I also learned about web engines and techniques of searching effectively. Before I knew that only Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Investopedia are only the best engines to search, but now I can know more than these to help my teaching career move upwards. Partly, I have also learned how to use searching techniques so well. And I have learned some ideas from the course mates who are really kind in sharing their knowledge to make a better world.I really appreciate their kindness and instructor's ideas and help. I hope that the lessons for this week are very helpful for my improvement, my students, and my teaching staffs. It is really nice learning from you all.