Webskills Course - Week Four Reflections

Introduction

How fast time flies and nobody has any control over that! However, one can always think of ways in which how the time is spent. Guess the weekly reflection is an endeavour in that direction too.

What I did and learned

This weeks Webskills course focused on Reading and Writing using technology. Like always there were four different assignments to do. There were couple of readings to do too.

Out of the readings I liked Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books by Ling. As part of the Nicenet discussion I posted how I'll make use of ideas mentioned in this article to develop a lesson of my own.

Then there was a distinct strand on corpora. I don't make use of corpus much in my teaching and was surprised to see so much of enthusiasm from my classmates on how to integrate this into language teaching, especially vocabulary teaching. My curiosity to know more about corpus took me to a post on Onestopenglish website titled Introduction to corpora.

The second task was to come up with a technology enhanced lesson plan. I took a while to do this. I went through couple of my classmates' lesson plans before garnering the confidence to do one of my own. I thought of using technology and the internet to raise learners' awareness on current affairs and in the process work on their language and study skills. Learners of our era are fortunate to have access to a variety of resources - print as well as digital - around to enhance their learning. Sadly, many students don't make use of this either because they don't know about them or don't know how to make use of them. Classrooms in such contexts can introduce the resources as well as show learners how to make use of these resources.

My lesson plan which is open for comments can be accessed by clicking here.

There's a final project task that is left now and I know there's a step that I'm lagging behind and can now sense how that has to be taken care in order to do this.

Apart from all these I learned how to spice up my blog by adding blog roll (that can be seen on the right side) which in a way will help me to keep a track of the latest posts from my classmates.

Classroom application

The sites that I got exposed to in this week can in deed help me in integrating technology in the classroom. I knew technology or the internet is just a tool in my hands to enhance learning experience of my students and nothing more.