This week I read Dimitrios Thanasoulas and David
Little’s articles about learner autonomy. Reading these two articles helps me
understand what is learner autonomy, although people may define the term
differently, and how could teachers help students achieve learner autonomy. As
to me, to achieve learner autonomy is simply as teach the students to learn how
to learn by themselves. As applied in teaching, I think the first thing for
teachers to do is to change their traditional role to a facilitator for the
students and their learning process. Then, I moved on to explore how to promote
learner autonomy in one-computer classroom and on mobile devices. After reading
about some activities and strategies on mobile devices and one-computer
classroom, I came up with an activity which I thought could promote learner
autonomy and posted it on Nicenet. What’s more, I learn to put up a
post on Padlet by watching a 3 minutes tutorial on Learnig and Teaching with
the Web (http://titova.ffl.msu.ru/tools-for-teachers-february-2012.html).
It is simple but interesting. I like Wallwisher very much and
now am still thinking about how to apply it in my teaching.
Besides all these work, I still focus on carrying out
my project. This week, I firstly presented my WebQuest to my students and
officially asking them to work on it. Then I found that it was somewhat difficult
for my students to follow up as the reading materials I gave them were
authentic, which were different from what they used to read, therefore I made
some changes by mainly narrowing down the reading scope for them. I know my students
are actively involved in the project and I can’t wait to see what they can present me next
week! 
11/17/2013
Week 6 Engaging Students
This week’s main focus was on
how to engage students especially in large classes with the help of technology.
And I find the most effective way for me to manage large classes and enhance
students learning experience is to use an interactive PowerPoint. I explored
several articles (Adding Interaction to Your PowerPoint Presentation, Adding
Multimedia to PowerPoint, Presenting with PowerPoint) related to the topic and
learned many practical skills of making PowerPoint more interactive. Then I
created a PowerPoint slide incorporated interactive elements like sound files,
images and quick-thinks and uploaded it to the class Wiki.
Another important thing for me to do is to
begin implementing the technology-related change in my class. After the study
of the previous week, I have decided to create a WebQuest for my final project.
The content of the WebQuest is based on one of the Chapters in our course book
I am teaching this semester. I am very glad that Sean had approved my idea
about this WebQuest and he also gave me some suggestions on helping my students
make their own WebQuests. But as a beginner of WebQuest, I think that is too
ambitious for me. So my present plan is to make my own WebQuest and walk my
students through it. With the combination of PBL and WebQuest, I could make a
change to our traditional way of teacher-centered teaching style and students
would genuinely experience autonomous learning under the guidance of the
teacher.
I devoted a lot of time
designing the WebQuest as it would be the key for my final project. I did come
across difficulties while making it but I managed. Here is the URL for my
WebQuest AIDS ABC on Zunal.com: http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=221506.
I am going to present the WebQuest to my students and ask them to work on it
next week. We will find out how the students would respond to it very soon.
11/10/2013
Week 5 Rubrics, Assessments, and PBL
This week, we are required to think about a
possible solution to the problems we have with our students. As I understand
that my students my have motivation problems, I believe that a
technology-enhanced learning process may rouse my students’ interests in
learning English. So I selected and shared the following links with my students
in our listening course this week:
Mike the Writing Tutor
Phonetics
Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab
Children’s Storybooks Online
Children’s Digital Library
The purpose is to find out what may possibly
grab the students’ attention and get them motivated in learning. So I didn’t
emphasize any of the links but just asked my students to explore according to
their own wish. Guess which one of them does my students like most? Mr. Mike!
Some of my students even spent a whole class of 40 min to chat with Mike,
generating information in English which could usually cost them for days to
produce, written or oral.
I am very happy with the finding but also
troubled by it. I am happy because I think I find a good tool to help my students
express themselves. They have completely no pressure chatting with Mike, and it
seems that Mike can always inspire them to talk. What troubles me is that I don’t
know how could I incorporate the website into my teaching. Students may feel
interested because this is a complete new experience for them, but if I don’t
work out a good plan to apply the site it will not be long for my students to
lose interest. I myself also have no experience of using this kind of tool
before, so if anyone could give me any tip on that, I would be very grateful.
11/03/2013
Week 4 Reading, Writing, and Vocabulary Skills
I enjoyed reading materials of this week as I
am very interested in how could technology help us improve students’reading
and writing skills. I am convinced that online materials can be extremely
useful helping students to read extensively, and I also learned about how could
I integrate these learning materials into my class. Now I want to say something
about another article that I read this week: Using the Internet in ESL Writing
Instruction by Jarek Krajka.
This article explores how could Internet be
used as a teaching aid to help students improve their writing skills. The
author has analyzed 11 different writing genres as examples to show the readers
how could Internet be incorporated into different kinds of writing practice. On
the whole Krajka emphasizes on three basic elements: websites, e-mail and web
publishing. I am impressed by how creatively Krajka uses the website for
students to collect information which they would later apply in their writing.
I find the websites he recommends are abundant in resources for both teachers
and students. As for e-mail and web publishing, I kind of find it may be a
little bit outdated. I think e-mail can only be used as a tool for students to
submit their writings. Of course teachers can correct these writings online and
send them back to students, however I don’t think this has
made a great difference to the traditional way of collecting homework and
giving feedback. This article was written more than ten years ago, up to now,
we have already got more advanced tools like Wiki to help monitor students
writing process, to give feedback, and students can work collaboratively to
complete a writing assignment online. As for web publishing, it is a good
post-writing activity, but I don’t think teachers
needs to spend time creating web pages for every classes of theirs. We can borrow
platforms like Nicenet or Blackboard for students to use. It will save a lot of
trouble and time. Anyway, these are just my personal thoughts.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)