WEEK 2 - A VERY PRODUCTIVE WEEK!!!

Before this course, I had done all my academic searches using Google and Alta Vista. However, during this week I have had the opportunity to explore some new search engines. One of the them is NoodleTools’ page http://www.noodletools.com/  and after I clicked on “Choose the best search” I got amazed at the many resources it has. The best thing about Noodle Tools is that the information is classified into topic areas.

I used iSeek Education http://education.iseek.com/iseek/home.page  which is a functional search engine all educators should use. In fact, I will recommend it to my colleagues. There I looked for information related to EFL teaching methodology and language assessment.


I also tried http://www.americanrhetoric.com/   where you can find videos, audio files of American public speeches lectures, debates, interviews and events. This is very good resource especially for students who need to develop their listening and oral skills in English

This morning I also explored http://www.infoplease.com/almanacs.html  and I searched for information about some of my webmates’ countries of origin. This website can be very useful for my EFL classroom projects about describing countries.  Well, as you can see the list is long, so Iencourage you to try Noodle Tools by yourselves.
Besides search engines, this week we also read and learned about the ABCD Method to write clear objectives. As an English teacher, I found this method very useful and functional to write my lesson plan objectives. I normally wrote my lesson objectives considering three elements, A audience, B behavior and C condition. Now I understand that the D element is vital to specify the degree of mastery I want my students to perform a task. By reading all my cybermates’ lesson objectives I got clearer idea of how to use this method. You can read about the ABCD Method at http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/learningdesign/objectives/writingobjectives/

This week I also started to think about my final project which consists on implementing an innovative technology-inspired technique in one of the classes I teach.

GETTING STARTED WITH MY SELF-REFLECTIVE TEACHING BLOG!!!

I started this Webskills course this morning and the first activity I did was to join the class discussion and introduce myself on Nicenet. It is really good to have the opportunity to be part of this course with people from all over the world.
After that, I created this blog. Well, I had already created it some time ago, but I had not really used it, so now it is going to be a good time to retake it. It took me a while to decide on the desing. I hope you like it!

I also started doing the readings for this week and one of them is about the use blogs for EFL teaching. http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/blogging-elt

I found out that blogging offers many advantages to teachers and students, not only for the academic aspect, but also to build better relationships among students and teachers in a class. For example, I think that by creating a blog and using it, my students will have more opportunities to put into real practice all the knowledge they have about English, especially because we live in a small city in Ecuador where there are not many chances for students to communicate using English. The reading also introduces some innovative ideas to use blogs as well as useful tips to keep students motivated and interested in using them. I think my students would like to get involved in an International link-ups project and in the Mystery guest activity. They would also like the Photoblog!!! As a teacher, I will also learn a lot from all my webmates. So I think blogging is a very good and useful tool for the EFL classroom.