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.