WEEK 8: A WEEK TO “PLAY” WITH TECHNOLOGY!

My instructor, Donna Shaw, gave me a useful piece of advice during this course. It is not to be afraid of technology and just play, play and play until I find out how to use it. As we know human beings, no matter their age, enjoy playing. Playing allows us to develop our imagination, creativity, and problem-solving abilities which lead to LEARNING. As I mentioned in one of the Nicenet posts, I consider myself a “digital immigrant” who is struggling to catch up with all the new advances in technology so this suggestion has encouraged me to try new things.


This week’s most important topic was the use of ANVILL, which stands for A National Virtual Language Lab.

It is a free Course Management System (CMS) developed by Jeff Magoto, Director of the University of Oregon's Yamada Language Center and with whom we the opportunity to interact on Nicenet during this week. With ANVILL teachers can develop their students’ aural/oral skills through their tools: Voiceboards, Practice Recorder, Quizzes, Livechat, and TCasting. Personally, I think that the use of ANVILL has two main strengths: motivation and collaboration. Motivation because with ANVIL students can listen to news, watch video clips, and submit voice or video-based assignments which offers a new and more appealing approach to learning. The second strength is collaboration. Students can get involved in projects which let them interact not only with classmates and teacher, but also with people from other countries. For more information you can check this link: http://ylclab.uoregon.edu/groups/anvillhelp/wiki/48305/Units_and_Lessons.html

I also learned to create teaching materials such as: word search, bingo, crossword puzzles, and board games using this web site. http://www.toolsforeducators.com/

Regarding evaluation, we checked Hot Potatoes, at http://hotpot.uvic.ca/  This tool can be used to create matching, cloze, scrambled sentence, and multiple choice exercises and crossword puzzles. In addition, I checked Easy Test Maker http://www.easytestmaker.com/default.aspx  to create paper tests.

GOOGLE was very used this week. I used Google sites to create my class wiki. I also used Google docs to create a survey.

Besides learning to “play” with these ICT tools, other important tasks of this week were the presentation and peer-evaluation of the first draft of our PROJECT PLANS. I have to thank my partner for the feedback the feedback she gave me. Her suggestions will help to improve work. As you can see, this week has brought meaningful and memorable learning experiences!!!