Week 3 reflections

   I think that the 3rd week was a  very fruitful week because we have been introduced to several new things. 

It is very nice that now we have created Delicious pages where we can find our favorite websites (at least to me this was very good and helpful). 

Amongst other new and important things that I've learned during this week are the strategies on  building  aural/oral skills. It was a great week because we had the opportunity to be introduced to different strategies and ways on how to build these skills. We also shared different useful links, and  fortunately, I've been already able to use some of them with my students. 

The first link that I used directly in class was  www.esl-lab.com, there students could do some listening exercises directly in the computer, and I saw that it already had a good impact on them. After this exercise I recommended some websites where they can practice their listening and speaking  also at home, they are: livemocha, bbc.com.uk, and, real - english.com. The advantage of these sites is that the students have the possibility to practice directly with authentic material.

Finally, I'm very glad that now I'm able to teach my students that they can use the web also for their education, because till now they used it only for fun. But, after using the above-mentioned links they said that also learning English through this way is fun, so I can see that this new way of teaching already began to have some good impact on students, and it's also a great experience for me.

Teaching Pronunciation with Jazz Chants - TEFLVideos.com

Teaching pronunciation

While searching for some material about how to teach pronunciation, I found a very interesting article about "The Hows and Whys of Teaching Pronunciation" written by  Shelley Vernon in  http://www.teachingenglishgames.com.  The author in this article describes different stages of teaching pronunciation, but amongst all these stages she also incorporated, according to me, a very important point "How not to Teach Pronunciation," where she states the mistakes teachers do when they practice pronunciation. For more details you can click on this link:   http://www.teachingenglishgames.com/Articles/Teaching_Pronunciation.htm .

 

Week 3: New listening activities

Today I tried some listening activities with the 10th and 11th grade students who study fashion design. I tried a listening exercise called "CLOTHING STYLES" in  www.esl-lab.com.  After telling them the title, I saw that they started to be very enthusiastic about the exercise and in a way they were also motivated.
According to an article  that I read about improving listening skills in http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk, it is enormously important to motivate the students before starting with listening activities with a text that they will find interesting and will arouse their interest and curiosity.

As a pre-listening activity, I introduced the students to the quiz text. So, we did some vocabulary exercises by reading the text and learning new words about clothes.
During the listening activity, they had to click at one of the multiple choices. While doing the exercise, I saw that even some students who usually do not feel very confident in English classes, were able to finish the listening exercise with a good percentage. They said this was helpful to them because the topic seemed interesting and caught their attention.
Unfortunately, this listening activity was performed by only one computer as there aren't any computer labs at school yet. So, students performed this exercise one by one, and they said that they enjoyed more this exercise by doing it through the computer.

However, today I learned that in order to make students to get the most of our classes is to be able to motivate them.

  I hope that in the near future the schools in Kosovo will start to be digitized and it will be possible to teach students the language through the web.  But, of course, also I as a teacher still need to improve my teaching skills through the web.



 In this link you can find a framework for planning a listening skills lesson
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/a-framework-planning-a-listening-skills-lesson

Differentiation Video

Why should you differentiate instruction?

THE NEW WAY OF LEARNING AND TEACHING Teaching different levels of students through the web

In my teaching experience during these two and a half years, most of the classes were consisted of different levels of students in the same class, and that was really a gap. Some students were intellectually prepared for the respective levels of English and some not. So, there was no "balance" between them. After identifying this problem, I did some search on the web (books.google.com )about this problem and I found a great answer "Differentiation." According to Diane Heacox's book "Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom", differentiation means to "adapt or modify" the teaching material according to the student's need, and it's a two - step process :
1. Analyze the degree of challenge and variety in your current instructional plans.
2. Modify, adapt, or design new approaches to instruction in response to students' needs, interests and learning preferences. (Heacox, Diane, "Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom", Free Spirit Publishing).
I started to adapt or modify the material I teach (also with the help of some teacher trainings) according to my students needs and it had some good results, at least there was created a balance between the strong and week students. Both, the strong and "weaker" students were able to finish the same tasks, and this was because the task was adapted according to their level of English. To be more specific, I mostly applied this method with a class of 11th grade students, where 60% of them weren't intellectually prepared for Pre-Intermediate English.
After reading in detail the learning objectives, especially "Bloom's Taxonomy", I think that differentiation can be applied even better.
But, now I would like very much to be able to apply differentiation with these different levels of students also through the web.

I was searching about "Teaching different levels of students through the web", and I used "Noodle tools". I tried different searching engines in there, like : iSeekEducation, SweetSearch, Wikipedia, Bing and some other search engines.Through the other engines I couldn't find the information I needed. They didn't show any useful links or results, whereas Bing was great because it showed also some other related links that are very useful, especially: http://oc.course.com/sc/tdc5/index.cfm?action=issue&chapter=2. In this link you can find different information about "Teachers Discovering Computers."

The other search engine that I used is YouTube (recommended by Vinicius ). There I could find different useful videos regarding this topic. Thank you Vinicius!

Finally, my aim as a teacher is to be able to use as much as possible the skills I'm seizing through this course. I hope and believe that the skills that I'm improving through this course can be helpful also to my teacher colleagues.

I strongly recommend this link to all teachers. Here you can find different information about integrating technology in the classroom.
http://oc.course.com/sc/tdc5/index.cfm?action=issue&chapter=2