Week 3 Skill-building Websites for Oral/Aural Skills and Saving Bookmarks with Delicious

This is my third week in the course and this week we started by reading some articles about aural/oral skill-building. These ones gave me  new tips to enjoy working in class and develop new language skills. For instance to develop listening skill we can do it with a lot of authentic materials that we have around like radio, television, videos and the Internet. We just need to guide our students so that they can use them appropriately. When we listen to a radio program, real English from native speakers, we need to take in count  the pre, while and post listening activities not with the idea of measuring performance specifically  but with the idea they really enjoy listening and become familiar with this kind of activities, when we see a movie it is a good idea to ask students see the movie at home with subtitles and see again in class without them, so they will understand better what they are listening to, and when we use the Internet we can find wonderful sites to practice listening for example in Randall's Cyber Listening Lab: http://www.esl-lab.com/  this one I liked a lot because it has topics  for all levels and most of them related with real world. In addition I checked some sites like American English Pronunciation at http://www.manythings.org/lar/  to practice pronunciation by repeating several times the sounds provided,  and other useful sites like http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/larry-ferlazzos-english-website/ from Larry Ferlazzo’s websites  to practice speaking. I really need to investigate more about the last one.
While creating my first Delicious in Delicious.com I was quite excited with the idea of putting all my links in order. At the beginning of the course this  was an aspect that worried me a lot I was wondering what to do will all my links I was not sure to keep them all in my mind but now I know they are all saved  in a  place where I can easily access from anywhere. With my Delicious  I will be able to add , share and store all my favorite links an I started storing all I found useful during this week. I could also checked the link shared By Nando about  livebinder http://www.livebinders.com this is another resource to save links, it functions the same way  like Delicious but It has  some additional and different settings. Finally I finished reading some sample projects the past web skills did and now I have an idea how to star my project and the aspects we have to add like background, refereeing to  who are the learners, the settings, the course goals, etc; the issue or problem that start our project, the initial solution and expected response, the response and reflection , the changes we are going to do, conclusion and resources. I have to say that the course is helping me to learn a lot about technology and projects  and I hope to share all this knowledge with my colleagues at the school where I work at present.

Week 2 Web searching

I'd like to share what I have learned during this week. Before reading the information about the web browsers I could not imagine the amount of search engines that exist on the network. I thought that Google was the only search resource available but now I understand all the search engines we have and how they can provide us with all the information ne need  . While I was reading Noodlletools at http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html and  exploring all the search engines I could notice that It is possible to choose a searcher according to our necessities . When we need to find some information related with, teaching and learning tools or any other topic related with education for example we can easily access to an academic searcher and go surfing on it.  I was trying with “sweetseacrh” which I recommend you. This searcher allowed me through “agendaweb” practice hundred of free English exercises online , check the link http://www.agendaweb.org/listening/english_audio_activities.html  

Some of the different searches we have available in the web give also  people the options to find information in specific disciplines. As swetsearch is a useful tool to find required information. It also offers   a variety of resources  in multimedia tutorial , teaches effective web skills for educators and students, biographies and other subjects needed by students . Kidshealth   is another example of searcher, this one   gives health information directed to kids, teens or parents. I also find interesting to navigate in” Kidsclik” if we are looking for sites with educational content or any other topics for children. I think we can navigate in using all the different kinds of searches , the only thing we have to take in count is that  we have to start by identifying the searchers that provide us with the most useful and significant  information we are looking for.

Second week web search

An excelent tool to start working

I have never created a blog before. This is my first time and well I consider a very good resource or tool  to work with students specially if our purpose is keeping in touch with them to solve difficulties, answer their questions and maybe reinforce any topic they are having trouble with. I recognize that at the beginning I was very confused about creating my blog so I had to search some information about blogs on the internet and I found this from Pro blogger http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/02/05/what-is-a-blog/ It helped me to understand a little bit what a blog is. I think this kind of tool is quiet important to know nowadays and also let know our students about it. It might be good for both teachers and students because this source give us the opportunity to post our ideas, thoughts, knowledge, experiences and share this with other people with different points of view.