Saturday, January 28, 2012

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.

1 comment:

  1. Dear Vilma,

    I do share with you the same joy of having found such useful things about extensive listening and www.esl-lab.com, as well as a really handy website www.delicious.com -- it is so strange sometimes... there are so many things online... and you can never stop learning.... this virtual reality never stops surprising me... and we are just on our way of advancement....

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