Week 8

I have to say that this week has been really hard for me we started by doing the project report which was due to last Wednesday so I had  a lot of work to do. Organize the ideas to complete the categories  was my main concern this week . I didn’t get the right form I guess after all, but I think I am ready to make the necessary changes for the next week.

The task for this week  was to create a course site or an exercise to use online or offline. I have to say that  I created a course in Nicenet, and because my students are still not well skilled using this kind of tool, I will use it  first with my English colleagues. I am planning to share with them evething I’ve learned in the course. Because my idea is share files, links and work with some exercises from the web and due to the limited time my students have because of their work ,  I have chosen the blog where I will share every week the activities they must practice, these ones  include listening, writing and the use of some  grammar structures learned in classroom. They will be able to make comments about the online exercises, or otherwise I will also chose an interesting  topic to discus about.

This week we also had some  sites to explore and I consider  most of them extraordinary tools that can help us in our teaching process. I found really interesting the hot potatoes page at http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ I was always interested in finding tools to create interactive exercises and I have already checked some on the web, but my question always was , how they were designed? Now I have clarified my doubt, and with a useful tool like hotpotatos It will be easy to create exercises for the students to do online, offline or to print out. I like the variety of options that hot potatoes offers like the JBC,The Jquiz,the Jcloze,the Jmix, Jmatch . I personally love the Jmatch and the Jmix all these tools helps us to create matching, cloze, scrambled sentence, and multiple choice exercises and crossword puzzles which we always need when we plan a lesson. I have noticed my students like to work in the computer and once I tried a similar sample with them they enjoyed a lot because the liked when they had an immediate feedback to correct their mistakes.

Referring to ANVILL, I consider it as an advanced resource which provides updated tools to work with audio and video. This tool is fantastic but requires our students to have an intermediate or advanced level of English to participate on the Tcast, livechat or forums. Mastering the use of this tool could be quite useful for teachers and students because it is definitely a good complement in English learning. I think the use of this tool could  definitely encourage students to become more autonomous and because  these kind of tools are interactive they enjoy a lot using the computer instead of working in books.