Reading, Writting and Becoming more Tech Skilled

This week 4 I’ve studied and analyzed several articles and websites to promote writing and reading skills. I’ve used many websites that develop multiple skills using attractive media and the amount of websites seems endless. Also, I researched about the ebooks and the way teachers can get the most of them while teaching a second language.

I’ve learned that cooperative learning promotes on our students effective instruction of thinking skills and also creativity.  From the authors Trokeloshvili and Jost in their article "The Internet and Foreign Language Instruction: Practice and Discussion "I’ve learned that we can create tasks and made our students participate in discussions via intranet system, and with the purpose of learning, those task are going to help them “use the internet for general research”. However everything should be based in student’s needs and in our goals. It was interesting for me to find how online writing instruction can use the same three stages that the formal reading, writing and listening I learned during the past weeks, Pre Stage, While-Stage and Post Stage.

While creating a Technology Enhanced Lesson Plan I’ve learned how the web shouldn’t be used all the time either just the web material during our classes. This lesson plans should be developed to achieve more than a core objective but as a technology one also. Furthermore, enriched lesson plans with the components from the web should deliver outstanding student’s outcomes.

When I was reading the project task from the other teachers, I realized that it was not easy just to focus on one issue. Educators are always dealing with all sorts of hard situations apart from teaching. Even if we have differences in our circumstances, we are so very similar in what we think and want to achieve. Most of us have to deal with populations that are not feeling the necessity to speak English outside of the classroom until they see that it can interfere with their future. The time the students or schools dedicate to learn or teach a L2 is not enough.  It is clear for us as teachers that students fall behind on making a connection between their English learning and their everyday lives. As professors, we see that students are afraid to make mistakes due to low confidence. This can easily be built by seeing their words published on a class website.

I can believe week 5 is almost here!

Thank you,

Aida