Week 4 - Learning and learning!

     

Welcome Week 4!!! One more week to bring new learnings and challenges! The time is passing really fast, but Donna is presenting the new subjects in a soft and balanced way, that I really don’t feel that I’m in a hurry to reach all the week’s objectives that she suggests. I’m learning so many things, and they’re not only about the technology resources but also about education, my way to teach, my way to write and present my ideas and also gently present my divergence about an idea. 

             

It’s really good to study and learn. And the readings of this week were very instructive for me. The first one that I read was Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction by Jarek Krajka. The author gives us a very good summary of previous research about the use of the internet in an ESL class. Also, in this article there are suggestions to work on writing skill using different kinds of genres. One of the suggestions that I liked was the 4^th one: A description of a person, where students describe the “Wanted” person with short and humorous information and the other friends have to try to guess who the person is. This article was excellent.

            The goal to present ideas to work with reading using the internet was the theme of the article Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books by Mei-Ya Liang. Although there are just three suggestions, the ideas are simple and easy to do. For example, the suggestion three on Evaluating Books, leads students to a higher order thinking activity as they have to evaluate some books, rank them and present to the class the reasons for that ranking. And using the suggested sites and guiding questions for evaluating the books we have a productive activity.

            And what about the tasks that are getting harder as the weeks are passing by? But what a relief every time that I finish each of them!! Just like my colleague Ayman, I’m really happy to accomplish all the objectives and see that all we’re learning is not only for us, it’s for our students, too.

            After reaching ( Yeahh!!) all this week’s objectives, I’m ready for the next week...

                                                      

                                                                       See you there,

                                                                           Claudia