Sunday, October 16, 2011

Week 3. Reflections

After a two-week vacation, this week has been hectic trying to keep up with the week’s tasks. Working 13 hours a day, it has been a bit harder to try to check all suggested sites and follow the discussions. However, I would say that the different tasks were a lot useful and fruitful.
About oral/aural skills, I have to admit I felt a bit skeptical at the very beginning with the pitch software. However, after reading the different discussions and reading materials, I can see how important the application of CALL is. Before that, voice analyzes software sounded like science fiction to me because we have never experimented with such tools, at least in my city. What is more, since English is taught in my country, Bolivia, as a foreign language, the most difficult skills to enhance have been listening and speaking. So, CALL applications seem to be the answer to our concerns. It still needs a lot of reflection and investigation to see how this can be used by our students.
Trying to enhance my students’ listening skills, I have visited some sites where there are dialogues and students can work on the activities. These activities can be done in and outside the classroom as long as there is an Internet connection. I am now experimenting with one of those activities outside the classroom, and next week, I will have some results and feedback from my students.
Reading a project report, gave some ideas about where I am, and what I am expected to do. It make me think that I am running out of time and still have to think about activities to be done in my classes that show a technology change, enhances students’ skills and meets their needs.
When I posted my comment to nicenet, my subject was “Delicious made my life sweeter” and that is totally true. Before using Delicious, I used to save some interesting links in a Word Document. Sometimes it was useless because I used to forget the document and the file. Funny, right!
Little by little, I think we are on our way to our final project and technology chances in our classrooms and lesson plans to enhance our students' language skills.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Genny, welcome back!
    I agree with you that delicious.com has made our lives sweeter! Now every single site I learn about I simply add it to my list so that I can study it carefully whenever I have some free time.
    I also loved the chart Robert added in Google docs so that we could visualize all links suggested by classmates. That is just great!
    Here in Brazil we are not familiar with using software to work on pronunciation. I must confess it is still a bit like science fiction to me but it is interesting to know it exists and it can be adaptaded to some of my groups. I`m considering trying it in the near future to see how students react to that. I think they could benefit a lot by actually visualizing the sound produced. Those softwares must be very effective for certain corrections in speaking production.

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  2. Hi Genny,

    It is true, we might feel skeptical when we have a first time connection with a new tool to use.

    I like the way you mix the use of CALL in our classes and the way we as non English spoken countries face similar problems when we plan ways to enhance students to make use of the language by using realia. This CALL can work for us and it is cheaper than other programs that sometimes schools cannot afford.

    Good title about the use of Delicious. It make me think you are working well with that and it has been useful for you and your classes. In my case, delicious has been useful for me and I am planning to have a meeting with colleagues next month and share all of the new things and learning and I am sure.

    Well, Genny we continue working for our teaching success.

    Great blog, by the way.

    Regards,

    Yariela from Nicaragua

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