WEEK 4 - REFLECTIONS

At the beginning of this week I thought I could not complete the assigned tasks because someone very important in my life passed away on Monday, but here I am sharing with you what I learned during this week.

READING/WRITING SKILL-BUILDING:

After reading the article written by Jarek  Krajka, I can say that one of the benefits is the wide range of materials available for different topics which can be used as teaching aids, with them students can learn how to write different writing genres, useful vocabulary and key structures and some additional activities for speaking: a letter to a friend; formal letter; a biography; a description of a person; an argumentative essay(both For and Against); notices and advertisements; a description of a festival or ceremony; a description of review of a book, film or play; a newspaper; a personal opinion essay and a description of a place, all of them with useful vocabulary and key structures and some additional activities for speaking.

She also mentions about The Internet for English Teaching: Guidelines for Teachers", that gives some tips about how to use Internet in the classrooms successfully:

-          Teachers do not have to choose at random on-line activities in the classroom, it means that teachers need to spend time searching for different websites suitable for their students.

-          Set the course goals.

-          Teachers must prepare the syllabus in advance.

-          Teachers need to be conscious about the difficulties of the on-line learning environment, it means when they use the internet inside and outside classrooms.

-          Teachers always have to monitor students’ tasks in order to provide help or feedback when they need.

C     CREATE A TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED LESSON PLAN

So how do you go about planning for a class? Begin by deciding what content you want to cover and what your objectives are for the lesson - this will depend a lot on your class's level and it might depend on an ESL textbook that the Institution has provided for you or that you have brought yourself. Ideally, these objectives will include both new vocabulary and new grammatical forms. Then think about what activities you want to use to accomplish these goals and the most important how you can use technology to improve and motivate your students’ learning. These may include a short introduction to the class, a warm-up activity to get everyone involved, group work on dialogues, or written exercises, and a short conclusion reviewing what was learned and pointing out common mistakes.

Finally, you should always have a "contingency plan" to fill up any space that might exist at the end of the class. These plans may consist of an additional game/activity, or of an exercise that will help students to build bridges in their minds between structures and vocabulary learned in different lessons and that learned that day and as  I said before do not forget to include technology!!!

To get information about go to  University of Tennessee. There you can find lots of information.

Sylvia