Week 3: Skill-building Websites for Oral/Aural Skills and Saving Bookmarks with Delicious

Week 3: Skill-building Websites for Oral/Aural Skills and Saving Bookmarks with Delicious

This week is one of my busiest weeks. I have work, this online course, and my brother's weeding. I've been very busy preparing for the wedding party and thanks God it all went as planned and now he and his lovely pride are enjoying their honeymoon in Malaysia.

During this week, I've learned new things and have broadened by perspectives regarding using technology in teaching oral/aural skills. Among the different websites and lesson plans offered for exploration this week, I like Randall's- ESL Cyber Listening Lab and I used it in one of my writing classes. My students loved it and I encouraged them to use it outside the classroom to enhance their listening skills.

Added to that, It's my first time to hear about Delicious.com. I never heard about online sites or tools for storing useful links. Amazing! I can now create my own favourite links and get access to them easily and from any computer. In the past, I lost so many links to useful-websites because I marked them as favourite on different computers. Thanks to Delicious.com as it will help me storing all favourite links in one page. Here is the URL to my Delicious Page: https://delicious.com/hoopoo

Before having a look at the samples of research projects during this week, I was worried about how to conduct an action research, what shall I do, and how can I write the final report.  Now, I'm relieved. I realized how easy it is if I follow the same steps, and I'm eager to start working on my own project.

Houda

 

 

Week 2: The ABCD Learning Objectives Framework and Effective Web Searches

Hi again,


This is the end of my second week at Building Teaching Web-Skills course offered by the University of Oregon. I've enjoyed being part of this online course and I've learned a lot during this week. Both of the topics covered during this week are of great interest to me, especially web-searching engines.

I am aware that searching for information on the internet is a tiring and a time consuming process. However, with the help of different academic search engines which I explored this week, I think it will be much easier and enjoyable. I am used to Google everything I want to search for and I'm not saying that Google is bad, but I'm glad that I've discovered other academic search engines which would serve my needs the best. Among the long list, I liked: I Seek Education, Sweet Search, Word Central, English Central, and BBC English. I'm planning to make a good use of these engines, apply them into my teaching, and conduct workshops to introduce them to other teachers and students at my university. I must admit that these search engines have opened a new window of opportunity to me at both personal and professional levels!

Added to that, the ABCD learning objective model framework is of great benefit for teachers. It is easy to write on the part of the teachers and easy to be understoon and followed on the part of the students.

Also, I've started my first step in my project by describing my educational setting and the population that I'm currentlt teaching. I'm lokking forward to the next weeks of the course and eager to learn new things and go further in my course project.

Loves,

Houda

Week 1: Introductions; creating an Academic Blog

Hi Again,

In this week, I've started my pathway into learning how to use the web applications to facilitate English language teaching and learning. The first step is creating this space to share my reflective journals on what I've learned during each week of this course. During this week, I've been busy exploring the course and getting used to an online learning environment. Its my first time to participate in an online course- I'm used to face to face learning in a classroom.

Welcome to my blog

Hello everyone,

This is me, Houda Al-Ruheili, an English language lecturer from Oman. I'm creatiting this space to share my ideas, thoughts, reflections, and experience on using web skills to facilitate English language teaching and learning.

Hope you will find it useful and will share your thoughts regarding my posts.

Regards,

Houda