Week 4: Skill-building Websites for Reading/Writing Skills and Technology-enhanced Lesson Plans

My first task for Week 4 was to read the internet TESL journal created by Jarek Krajka from Stefan Batory Pallottine Secondary School (Lublin,Poland).  The author concluded that there are three elements of on-line lessons, which are used while teaching most of the writing genres, but in different ways and for different purposes. Moreover he suggested 11 reading and writing activities for teachers to use along with technology in order to enhance lesson plans, for instance; A Letter to a Friend, A Formal Letter, A Biography, A Description of a Person, An Argumentative Essay (Both For and Against), Notices and Advertisements, A Description of a Festival of Ceremony, A Description or Review of a Book, Film or Play, A Newspaper Report, A Personal Opinion Essay, A Description of a Place. Each activity was suggested with the website (s) where the readers can access and study further. One last suggestion before he wrapped up his journal was that the Web should not be used all the time, or the Web materials only, but rather a teacher should enrich lessons with the Net component when it is really profitable for students and could help them in their learning. I agree. While reading I accessed the websites he mentioned on each activity and found that those websites are useful for teachers  too, for instance;   www.marlo.com/card.htm , www.eun.org , www.amnesty.org , http://www.panda.org/home.cfm , http://www.imdb.com/ , www.telegraph.co.uk http://www.ohiou.edu/esl/project/index.html ,etc.  (I would  add these website in my Delicious website after finishing editing my Week 4 blog.) I occasionally spent time on referencing websites, since I enjoy learning from them, and want to maintain a note of them for the future. Some of my friends like to use the Notices and Advertisements in their classes. I would like to apply some of them to work with my students too.

Exploring Web 2.2 : Tools for Classroom Teaching and Professional Development
Michael Krauss

I also read "Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books" by Mei-Ya Liang on http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Liang-ExtensiveReading.html . The author presented the lesson plan for the online extensive reading for her intermediate and advanced ESL/EFL students, which is very interesting, but it might be too difficult for my students.  Last but not least I took a quick look through "E-mailing to Improve EFL Learners" Reading and Writing Abilities : Taiwan Experience by Chao-Chih Liao, Feng China University (Taichung Taiwan) on http://iteslj.org/Articles/Liao-Emailing.html . I enjoy reading about his communication activities via emails. By this method, students have an opportunity to practice writing and learning his/her pen pal's culture too.  I have a pen pal too, she was studying medicine in Israel in 1987. It was so amazing that one of her classmates was the doctor from the same city as me.  Something different is that we wrote in a letter and it took several days before receiving each other's letter. She has moved to work and live with her family in the USA, but we still send postcards to each other every Christmas. Wow! What a long  beautiful  relationship! Nowadays it is easier and faster when students communicate with friends via the internet instead.

http://www.confessionsofapsychotichousewife.com/2012/05/giveaway-pen-pal-kids-club.html

After reading about technology-enhanced lesson plans,  I have created a technology-enhanced lesson plan by using the format shown on the web course, and share it to the lesson plan page in my group's wiki.  Although I have create my own lesson plans all my life, I still have to spend  many hours or several days doing the research and reading. A key difference from my old style lesson plan is that the ABCD Objectives has been used; the technology alternative  in case things do not work as planned including with Learning styles have been used for creating the lesson plan too. These will make my lesson plan easy to read and understand.

My blog would be edited by myself day by day. Thank you a lot to all my classmates for our precious discussion and your helpful minds. I love working with you all.

Meeting with the science teachers.

Yaowapa

Thailand