Saturday, June 5, 2010

WEEK 9: Online tools for enhancing learning&Create an online course site or an exercise to use online or offline

Week 9: Almost done!

Being in this course for 9 weeks makes me realize of the reason why I took this course even I am not much good at technology. I thought I would get new experience and gain more knowledge about it. How lucky I am to have chance to learn from our classmates and our professor. Everything we have learned from this course since the first week until now week 9(nearly end) is new and really useful for my language teaching. I was thinking about sharing the knowledge from this course to my colleagues at the school and other teachers of English in my area. Webquests, Noodle, delicious, blogger, interactive power point and all useful websites for English teachers are available on the Internet which we can apply and choose the appropriate ones to our lessons. It is easy and very convenient to integrate technology into classroom. Deborah provided many wonderful links and things for us here.
This week our professor assigned us to use different tools and implement to create the lesson with the technology and Nicenet, Blogger, Google site all are free and simple to use for promotion, discussion and assignments online for our students. Even the first time was not easy but I just keep trying then I found that it is not so difficult to create the class online or post the assignments. The websites which are useful for teacher of English suggested applying this week are really wonderful. I found http://www.toolsforeducators.com/ for making exercises online to print out. The tools for educators - word search, bingo, crossword puzzles, and board games: Personal Educational Press - flash cards, bingo games, matching, multiple choice exercises to print out: http://www.educationalpress.org/index.asp and Easy Test Maker (paper tests): http://www.easytestmaker.com/default.aspx for helping my life easier in writing test because I can insert new question from the list, True/False, Multiple Choice, Short Answer, Matching or Fill in the black then just click the question format I want to add. I got www.123listening.com from Ruslana. It is very useful for practicing listening skill. There are worksheets and audio materials about different topics that are suitable my students’ level. And here are the lists provided for E-Teacher Scholarship program by my professor, Deborah.
Make exercises to use online or offline on a computer or to print out
• Hot Potatoes - download this program at http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ to use it on your computer. It's easy to use and lets you create matching, cloze, scrambled sentence, and multiple choice exercises and crossword puzzles. You can get help online or download this how-to PDF.
• See some interesting exercises at http://eolf.univ-fcomte.fr/index.php?page=technically-interesting-hot-potatoes-pages
• Xword Puzzle Generator - create crosswords to save and use on a computer or print out: http://www.edict.com.hk/xword/generator/
Make exercises online to use online:
• Web Poster Wizard - free website for teachers and students to use as part of a course. It uses a very plain format, but it's very easy to create something with text, one graphic, and links on each of 4 pages: http://wizard.4teachers.org/
• SMILE- a variety of web-based activity generators. Requires a free registration. The application here are quite interesting, but they take more time to learn to do. http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/mimea/smile/v2/index.php
They are all great! and worth learning!

Best,
Garunyawun

2 comments:

  1. Dear Garunyawun,

    for each of us everything was new. But we are lucky we had the chance of learning and trying out new things. Otherwise, the course would have become boring and uninteresting, and at the end, the question would have come up: "What was the point?"

    Now, we are more powerful as we know many new things and our students are more than lucky to have us as teachers.

    I wish you all the best,
    Nadina

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear Garunyawun,

    I was using technology with my students for sometime. When I joined the course, I thought it will only add 25% of the course material to my existing knowledge. I was completely wrong!
    All the course (100%) was absolutely amazing! Believe me, I am very thankful to God that He gave me this opportunity. It made aware of so many sides in using tech with students, and for my own professional development.

    It's a pity that it's coming to and end.

    It was great to be with you in this course!

    All the best,

    Hala

    ReplyDelete