Week 3

Most of my classmates called this week’s task a delicious one. It was not a surprise to me since we have used a bookmarking tool called Delicious. I’m one of those people whose list of favourites goes down to the floor and it gets longer every day, so Delicious will be a perfect tool for cleaning up the mess on my computer. Except allowing us to keep our links online, Delicious allows us to create stacks of links,  tag them, share them or keep them private, to follow other users and add their links to our stacks, which will certainly be one of most useful options to me.

We were also given three articles on teaching aural/oral skills. The one I particularly found interesting was  Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials by Lindsay Miller. Ms Miller has mentioned different listening activities and different approaches to developing listening skill. She has also mentioned the fact that listening has been a relatively neglected skill and pointed out the importance of movies in English. Lindsay also mentioned in the article that “The authentic lecture discourse contained many false starts, redundancies and repetitions. None of these show up in English language teaching (ELT) textbooks.” The article was first published in 2003, so I have to agree with the author regarding the books published several years or decades ago. However, nowadays, coursebooks tend to have more redundancies, slang and repetitions in order to prepare the learners for the real life situations.

Lindsay has also suggested that getting used to subtitles could be one of the reasons for neglecting the listening skill. However, subtitles were a key point in my English language acquisition, since I have learned English for several years by listening to the music and watching movies. My formal language learning started much later, but my listening and speaking skills were quite well developed for my age. That is why I often suggest watching films and listening to music to my students and I cannot help but wonder how difficult it has to be to learn English in countries where movies are dubbed.

During this week, we have been also asked to examine one of the previous projects and give our opinion about it. The projects were all interesting and they gave me enough clues about what I am expected to do and how the project plan should be presented at the end of the course.

Of course, Nicenet discussions were a great help this week, too and I have learned more thanks to other participants ‘comments than I would if I were to study by myself.

And here is one powerful audio tool that could be used for developing the listening skill: SoundCloud. It lets users upload and share their audio files, not only songs, but more importantly brings a social element by adding commenting and likes to the audio stream. Press play, please and enjoy one of my favourite songs.

Week 2

  This week we have dipped our toes in the ocean of various search engines. I have to say I used to be one of those stubborn people who had used mainly Google, but after revealing this ocean I have started looking at the skill of “searching” from a whole new perspective. The tools our teachers suggested not only help us do a more refined search, but the search engines themselves give us new ideas for our lessons. At first, I was impressed by Biography.com, but when I read the inspiring ideas of my classmates for using other tools, I added many others to my list of favourites. Actually, those ideas that were mentioned during the discussion are priceless and I will certainly use that treasure in the future. And I especially like the idea of making a Search List on Wiki.

The second task we had was related to behavioural objective using the ABCD model. At first, I was a bit confused, so I patiently read the other examples and they really helped me come up with my own objective. By the way, in my country, when we write a lesson plan, we are supposed to create three objectives: educational, pedagogical and functional and these three always demand serious thinking,.

The second week seemed to me more hectic than the previous one, but very fruitful.  I have also described one of my classes and learned a lot about the classes of other teachers. I have read the additional resources and found Twurdy very convenient. It was also interesting to read each other's comments on Nicenet. Our teachers did have a lot of work this week, replying to our posts, giving advice, encouraging us and suggesting new approaches. 

A Blog Roll Permission

I have created a blog roll on the right side of my blog. At first I started adding your blogs, but then I thought some of you maybe wouldn't like the idea of sharing your blog here, so I removed them for the time being.

Now, I just wanted to ask for your permission to share your blog on my blog roll. If you agree, please post a comment below this post. If you don't agree, I understand. Jodi has already agreed about her blog, so hers is still there. As for mine, feel free to share it on your own blog roll if you decide to have one.

Thank you and have a nice weekend!

Marija

p.s. This weekend we celebrate Easter (Orthodox Christians use a different calendar), so lots of good food (yummy) and family gatherings.

Week 1

The first week of our course was very exciting. After receving an e-mail about the tasks we can expect during this week I went to Jodi and Celeste's Wiki and then to Webskills Google map and added my placemark icon. "Normal" people would probably close the map and come back to it tomorrow or after a couple of days. However, during the very first day of the course I was so excited that I have went to see the map about 20 times. I was so eager to see where all the other participants were from and it was so exciting to see the placemark icons being added in the next few days. Each marker had its own story and I was trying to imagine people behind them.

I have also posted on Nicenet twice. I am not familiar with this communication tool. It's not a complicated one I would say. Two dilemmas that I have right now are: is it a free tool and are we allowed to open separate threads with new discussions or not? Hmm.. let me see if I can find out something about the first dilemma. 

(7 minutes later)

Yes, it's free. You can read more about it here. I will certainly have a serious thought about using this with my older students.

Thanks to the discussion on Nicenet, I have learned a bit about each participant and about our teachers Jodi and Celeste. I am looking forward to learning more about their classes, school system in general and the available equipment in their schools.

I have also filled out the survey and read all the resources given and I think I will use the evaluation sheet as a personal guide for my future projects with students.

And finally, his Majesty, the blog! I do have some experience in blogging but each time I start a blog it's about a different topic and for different audience. That's why it was so challenging when I was creating this one. I also got stuck for about 2-3 days when I wanted to create separate pages about Oregon and Serbia. Some say you have to be patient with technology. I would say you have to be patient and stubborn!

Hello!

Hello everyone.

This blog has been created as a part of UO AEI Webskills course. I am very happy to be one of the participants and I am looking foward to learning from my teachers as well as from my colleagues from all around the world.

As the title says this is my interactive journey. I hope I will learn a lot, but I also hope to share my own knowledge and maybe help some of the participants with the web tools I am familiar with.

I have created three pages. The main page is for my reflections on the course, the second one is my own personal task to learn more about Oregon and the third one is my wish to introduce you to my country.

Since I have recently discovered Sliderocket I decided to share my story with you using this tool. To be honest, I do not like writing long essays and I'm not good at it either, so I always add a picture or a video to make it more interesting. p.s. This presentation includes audio, too.