Week 3 Reflecion

Week 3 Reflection

It is great to learn something new everyday, to be more accurate, every moment I read the stuff provided in the amazing online course. At first, Delicious.com Social Bookmarking. What a wonderful way to save your favorite web links online, share them with others, and have access to what others have saved and shared. I have always kept my nice favorites or bookmarks on words files and always sent them to my students or shared them on the Facebook, but it never occurred to me that there could be an easier way to keep them, categorize them, even divide them to some to be private and others to be public for everyone, this is awesome! This is also a good way to share bookmarks that everyone might find either students or teachers. Here is my link on Delicious. I promise to add more and share more of the nice links of my mates here.
Here is my page, go and check, my friends.
http://www.delicious.com/mrheshamenglish

This was actually my surprise of Week 2 reflection, but it turned to be outdated as I thought of creating a page on the Facebook or Blogger to share nice links that we all find and make it longer and longer day by day.

The three articles that I read and studied carefully also added a lot of ideas to me about improving my students’ pronunciation which is one of the biggest problems to non native speakers everywhere.

Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials (Word .doc file)
http://www.elthillside.com/up/files/article4.doc
New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation (right-click on the link to download it)
http://www.openstarts.units.it/dspace/bitstream/10077/2850/1/bus%C3%A0.pdf
The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills (right-click on the link to download it)
www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/research/resources/student_res/postscriptfiles/vol3/vol3_1_gong1.pdf

That was amazing, we were asked to choose one but I read them all and enjoyed them a lot.

Also the amazing links that were provided
Speaking lesson plans (teacher resource)
Speaking lesson plans at One Stop English

Conversation lesson plans at esl.about.com
Communicative lesson plans at ESL-galaxy.com

This helps a lot and one can refer to the other parts of these professional websites for more.

Also, Listening (student resource) such as Randall's Cyber Listening Lab: http://www.esl-lab.com/ , Listening RealEnglish video - advanced; multiple dialects. http://www.real-english.com/reo/1/unit1.html

and for  Pronunciation Robert's site of useful resources for teachers and students of pronunciation. https://sites.google.com/site/pronunciationstuff/ and the most amazing of all Pronunciation Tips from the BBC - exercises, videos, quizzes. This works best with teacher guidance. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/ all need hours or days to explore learn and give to student to learn.
For Speaking Best Sites to Practice Speaking English (Larry Ferlazzo) - high use of tech. It is a teacher site, not a student site. http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/the-best-sites-to-practice-speaking-english/  and the Additional Resources all added a lot to my knowledge.
Reading the final project report, and commenting on that report in nicenet and describing what the person did in his/her project, and discussing what I liked about the project gave me a good chance to think of my project too and to learn from previous experiences pros and cons and to draw an image to what I am going to do. I hope all my friends here had similar opinion and I hope that we keep learning and helping one another even after the course ends. 
Wish You all the best in life.
Hesham, Egypt

Week 2 Reflection

As I always say and tell myself and others, "We live and learn", "Never too old to learn." It never occurred to me that searching for information on the internet would be an important topic to discuss. Now after many years of using the internet in nearly everything and every day, I learn how to use the net for searching professionally this time. The week starts by learning ABCD, this time it is not the alphabet, it is The A.B.C.D. method of Writing Objectives. I liked the two quotes,

Jones, 1997 – "Clear objectives can help the instructor design lessons that will be easier for the student to comprehend and the teacher to evaluate".

Lohr, no date – "A properly written objective tells you what specific knowledge, skill, or attitude is desired and what method of instruction and criteria for learner achievement are required."

This is one of the most important things of what we have been learning at the AUC since I started my studies their (The Can-dos of the students and teachers objectives of each task assigned.)

The idea of deciding Audience, Behavior, Condition and Degree of your learners before you start in this link , http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/learningdesign/objectives/writingobjectives/ , is essential.

Also, Typical Problems Encountered When Writing Objectives and the idea of Blooms taxonomy has inspired me a lot when thinking of objectives of my tasks in my classes.

The part I liked a lot was this page

http://edtech.tennessee.edu/~bobannon/classifications.html

About Classifying Objectives. According to Bloom's Taxonomy, there are six levels of learning are in the classification. The lowest level is remembering. The remembering level is followed by five increasingly difficult levels of mental abilities: understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating (the highest level).

To my disappointment, I discovered that in a lot of Egyptian schools we deal with remembering which is the lowest level and when we feel we did something great we move a step up toward understanding and applying, thus, neglecting and even not encouraging creativity.  Hopefully in the future, I am going to reconsider that to reach creating which is the highest level.

 The next great think that I have learned is how to search the net in the right way. "Hey, Mr. GOOGLE, you are not my main and only way to search anymore! :)" I said to myself. There are better ways to do that.

http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html

Here is the way to do things.  You can "Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need", to decide as they said it. I love this website which gave me ideas that are useful to me and to my students. There are many other websites for searching other than Google.

Also the idea of thinking about my project, to think about a class that would benefit from making a technology-inspired change, and to describe my students and class setting now and how it will be later discussing  the technology I and my students have access to now, both in and outside of school and thinking of how it will be later has inspired a lot of ideas later which are ……..

Let it be a surprise ….

Next episode … :) I wish you all the best in life.

Week 1 Reflections

It is a great feeling to feel like a student from time to time. Though I have been working as a teacher for about 17 years now, still doing some studies, doing some online, a teacher and a student on the same day, I love that, “Never too old to learn.” So far I have learned from nearly everything in this course, even the course description. The plan of the page with very clear and well organized points, the learning objectives for each week, the readings, the  Ground rules for discussions gave me ideas to use in my class, even the online discussions - comparing rubrics shows the professionalism of those who prepared the. Creating a blog at Blogger gave me more ideas on how to make another blog for my students as I am always in contact with them through the Facebook, email and my previous blog, (http://mrheshamenglish.wordpress.com/) yet this gave me more ideas to do later. Also Blogging for ELT http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/blogging-elt, this was great as to show the benefits of having a teacher’s blog then one for the class and personal ones for the students with great ideas and extra links. This will prove to be of great use to my classes in the future. I have enjoying every bit of my work so far and I hope we will all be working for the good of all students all over the world.