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This was actually my surprise of Week 2 reflection, but it turned to be outdated as I thought of creating a page on the Facebook or Blogger to share nice links that we all find and make it longer and longer day by day.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