Saturday, July 16, 2011

Week 4-July 16- My reflections

This week was devoted to Teaching Reading, Writing and Vocabulary Skills. This topic is also very significant in teaching process. Developing vocabulary skills helps better reading and comprehension as well as promotes fluent and accurate speaking. Students will feel more confident when they are able to express their thoughts and ideas easier, and if it doesn’t take much time to think for the appropriate word or phrase. They will take risks talking to native speakers and people they don’t know.
I’ve read several articles on the issue and all of them I find very helpful and interesting. I like the ideas of Jared Krajka and there are many interesting tools to use in my classroom!
Another good article is Using Technology to Assist in Vocabulary Acquisition and Reading Comprehension by Andreea I. Constantinescu. Sometimes it is so difficult to help students develop and activate their passive vocabulary (to make it active), that the teacher gets confused and frustrated, and feels that there is no way to do it. Technology is a very good way out! The author mentions a lot of computer programs and multimedia tools which can promote Reading and Comprehension and develop Vocabulary skills.
We are getting closer and closer to our final point- technology-enhanced project! This week we’ve discribed our class problems and the issues technology might help us with. Having read the descriptions of other participant, I realized that the main students’problems were similar from class to class, regardless what country they were from. So I think our projects will be helpful for many of us!
Creating technology-enhanced lesson plan first seemed a difficult task to me. I couldn’t make myself get down to writing the plan and I was thinking over it again and again. When I finally began doing my task, I understood that it was something I actually did every time before my lessons. The only difference was that I didn’t follow any templates and I did it for my purpose and use only, so the template was something that confused me. All in all everything was alright and I hope that my lesson plan is well-done Smiley
P.S. Today is my son's third birthday!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, my little angel!

Friends18.com Orkut Scraps
Friends18.com Happy Birthday Scraps

2 comments:

  1. Hi Iuliia,

    It’s better late than never. The first word I want to say is that “Happy Birthday to your son!”

    Yeah, this week we’re pretty busy reading materials related to Reading, Writing and Vocabulary Skills. Especially, planning a technology-enhanced lesson is a bit challenging to us. However, you’re a teacher of at least several years of experience, so I think you have little difficulty planning lessons because most of the time they’re in your mind. I agree with you that students’ problems are not much different from class to class and teaching methodology is the same to every teacher. The most important thing is that how to best apply technology to our skill-building classes.

    I really like the task “Describing class issues” because it guides the teacher to find solutions to the problems and find out appropriate strategies and teaching methods to match the class objectives.

    Time goes fast, you’re right that we’re getting closer and closer to our final technology-enhanced project which will be very helpful for all of us in some cases. I’m sure we won’t stop learning after the course finishes, right?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Phuong-Mai,
    Thank you so much for your wishes!!
    You are right that many things I just keep in my head and sometimes it is difficult to put them on the paper following some templates. But it's worth doing it, and it really facilitates my teaching and assessing pocesses! We should do it more often.
    I am sure that this course is just the beginning of our long road of studying! Hope that after the course we'll still keep in touch sometimes!

    ReplyDelete