Thursday, January 22, 2015

Week 3: Oral/Aural Skills and Delicious Tool

In this week we worked on a nicenet discussion about aural/oral skill-building. We create a Delicious page, read and discuss a past sample project report and wrote a weekly reflection on the blog. We learned that there are websites which have a lot of resources for teachers in order to build students´aural/oral skill. 

Additionally, we use the Delicious tool to create a web page to store some useful links with tags, categories and descriptions in a web page. I think this is a good tool to share web resources with our learners although we have to be careful with choose quality resources. This is the URL of my delicious page: https://delicious.com/abvargas where I added my favorite link:

  • Ted Talks (http://www.ted.com/).- An interesting website page where we can find interesting and entertaining short talks about topics in English as well as in other languages. 
  • Do Lectures (http://dolectures.com/).- A place where we can find inspiring talks from passionate, creative people that teach how to do things, thus inspiring others to do things too. 
  • Between Teachers - The Movie - An educational experience unprecedented (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnaunQx66yE) .- a documentary about innovative educational experience. It’s an encounter between life and education through self-knowledge in class.
Usón, P. (2013). Between Teachers
- The Movie - An educational experience unprecedented

Finally, we read and analyze samples of projects. Among them were:
  • A Reflection on & Action Research Report, Working with a Large Class of Grade 13 "Terminale" Students Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web Project Report. 
  • Project Report for Graduate Students at the Jesuit University of Philosophy and Education "Ignatianum".

I choose the project designed by Nikiema (2010) tetled “Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web” in order to comment on the nicenet. The overall project goal is to plan and conduct action research, which involves a change related to technology. 

The interesting thing in Nikiema project was that the teacher promoted autonomous learning by using new technological tools in order to involve learners in active reading, writing, communicating and sharing opinions.

References.-

Nikiema, T. B. (2010). Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web. E-Teacher Scholarship Program, 1(2). Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B05v8GScCgIvZzZVOEEzTGE3TlU/edit?pli=1

7 comments:

  1. Hi Alba,

    I look forward to watching "Between Teachers". I've already saved it to an Evernote list. It'll be a good opportunity for me to practice my Spanish listening skills. I'm also looking forward to spending some time on the dolectures.com website. There's a lot of good material there.

    Best,
    Russell

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    1. Hello dear Russell,

      I am happy that you liked these two sites. I found them very interesting and useful to introduce in our English classes.

      Best,
      Alba

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  2. Hello Alba,

    I like the sites you stated above, particularly 'thedolectures'. People are different and of course, tuned different. It is inspiring to know how people in the world talk in a different approach. We can be the do-ers too. Get the ideas, harness some energy and harvest a change. Really nice!

    Cheers
    Lina

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    1. Drar Lina,
      You are right, we can become positively influended with excellent creative results.

      Cheers,

      ALba

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  3. Alba,
    Thanks for sharing your reflection, it is very complete and useful.
    And I want to point out that the website "Ted talks" is really helpful for all kind of classes. In fact, My colleagues and me use it for preparing listening activities about medicine related topics. Certainly, now that you have mentioned that link I am going to add it to my "Delicious page".

    Regards,
    Laura

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    Replies
    1. Just in case, I am Laura from Chile.

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    2. Laura,

      Now that we created a Delicious page, it is a good idea to store the most useful links there.

      Best,
      Alba

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