Week 4

Week 4 - Going on to Discover New Interesting Things

I start to write this post when we are at the middle of Week 6. It's because my mother's serious sickness and death the week before and I had to come back to my hometown in a rural area of Vietnam to take care of her and see her off to the other world.

There was a lot of things to do there and I tried to work with the course whenever I had time.

The two reading articles of this week are interesting to me. The first one, named Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction (2000) at http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html, is rather long and took me a lot of time reading, but is the one that I really like because it gives me a review of previous research in using Internet in ESL writing instruction and detailed ideas of teaching genres using Internet together with usefule links, which is a good source of reference for my related studies in the future. I did a study on using computers and Internet in teaching and learning ESL writing in 2002, when Web technology was very limited.

I found the second article, i.e., Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books (2004) at http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Liang-ExtensiveReading.html useful, too, with concrete classroom techniques. However, it is beyond my sixth grade students' proficiency level now. They may be applicable to my class in one or two years. Vietnamese youth nowadays is said to read less, and teenagers like my students usually use computer and Internet for fun. So, this is a good suggestion to lead them to make full use of this technological advance for learning purposes.

This week I also 'had to' describe my class issue, problem, or need. In fact, there are quite a lot issues, but I chose the problem with project work to describe here, which I think technology can help.

I was also asked to write a technology enhanced lesson plan, and project work is the one that I decided to be my lesson content. I sometimes integrate technology to my classroom, but this is the first time I write a detailed lesson plan about this. This job was made easier with the template file given by Robert. I have used Google Docs and shared files with others, so I had no difficulties in this. It would be good if I could try this plan, like what Brigitte Falkner did with her class, to see how successful it is. However, my students here are having 2 weeks off on the occasion of the lunar new year and I have to wait until they come back.

With what I learn and prepare this week, I hope I can make some positive changes in my teaching.