Sunday 21 October 2012

My reflections on Week - 3 - Web Skills

Hi Courtney and other colleagues,

Greetings.

I am really happy to post the reflections of my practices of different tasks of Week 3 Assignments.

Firstly, I am really happy to cope with the pace of this course like all the colleagues competing each other.  I read all the three articles on 'Teaching Aural / Oral Skills' thoroughly.  Though all the three articles are most important, I was very much impressed with the first and third articles ' Developing Listening skills through authentic materials' and 'Implementation of CALL' because both of them were dear to my heart.  I do practice this everyday in the engineering classroom (through theory and language laboratory activities).  Though I do practice it, these articles have further  sharpen my skills of teaching through up-to-date information of the  methodologies to improve the listening skills (especially through pre, during, and after listening activities).  For that, I used Randall's Cyber ESL - Lab activities and found excellent results and received wonderful feedback from the learners.  Then, I was very impressed and obsessed with the implementation of CALL to improve the Speaking skills of the learners.  I employed the skills of speaking through Group discussions based on the content and context available in Randall's Cyber Lab and TED videos to the advanced learners of the first year engineering students and very happy with the outcome.
Further, the questions raised by the instructor especially based on the article 'New perspectives in teaching pronunciation' provided an insight on teaching of pronunciation.  Though I do not teach 'Pronounciationi' in an engineering institution, I am very much agreed  with the suggestions to improve pronunciation.

Secondly, based on Task -2, I  created an account in 'delicious.com' and found the on-line bookmarking very interesting.  Earlier, i created bookmarks only on a specific computer.  But  creating an account in that which will facilitate the basic methods of adding a link and provide tags both single and bundled tags to the added website are awesome.  I have uploaded around 20 web links and provided various tags to those web links. Further, I read the entire posts of all the colleagues and how impressive and unique each colleagues shared their experiences and added their links in delicious.  I have gone through the majority of web links created by them amazed with the different links provided them.

Thirdly, I started reading sample final reports of Batch-2010 and found the task well cut and demanded the skills of assimilation and deepen our thinking as learner-trainers.  I selected the report of Camelia Pagila of Romania and found awesome methodological implementation of the final project. Her ideas of creating a class blog and linking audios and videos  provided an excellent platform for the technology driven classroom especially in engineering education environment.  I saw the nuances of preparing the different tasks for each class and made the learners as the embodiment of responsibility.  I learned the techniques of preparing an effective course plan and linking various web sites to make the learners access the works.  Further, I was impressed by the documentation of various web links used in the project.  The report asked me several questions to internalize the concept of preparing an excellent report at the end of the course.

Finally, commenting on some others blog is a task that made me identify the image of mine. The third week of Web skills is really fruitful and productive because the tasks are systematic and made me enjoy as well plough my skills under scrutiny.  The preparation for the final project has made me to stretch one step ahead.  I learnt the techniques of incorporating speaking and listening skills into the classroom and made me very creative to reach the excellence....

S.Sankarakumar


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