week 09

Week nine was as easy as a pie for me, I could finish more than fifty percent of my assignments on one day, and it was a miracle! In this week I have learned that technology can be highly exploited to cover all learning styles the student posses.

In this week I was lucky to have the editors of FORUM--Max Koller and Tom Glass in our class. I like the idea of seeing Forum on Facebook, it was a good question from the editors. We all can see what blogs and Facebook has done, they changed the political system in the Middle East; such as Egypt, Tunis and now Libya. Hence Facebook is a very effective tool.

project draft

Web skills final project plan

The webskill course is coming to an end, we have to prepare the final project plan, here is sketchy piece of it. 

Objectives: incorporating technology (PowerPoint presentation, multimedia, softwares, etc..) in classroom could solve many problems.

Environment: the class is doing Bachelor in English, second year students are 40 male and female, their age is 17-19. They study a course titled" vocabulary and idiomatic expression in use" the book is written by Stuart Redman. The course is 2 hours a week.

Location: 2nd year B.A students are part of college of languages, Sudan University of Science and Technology.

The college of languages has four main branches: Arabic Department, French Department, German Department ( hasn't yet officially started and English Department. the English Department has around 40 teaching staff.

The student needs to cover many courses such as Reading, Writing, Speaking, and listening; semantics, phonology, etc...

What are the course (vocabulary and idiomatic expression in use.)

Goals: by the end of this course my students should be able to know and memorize the basic idioms in English; they should know how words are collocated in English. They must be able to know the basic rules of prefixation and suffixation.

Students should be capable of using some vocabulary learning strategies.

What are problems you expect your students may face?

Due to their least exposition to the language, my students will face some problems to recall some words they have learned. They may have some difficulties using vocabulary learning strategies.

Solutions: quizzes downloaded from the internet can help to activate passive vocab. into active vocab. English vocabulary pre-intermediate and intermediate is a software made by Oxford is an invaluable tool for learners.

Power point presentation could be arranged to help students memorize idiomatic expressions. Using photo help learners make some kind of connection with idioms. I created PPPs with photo to help students memorize idioms.

Week 05 PJBL and WebQuests

Hello everyone, I start this week as usual by reading the links provided by Robert the captain of the webskills ship. Reflecting on what I have learned this week, I have gone through the two websites webquest.org http://www.zunal.com/ and Zunal.com. http://www.zunal.com/  From these two websites I could be able to know a little about what is webQuest? Because this the first time I come across this term. However, I have read a PowerPoint presentation from mywebskills.blogspot.com by our colleague in this webskills course Mbarek which was very helpful and informative.

WebQuests are really unique. Learners will get a readymade materials provided to them. Their valuable time is well-considered. Students don’t have to search the search engine, but analyze and evaluate the materials provided to them. Webquest designers provide in advance the task, tools and process that learners will use to produce the target product.

PjBL Project-Based Learning not Problem-Based Learning, because I am not the only person who got confused between the two terms. I think the PjBL is putting the students in the driving seat as my colleague Palwasha said. Teacher is a facilitator and sometimes must go to the back seat and watch how the driving is made.

Week 04 Technology Enhanced Lesson Planning

This week was very difficult to me; I was very busy shifting from one office to another in the English Department in SUST. I was also busy watching T.V monitoring the uprising taking place in Egypt. Doing assignment was tedious job but educative. Reading those articles about technology enhanced lesson plans was a good practice although we do that all the time, but frankly my colleague assignments has shown me very useful websites I have never heard about.

Week 3: Oral/aural Skills

This week we delve into incorporating CALL in ELT. We discussed using authentic materials in listening for different activities and levels. We also covered the appropriate websites that could be used in aural and oral. I also come acquainted with the bookmark websites like delicious.com, google.com/bookmark and technorati.com.

It is high time to enlighten learners and colleagues to widen the scope of using CALL in classroom. 

I find the discussion on nicenet and the reading of my colleague blogs was very useful and idea- creating. I also added my delicious page on the wiki site. I bookmarked many websites I consider very useful and helpful.

week 2 of "webskills"

Now week two is ending, beside making a blog and sharing my views with wonderful teachers across the world I had the chance of practicing instructional objectives. For the benefit of my colleague http://itc.utk.edu/~bobannon/practice.html is a web site of where you can take practice exercises on instructional objectives. Knowing Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives is another merit especially the digital verbs.

week 01 reflections

week 01 reflections

It is a very important point of time in my career to use blogging as a teaching tool. entering the gate of educational technology is a real challenge to me. In fact, previously I used to teach without incorporating technology in education, but recently i had the curiosity of using multimedia and powerpoint presentation in my class.
It is high time for me and my colleague in this course to get the benefit of using these vast weapons creatively. To all my colleagues in this course sing with me and chant:

Ring out the old-fashion monotonous style of teaching
Ring out the fear and phobia of the high-tech

Ring in the new gate of technology
Ring in the new method, style and fun of modern teaching