Many Web users are confronted with the fact that finding a “valuable” link on the Internet can be a fruitful event if such a thing is somewhere recorded for later use. Oftentimes it does happen that those “valuable” links vanish from our eyes the moment we click on another page, and trying to recover the “valuable” site proves to be a dead-on street. Delicious.com seems to be the answer to all our worries about keeping a “log” of links that can help us keep track of the language learning pages we visit or come across while surfing the Net.

As part of the experience of this week in our “Building Teaching Skills W2010” online course, it is so exciting to see how ELT professionals and colleagues all around the world have created their delicious.com personalized pages and how the amount of links registered in their pages increase systematically (with the use of tags) and exponentially (by the number of registered entries). If something outstanding happened this week on this course, it is the personal “epiphany” all of us have had and the discovery of how to register all our “delicious” sites.

Since human memory is so limited, and we can hardly fight back our absent-mindedness at times, Delicious.com can become our “external memory card” that can keep a record of all the language learning skill-building sites we encounter in our ventures over the Internet. As a personal experience, I must admit that I used to keep those links on a separate gmail account that I created for storage purposes. I systematically classified all sites, but now that I can compare what I used to do with the things I can do now in terms of web-link storage, Delicious! is a go-of-it.

All teachers craving for extra resources to use with students, in or out of class, are bound to find sites that are worthwhile sharing, but passing post-it notes with URLs and the like is something of the past, not only because those little papers get lost but also because free online services can allow us to have access to that information anywhere we are. Now I can tell my colleagues or fellow teachers to visit my Delicious! page and profit from the things I have stored for teaching/learning purposes. And now that this E-teacher course has given room for the creation of a Internet-based teaching community, we participants should keep up with the expectations from our instructors to continue to share “vital” information to enhance our teaching anywhere we teach in this planet.

Now that ELT professionals are dealing with students belonging to the Net Generation, it is important to bear in mind the fact that teachers can personalize student learning by using language teaching webpages for this purpose. As Jamshed N. Lam pointed out in an article on http://www.teach-nology.com/tutorials/techinclass/, “The online learning enhances the traditional textbook and gives students a personal connection to native (…) speakers.” Now that question is “how can technology be used to improve students’ aural and oral skills?” Let us venture some potential answers to this query.

Students must develop a series of skills to become successful language learners. One of these skills is the increase of their aural perception to enhance listening comprehension. By using audio web-pages, language teachers can offer students samples to illustrate areas to improve, such as accent understanding or sound discrimination (consonants and vowels). Besides, these audio web-pages provide tutorials and self-quizzes that can assist students in their personal learning and can maximize their own learning by expanding the contents that are presented in class by language instructors.

On the other hand, we have “oral skills” that balance sound perception and recognition. Helpful online materials supplement in-class activities and assist learners to work on their own learning pace. For instance, language instructors can make use of pronunciation sites on articulatory phonetics that can help students see what happens in their mouth and replicate what they actually see; consequently, sound production can be practiced by each individual at home or elsewhere. Audio sites also give us the opportunity to provide interactive exercises in which students must practice rhythm and intonation, as well as word linking and minimal pairs. As Thad Polk, professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan pointed out (http://www.crlt.umich.edu/inst/techexamples.php#Onlinetools), “software, freeware, and web-based materials” can be used to have students “explore course-related topics in depth and test their understanding of these topics,” and all this can be possible thanks to the available resources on the Internet.

To conclude, by means of a blog, which can then become the webpage for a single course at a university or class at a school, teachers can now create an “online syllabi” –a group of related links with all kinds of free online tools to help students work on their own learning-. By doing this, and with the help of blogging services such as www.blogger.com, the personalization of learning can be possible: aural and oral skills can be worked outside the classroom with the proper guidance of the instructor even though there is no computer lab in our school or teaching place.

Useful websites for the use of technology in teaching:

http://lc.ust.hk/~material/pl/u1.htm

http://www.teach-nology.com/tutorials/teachwtech/

http://4teachers.org/inttech/index.php?inttechid=ta

http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/technlgy/te800.htm#researchresult

http://www.crlt.umich.edu/inst/techexamples.php#Onlinetools

http://www.teach-nology.com/tutorials/design_site/have_on_it/

(My personal reflection on Technology and Language Teaching, taken and edited from Building Teaching Skills W2010, University of Oregon, American English Institute)

Web searching has always been an issue for teachers and students as well. The never-ending problem is digging and digging through layers of links that seem to be leading nowhere, and the ultimate objective of one's search is not met easily. However, having especialized portals, such as http://www.noodletools.com/ is definitely a way to ease our pains in the process of getting the information needed for our planning of lessons or for some kind of academic research.

Wondering of the potential scope of blogging for class use, I decided to try something a bit unusual for some of my university students in the English teaching major. Since most of my students in the BIN-04 Reading Skills I class do have access to the Internet from home, or a nearby Cyber Café, I challanged them to create a Vocabulary Log Blog. So all together christened the task Log-Blogs.

My students are currently using the book written by Dr. Neil Anderson, Active Reading Book 1 (second edition), since they are intermediate beginning students with good language skill. And due to the fact that I surveyed the class to have an idea of what skills they have in terms of Internet use, I felt ashamed that most of "my kids" are way more prepared than their professor, which I think is a great advantage.

Due to the fact that our university requires us professors to use the university's web platform and existing tools, and because not only professors but students have access to all of this freely, I divided my 20-student class into 4 groups to work on their Log-Blog.

The idea is to create vocabulary logs from the readings from the book Active Reading to help others find suitable definitions for the new lexicons they find in each book unit, either by using synonyms or antonyms or by providing their own definitions, according to their level. (No dictionary definition-like entry is accepted.)

As not to make the activity repetitive, I asked 50% of the class to create word family charts. Through this task students increase their vocabulary and help their peers increase theirs.

This is just our second week of class this term with my students, and I look forward to seeing what they have in store for me and for their partners. I am sure each one of us will benefit from the experience. Eventually I will move to blogger.com to have their works posted for other students to have a look at.

Jonathan

Hi, colleagues!

Although blogging is not a new term or tool available on the Web, I have to admit that I did experience some kind of reluctancy to using this way of posting your thoughts and ideas and of sharing with others what you find while exploring your teaching on the Web. In the past, at one of my workplaces in Costa Rica, we intended to use this tool as a way to have teachers reflect on their weekly teaching, but for several reasons I cannot quite explain, it never worked as expected. (I am still mulling over the reasons why the blog posting did not work with student teachers.)

On the other hand, now that I'm back to blogging after a couple of years, this task of creating a blog as a part of a course on E-teacher "Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web," it has made me reflect on its potential as a tool to enhance student language developement and performance. Now my former "reluctancy" to using this way of sharing thoughts with others has turned into enthusiasm to venture myself into using blogs to help language students improve their "reading" and "writing" techniques. And why not, I might find myself in the position of working with other Costa Rican teachers and having them participate in the usage of blogging as a way to improve their teaching and student communication.

Even though I do not actually work with writing, since I do not teach writing or grammar related courses, I see this as a potential tool in terms of sharing websites, freeware, and the like, that could be used to enhance my areas of teaching, being these "pronunciation," "reading comp," and "oral communication skills." Besides, the good thing about creating and keeping a blog updated is the fact that your information can be stored so students can access it anytime they need to do so, and that you can eventually refer "future" students to your postings, so they can benefit from them as well. And needless to mention that your reflections can be used by other colleagues looking for information that can be benefitial to them and to their students elsewhere.

As a conclusion to this, my very first posting in a very long time, I would like to quote a colleague and partner of mine in this course on E-teaching through the University of Oregon, Amjad Ahmed Isa Mansoor Hussain Mohamed, "The first step towards academic and professional online contributions starts with a blog!" And I honestly hope to contribute with students and colleagues through this blog on "Reflective Online Teaching."