As you may remember, I am a senior ELT professor at Ulatina in Costa Rica mostly teaching reading skills, oral communication, and pronunciation (phonetics and phonology). Currently I am teaching a class whose code and name is BIN-04 Reading Skills I where students beginning their English Teaching major learn the basics of vocabulary building techniques, scanning, and the fundamentals of short story analysis, which is going to be crucial once they start taking the literature courses which are part of the 5th quarter, and on, in our program. Besides, most of my students have Internet access either from home or at the university, and, in extreme cases, they can access the Ulatina’s Website from a cyber café and work on our Central Core, which our Internet platform for our classes and documents sharing.
Although some of the BIN-04 students are somewhat reluctant to use Internet-based tools, such as skill-building websites, they are confronted with the fact that computer-assisted learning is part of the goals Ulatina wants to inculcate in its students. Bearing this idea in mind, I like to provide students with student-oriented sites that can help them better understand what we are studying in class. For instance, since part of our class deals with short story analysis, the use of information available on the Web becomes a must. Although it may sound rather childish, http://kidsclick.org/toplite.html has become a great source of information for students who want to deepen their understanding of the fundamentals of short-story telling and how they are structured. Students can then work independently and, in class or while socializing with their peers, comment what they have discovered on the Web. A cornerstone in the maxim of education, 50% teaching + 50% learning = education, becomes true for our university standards. Furthermore, with extra web-building links, we instructors can guide students and encourage them to become autonomous learners. And in my particular class, I can broaden student understanding with literature-oriented sites that can help students further comprehend how to analyze a short story and create their own short story maps or diagrams. (Please see http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=2983.)
From a teacher-oriented point of view, with so many tools available on the Web, we can keep track of student learning and progress. If we educators believe in autonomous learning, we have to also become guides and signal paths for students to follow. But at the same time, we teachers become responsible for what students do in regards to our class content. How about, depending on the subject-matter we teach, to have “reading” students create their own digital vocabulary logs that we can visit and check, and help correct if it is the case. Tracking what students do for one’s course in terms of vocabulary building is something that we could not have done years ago when so many free online teaching-oriented services did not exit; keeping a vocabulary log on a blog, for example, on a notebook is something that belongs to yesteryear eras. Digital resources are now around us that can help us become “digital” teachers.
As a conclusion, especially now that I have become to ponder additional uses for available Web resources, I would like to materialize two different things with my beginning reading students: on the one hand, to have students create their vocabulary logs in a blog-like style with a one-click access to the word pronunciation and with an online dictionary definition, especially after they have created their own and personal definition of the word based on the context studied in class or in the reading; on the other hand, to have students create short story summaries that can be shared with their peers to cooperatively assist others who have a bit of difficulty in grasping the conflict or theme of the stories studied in class. With these two ideas, it seems to me that the maxim of education can be exponentially magnified for the sake of student learning.
(My personal reflection on Technology and Language Teaching, taken and edited from Building Teaching Skills W2010, University of Oregon, American English Institute)
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