Week 4: Skill-buiding Websites for Reading/Writing and Technology-enhanced lesson plans

This week was another great week for learning about skill building, indeed: building students’ reading and writing skills, but also building our own skills towards a technology-enhanced classroom.

Our learning journey is becoming more and more concrete and practical.

All the readings presented are easily replicable ways to help our students build their reading and writing skills. However, when I read Liao’s” E-mailing to Improve EFL Learners Reading and Writing Abilities: Taiwan Experience”, it was like a slap in my face.

When I started to think of moving away from traditional teaching in 2006, the first thing I thought about was to use e-mailing. At that time I thought that this would be the easiest and most workable web-based computer application I could use to get my students more involved in their own learning. I was already teaching “writing techniques “and I wanted to give my students more opportunities to use English by conversing with me out of the class and develop their writing skills, at the same time. Getting early feedback on their writing pieces was also one of my objectives because I knew that we learn by doing and not by being lectured especially in writing. To make a long story short, it was not a great success only few, actually 3 or 4 out of this class of 25 students seized this opportunity and here comes Liao with his successful experience with e-mailing. I thought like him about key -palling, but I suggested it to my students more than tried to implement it.

I raved at my poor web-searching skills. Where were you Deborah and Sandra to instruct me on web-searching?

I would have read Liao’s experience and learned from it. But, now I know that it was not my students’ fault, it was mine. I should have thought more carefully over it and planned everything in advance with a lesson plan similar to those proposed this week for study.

I must admit that I do not always write a lesson plan for each lesson I teach maybe because I have been teaching “writing techniques” for quite a long time now , so I have a generic lesson plan that broadly outlines the unfolding of the class and sometimes the whole writing session

In the lesson plan recommended by the University of Tennessee some headings particularly interesting to me. Firstly, when I read the questions to consider for the classroom layout and grouping of students, I thought of my administration which sole view of teaching is a teacher facing and lecturing students. I gave a slight smile and thought I should show them this lesson plan.

I read probingly this notion of “NETS-Performance indicators”:”standards that each student should master to function effectively in their future; a future that is characterized by great change and information growth”. People in charge of designing curricula in my country should start integrating these performance technology standards in our schools if we want to extend the use of the new information technologies in our educational system.

However, these student performance technology indicators should be matched with the equivalent teacher performance technology indicators if we want to integrate technology successfully and in doing so reduce risks of resistance.

“Students’ present level of performance and skills” are important to evaluate for successful instructional outcomes. Yet, some questions came to my mind when I read this heading .How do we evaluate these pre-requisite skills in our mixed-ability classes? With a test? What happens if they don’t have these skills?

For “Adaptations for Special Learners”, there is still a long way to achieve equity on this matter. Most of our educational facilities are not yet adapted for disabled people. In a near future we hope.

The last heading "student product" reminded me of our own artifact for this training: THE REPORT, and at this moment I had a blank.