Week 4 : R&W skill-building - Technology-enhanced LP - Class issue

Reading/writing skill-building

After reading the articles about how to enhance reading and writing -  which readings are really food for thought -, I visited some multi-skill websites to find activities which can be used for the above mentioned purpose. 

The amount of materials offered on the recommended sites is enormous so it was clear at first glance that it would be impossible to explore all of them. I spent hours on visiting different pages and saved a lot of links with the intention to return to them in the future. 

Our task was to find some specific web pages that would work for us in our class. I chose a reading activity (http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com/quandary/version_2/examples/castaway.htm) and a writing one (http://www.dfilm.com/moviemaker/index.html) and shared my opinion concerning them on Nicenet. 

Kindled by Isabella Villa Boas's article "Process Writing and the Internet: Blogs and Ning Networks in the Classroom" I made the first step to use blogs in teaching. I asked the students in a group of mine to create their own blogs. We had some difficulties but neither I nor my students lost enthusiasm. We’ll see how it will work.

A technology-enhanced lesson plan

I read  Rober Elliott’s article „Tips and Advice from the Webskills Team: Writing a Technology Enhanced Lesson Plan” (https://sites.google.com/site/webskillsuo/lesson-plan) with great interest. I strongly agree that using technology for its own sake is useless. Unfortunately I have seen many lessons where the teachers used IT only because it was required from them but the use of technology was an end in itself.

I enjoyed planning my lesson, however, it took me many hours to write it down. Not the technical things but the wording needed a lot of time. Since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I didn’t only plan the lesson but put it into practice. I am not saying it can’t be improved but it worked well and reached the target. The lesson plan can be found here.

A class issue

 

After long hesitation I chose improving my students’ writing skills as an issue that technology might help with. I hope I won't regret this choice. In my class a lot of other skills need improvement too but this is the one where I feel a bit uncertain.

I hope preparing this project will help me to become more confident in teaching writing skills.