Week 8. Great learning Tools !

Education is not to reform

students or amuse them or to

make them expert technicians.

It is to unsettle their minds, widen

their horizons, inflame ther intellect,

teach them to think straight,

if possible "

 Robert M. Hutchins.

Every week  this course, has new and attractive challenges for us.This week, we had the  opportunity to see a series of different good exercises. At http://www.toolsforeducators.com I found lots of activities we can prepare for our  classes. It is a good site and I will further use it. As I said in Nicenet, I decided  to use "Hot Potatoes"instead, to learn more about a program I had heard before.The exercise I prepared in jQuiz, as a diagnosis exercise, is intended for my students at the university. They usually come from different school settings and present quite different backgrounds in the language so, it is good to know them at the very beginning to plan your further work.

  
                                                                    
Most important of all, is to see the big amount of  activities that we can have for our learners of all ages. They are graded for all the main learning skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. For the younger ones, we can create flashcards, puzzles, matching exercises and similar. For the older ones, we can create traditional tasks like : scrambled sentences and gap-filling exercises that can have clues to help them find an answer.These traditional type of exercises are usually more attractive when you provide them online. Students may also create their own tasks for another student to solve. This is a step in their autonomy  as learners .All in all,  the opportunities are endless, we just need to be aware of them and learn about their educative and meaningfull advantages.
                                                               

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This week we also learned about ANVILL( A National Virtual Lannguage Lab ) This speech based-tool  offers a wide range of opportunities for teachers and students. It seems that you can have everything grouped in one place. I learned about its features and possibilities at the site http://ylclab.uoregon.edu/groups/anvillhelp/wiki/fb6ef/Core_Tools.html. Its designer is Jeff Magoto, director of the Yamada Language Center in the University of Oregon. I am grateful of the big amount of infomation he provided about this course management system  that may, definitely, be a great improvement in the English class. We also had to check our partner ' s  draft report for the final project . It is interesting to see the good ideas my peers are coming up with 

       Well another  working week ended...I started classes at
       school this week and I believe I am  becoming as busy
       as my colleagues have been since the beginning of this
       course.  Although  I  have not told my second graders     
       about the blog yet,  they  liked  the  idea of having more 
       technological tools in class. I also like the idea that this
       course is not over yet. I am waiting for another good  and
       interesting week to start !