WEEK-4 REFLECTION

WHAT A TOUGH WEEK IT HAS BEEN!!!

Thanks God this is the end of week 4, which has been really difficult for me. Two journeys and staying in houses that have no access to net and a piece of great news : I started the course on my own but I will continue with my baby inside :) Now it is much more difficult to type as I try to be at least 30cms away from the computer to protect the cute guest against electro magnetic frequency waves. Anyway, below is the summary of this week:

What I did:

As usual we were asked to read and comment on a few articles such as "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction" by Jarek Krajka and "Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books" by Mei-Ya Liang. They were really useful and we were given some great urls to explore and I really loved some of them especially http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/. The others are also good but I love keeping my students up to date as much as possible and this website provides us with newspapers from all over the world, which is great.

Secondly, we were asked to write about some issues, problems or concerns we have for our project- class--ones that technology might help solve. We described the class and students, discussed an issue. The issue I talked about was regarding motivation and class discussions.

Finally, we were asked to Prepare a technology-enhanced lesson plan and as I worked heavily on writing last year, I designed a lesson for story-writing. I tried to integrate technology into my lesson letting the students see the short film of the story they are expected to write.



What I learned
I once more learned that writing a lesson plan is no easy at all. I am really hopeless at doing this.
I learned that there wait great websites and sources for us,language teachers; we should just explore explore and explore not to be BURN OUT teachers as Jeremy Harmer states.
I learned that life is full of surprises :)



How can I apply these in my classes
OUt of this week, my biggest treasure is a few more great websites and I can use these in my classes in various ways. As for my favorite website this week http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/ I can assign them pages weekly and give them general knowledge quizes every friday, which improves them in two aspects.

When it comes to the lesson plan, I don't think I will have a lesson plan for each lesson. In my school we aren't asked to do this and to tell the truth this makes me relieved.



Yes, that's all for Week 4, which was another great week here in this course with a lovely instructor and lovely colleagues.

Best, Nehir