Week 3: Skills building websites for oral/aural skills and saving social bookmarks with Delicious

The 3^rd week is  as hectic as the previous two weeks. The focus this week is on developing social bookmarking skills, collecting resources for aural and oral skills, and to prepare a review on a project report. I see myself growing in terms of information, skills and level of confidence.

Reading as a communicative activity is interactive and reflective in nature. The interaction takes place between a writer and his reader through the text, the reader also starts interacting with himself and a dialogue takes place internally. I experienced it while I read about the experiments of the students of the previous batches. A detail study of the model specimen projects triggered a volley of questions in my mind about my own teaching practices, my attitude to innovation, and the potentiality of technological tools in my teaching context. I could not resist from going through a couple of them from the suggested list.

I have now the firsthand experience of what is cooperative learning. I see that we learn better in a group and with the support of a group. We exchanged information and negotiated the relative importance of various technological tools and their pedagogic strategies for the proper incorporation of these tools. The www is a vast, intricate world. It is impossible to explore it extensively and to find out what is useful single handed. We joined hands, made a joint effort, exchanged information and now I know what I can use for my purpose. The time management during the week is sometimes difficult and stressful. The reason probably is I feel enchanted by the novelty and variety of the new medium of internet technology.

My Delicious webpage might help to sort out the problem partly because I will have a ready list of bookmarked sites to choose from for preparations and also practice teaching. A will have support from other members of this social bookmarking site- my batch mates who are able to handle internet more competently and are more resourceful that me.

The article by Lindsay Miller titled Developing Listening skills with Authentic materials discusses various technological tools for authentic academic listening practice. The article has helped me to resolve a dilemma about the use of right kind of materials for academic listening practice. Online listening materials hold better merits over the authentic listening materials since are more natural and therefore more close to real life situations. In case of large classes and limited resources at a teaching place, listening practice is possible outside the class either online of using other technological tools. But listening should be given equal importance as other skills in teaching and learning.

I am eagerly waiting for learning in greater detail during the coming weeks to improve my teaching styles.

Thanks

Kinnari