Reflective Journal for Week 3

It has already been the third week since this online course began, and now I’m quite getting used to reading the required materials, sharing my reflections and doing the project task each week. For example, we had to read about how Call is going to help our teaching, create an account and edit our bookmarks on Delicious.com, share links regarding building aural/oral skills, review one of the previous projects, and of course, keep the reflective journal for this week.

With all the links provided by every dedicated and resourceful teacher here, I surely will give it a try and see how they really work with my students. Undoubtedly, compared with the repetitive and mechanical drills in the textbook, those CALL resources will greatly help motivate the students with interesting games, videos and activities. But, other than arousing students’ motivation of learning, how do we know that our students are really improving their listening or speaking skills with the help of these websites?

What we can do on Delicious.com is really great because we are also creating a learning community to share helpful information regarding websites of English teaching with each other. This social bookmarking site allows its users to edit, annotate and organize their bookmarks, and just like other social media, you can also “friend” or “follow” a resourceful user and gain the access to his or her amazing collections.

As for the project steps, we had to choose one of the previous final projects and reflect on its strengths to get the big picture of what we’ll also have to accomplish at the end of this course. I read a wonderful final project by Aleyda Linares. It was about how she tried to improve her students’ grammar competence by creating a reflective blog to involve each student’s reflections. By finishing this assignment, I surely have a better understanding of what I need to do for my final project.

Reflective Journal for Week 2

We have two topics this week. One is about the best search, and the other is the ABCD mode. Just by coincidence, I happened to attend two workshops, “Britannica Project Starlight Taiwan” and “Assessment Symposium: English Remedial Teaching in Compulsory Education”, that share some similarities with our topics this week.

Invited by the British Council, the speaker demonstrated how to search its resourceful learning materials effectively. Since teachers in Taichung are allowed to surf this website without signing in, we are encouraged to incorporate what we found into our classrooms. Also, they are planning to recruit innovative English teachers to team up and design lesson plans, learning activities and worksheets, to help other teachers make the most use of this encyclopedia.

As for the Assessment Symposium, Dr. Tan Su Hwi mentioned questioning techniques by presenting Bloom’ taxonomy of questioning, which made me ponder over the ABCD method and the Indicators of Stage Competence in this regard. I’m especially impressed by the differences between “Assessment of Learning”, to check status of learning and “Assessment for Learning”, to improve learning . Does a proper learning objective achieve both?

After the orientation week, we started to really expose ourselves to the inspirational topics of this week by completing all the assignments. Also, we got to move towards the final project step by step. By the way, I have a  presentation to prepare, and I’ll incorporate some of the assignments into my PowerPoint slides because I think I can share what I have learned so far with other teachers.

English village and its implication on teaching

English village and its implication on teaching

李國禎 國中英語領域

A number of English villages have popped up all over the island in only a couple of years, and even more of them are now under way. As a member of the Advisory Group, I was given many opportunities to visit several of them, like the ones in Taoyuan, Mialoi, Yunlin and Kaohsiung. Through their English-speaking environment, I was able to see how they made use of native speakers and all sorts of resources to boost young English learners’ interest to learn the language in a more authentic way.

The Needs Assessment Survey

This website is mainly for all the English teachers in a total of eighty junior schools to participate in all the reverent activities regarding English teaching, such as English Speech Contest, English Singing Contest, professional development workshops, promotion for important policies from the MOE, to name just a few. And, I am exactly the one who officially blogs for the Education Bureau on this website.

I also like to watch videos on youtube because I teach a special class using all kinds of intriguing and authentic videos to arouse students’ interest in learning English. Also, I already downloaded “Shaping the Way We Teach English” a few months ago and found so many inspirational ideas to help my own teaching.

 Other than English, I also have a variety of hobbies, including cars, photography, amplifiers and speakers, travel and so on, so I frequently check the information and discuss with other junkies about those topics.

I think this online course will provide a great opportunity for all the participants to gain a better understanding of how to use computer technology, mainly the interactive webs, to enhance studetns’ learning. By building up a community, we can also reflect and share our ideas on this specific topic, so we can get to know how English is taught in different countries. Eventually, we have to apply what we have leraned from this course and put all the innovative teaching techniques into pratice in our own classrooms.