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.