Week 3- Reflections

Hello everyone,

I started the week with a new website. I had heard the site- Delicious- many times but i wasn't interested in it then. After the onset of this week, I created a page on Delicious website and really I liked it. Actually I was a bit regretful of missing a website like this, because not only sharing the ideas but also sharing your sources is a good a idea.

As it comes to aural/oral skill building through web skills, the articles chosen for us were very informative. First of all we were given a good example of how important pronunciation is in language teaching/learning.

I like using this chart in the very first lessons of mine just to give the perception of the phonics and the importance of them in intelligibility. To improve my students speaking and listening skills, I always encourage them to visit websites on these areas. From time to time I use websites about listening or pronunciation as the prerequsities of some activities. For example; I ask them to listen to some recordings from Randals Listening Lab to make them ready for a speaking activity on the same topic. I advise them to check the scripts of the listening activity if they had great difficulty in understanding the recording. Besides I always urge them to download applications about listening, pronunciation and speaking to their smart phones. The reason of this is very simple: They never leave their phones so we should make use of their addiction ;) 

Photo credit: https://carolschnei.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/oi.gif

I'd like to add some comments on one more site which is my favorite for years. It is VOA ;) Voice of America is a great site with an interesting content for the learners of English. You can find videos for your courses easily. You can choose the level and the topic for your lessons. There is also a part called "English in a minute" There you can have your students watch videos of some idioms and by doing so they will comprehend the meaning more because their using of the visual help will make the learning better. Here s an example:

That's all for this week. I hope you'll like the post, I'm looking for your comments ;)

Aysun Güneş

Turkey

Week 2- Reflections on ABCD Learning Objectives

Hello everyone,

This week started very hectic because of the workload of mine and I felt  a bit nervous at the beginning of the week. Today is Wednesday and I feel quite relieved because I've completed most of my tasks at school, in the MA program and also I was able to prepare a big birthday party for my son. 

When it comes to our tasks here, I can say that the online program is very fruitful and refreshing from the  start. In our college years of course most of us learned how to write learning objectives, but after over ten years it is really refreshing to have a look at them again. I saw that I forgot most of the jargon and for that reason I made a research on the topic and watched some videos on "Youtube" and checked some slides from "Slideshare". These helped me remember the details about the topic. 

As I mentioned in my posts on Nicenet, I'm a visual learner, for that reason I like to support my learning with videos and PPT slides.

I'd like to share the link of the video with you.

Link:

Writing ABCD learning outcomes

After watching the video, I learned that our objective should be about the outcome NOT the process. Moreover they should be SMART. 

That's all for now.


Aysun Güneş
Turkey

Greetings from Turkey

Hello everyone,
It's a great pleasure for me to be a part of this training programme. I'm Aysun and I'm an instructor of English at a state university-Anadolu University- in Turkey. I've been teaching English for over ten years and for the last 8 years I've been trying to participate CPD (Continous Professional Development) events and trainings to improve myself and keep learning.  I'm living in a small city called Eskişehir which is so close to the capital-Ankara. These are the pictures of my lovely city. If you visit Turkey or at least if you are planning to do so, I'd like to have you as my guests :)

Love,

Aysun