A Moment Of Thought About Our Group Presentation

With three days of nonstop discussions and preparation, we finally worked out the presentation which is the fruit for our hard work. In our opinion, it has many positive points regarding the presenters, objectives and actitivties. However, some follow-up improvements may make it better.

To start with, we are very happy together as a group. Each part of the presentation is appointed to a certain presenters but this does not mean that he/she works individually. We always share ideas and make recommendations to our rehearsal before actually presenting it. All of us are proud of our loud, clear voices, our English proficiency and confidence in public speaking. We have found out that many minds will make a good job.

As a group, we think that the objectives we set are very specific and easy to attain. We try to help the students with very concrete skills and guide them step by step. We do not impose workload on students so that they can have time to digest what they have learnt and achieve our intended purposes.

The activities are also suitable to students’ levels and also stimulate their interest. Actually, when we designed the activities, we always take into account interaction among students. They are communication-oriented, and therefore, can engage students into the lessons. Through pair work and group work, we help students to develop the collaborative spirit.

We felt that Martar’s recommendation of putting the reading text on the webpage very visually and spatially logical. This must be a great improvement to our final project.

Gennerally, we are really delighted with the fruit we have harvested and hopefully things will go well.

Hot Potatoes - They are really HOT!!!

Technology is a marvelous aid that facilitates language teaching and learning in a number of ways. Technological applications in the TESOL world have benefited teachers and students in making the classroom more realistic and the materials more authentic. Visual and audio effects, to a great extent, boost students’ interest in the lesson and enhance the teaching and learning outcomes. In our opinion, the TILT course is not only practical in its essence but also serves as a springboard against which English teachers can make further progress in their career and exploit technology to the full.

What we feel particularly interested is the Hot Potatoes software. It enables teachers to design numerous activities suitable for students of all ages and levels. According to students’ needs, teachers can tailor the activities with different programs such as JCross, JCloze, JMatch, JQuiz and Jmix. Each program has its our functions which help teachers vary the activities. In this way, they engage students in the lessons and take an active role in the learning process. Through JCross, teachers can create exciting games, enliven the classroom atmosphere and encourage interaction. Students will feel themselves more involved in the activities when they discuss with their partners to work out the answers. Take JMix, for another example. Among the jungle of words, they calculate and build correct sentences. In order to do this, students are expected to make use of their previous knowledge of vocabulary and sentence structures. This kind of activities helps them to apply what they have learned in a practical way. For activities which require comparison between options to choose the best ones, JQuiz, which is designed for multiple choice questions, may come in handy. Not less necessary are JCloze and JMatch for gap-filling and matching activities respectively. JCloze helps teachers to check learners’ understanding of the whole text so as to choose the most appropriate words or vocabulary items for each blank. With JMatch, students can be exposed to either texts or pictures which are quite motivating. Sentence matching may be rather demanding on the part of te learners since they have to take into account both meaning and grammar.On the whole, Hot Potatoes proves to be really effective software for language teaching and learning.

Reflection on WebQuests

We happened to learn about the so-called WebQuests when we were at university. However, at that time, we just thought that WebQuests were only websites that teacher used for reproducing materials in their teaching. Amazingly, what we thought is completely different from what Ms. Marta said. WebQuests proves to be a powerful tool for students to learn outside classrooms. It is useful that they have a chance to explore the given websites themselves to find out the answers to the teacher's questions. WebQuests can be very flexible in a way that students may have different answers depending on what they understand.
With regard to visual aspect, websites to be chosen to create WebQuests are supposed to be quite well-formed with beautiful graphics. This will stimulate students’ interest, thus they can learn more.

Generally speaking, WebQuests are very effective for active language learning as long as teachers are aware of how to create WebQuests with adequate quality.

And many thanks to Marta for her introducing to us a great Webquest Resources which contains a great number of WebQuests available and a tool for creating WebQuests.

Four Best Websites for Language Teachers and Students

Among the forest of websites that we've found for teaching and learning English today in our Tilt class, the following four are evaluated excellent matching the criteria we set at the beginning of the course.

• FOR STUDENTS

Randall's Other Sites provides a varity of audio files together with exercises available which are clearly and logically arranged in students'levels (beginners, intermediate and advanced).
http://www.esl-lab.com/

The Owl of Purdue focuses on writing is also a good recomendation. Grammar practice and different writing exercises from controlled to free writing from elementary to advanced are well provided.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

• FOR TEACHERS

Pearson Longman English Language Teaching
Huge resources for language teachers and students with lots of activites catering for different levels, ages and examinations (IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, PET, KET…). Business English materials are also available. It also provides a large list of recommended books for ELT teachers and ELT journals.
http://www.pearsonlongman.com/

Teacher Side of ESL PartyLand.
The site supplies teachers with a vide variety of lesson plans, tasks for teaching separated skills and integrated skills along with detailed activities for video and audio clips. This application of the Internet in language teaching is also taken into account.
http://www.eslpartyland.com/teachers/Tinitial.htm
Visit the sites and share with us your feelings!!!!!!!!!

WebQuest Evaluation

You have just got to know what a WebQuest is. Now, let's look at an evaluation we made on an ESL Website Exploration http://pw.vsb.bc.ca/library/eslexp.html

WebQuestsHave you ever heard of?

1. WHAT IS A WEBQUEST?

A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented online tool for learning. This means it is a classroom-based lesson in which most or all of the information that students explore and evaluate comes from the World Wide Web.

Adapted from http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/webquests/index.html

2. WHAT ARE THE ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS OF A WEBQUEST?

Introduction sets the stage and provides some background information.

Tasks are feasible and interesting. Instructions and materials which students have to complete are provided.

Process should be broken out into clearly described steps. Some guidance on how to organize the information acquired. This can take the form of guiding questions, or directions to complete organizational frameworks such as timelines, concept maps, or cause-and-effect.

Resources include videos, audios, online learning programs…

Evaluation of a WebQuest has to be able to evaluate students’ work

Conclusion brings closure to the quest, reminds the learners about what they've learned, and perhaps encourages them to extend the experience into other domains

Adapted from: http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html

3. What do short-term and long-term WebQuest focus?

Short Term WebQuests

The instructional goal of a short term WebQuest is knowledge acquisition and integration. At the end of a short term WebQuest, a learner will have grappled with a significant amount of new information and made sense of it. A short-term WebQuest is designed to be completed in one to three class periods.

Longer Term WebQuest

The instructional goal of a longer term WebQuest is extending and refining knowledge. After completing a longer term WebQuest, a learner would have analyzed a body of knowledge deeply, transformed it in someuh way, and demonstrated an understanding of the material by creating something that others can respond to, on-line or off-line. A longer term WebQuest will typically take between one week and a month in a classroom setting.

Adapted from: http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html

4. BENEFITS OF WEBQUESTS:

Students have ready exposure to a variety of activities which enable them to practise and apply technology into their own study. Webquests offer them encouraging motivations through differents tasks and activitties which are based on role playing and learning situations (http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html). Students are likely to engage themselves in their work and take the avtive role towarnds the learning pathways

Students have a good chance to work together. Webquests, therefore, motivate students’s cooperative attidude in problem solving tasks as it is commented that “tomorrow's workers will need to be able to work in teams”

Adapted from http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/webquests/index_sub1.html

Webquests develop students’ logial judgement and perspectives on real life problems. It is insisted that “They will need to commit themselves to a lifelong process of learning, honoring multiple perspectives and evaluating information before acting on it”
(http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/webquests/index_sub1.html)

5. HOW TO CREATE WEBQUEST?

1. The first stage for a teacher in learning to be a WebQuest designer is to become familiar with the resources available on-line in their own content area.

2. The next step is to organize one's knowledge of what's out there. Spending a few hours on Non-WebQuest 3 will guide the teacher in organizing the resources in their discipline into categories like searchable database, reference material, project ideas, etc.

3. Following that, teachers should identify topics that fit in with their curriculum and for which there are appropriate materials on-line.

4. A template is available that guides the teacher through the process of creating a short-term, single discipline WebQuest.

Ten criteria to evaluate a website

Today, searching information in the Internet is very popular with many people, especially teachers and learners. To have an appropriate teaching material, teachers will have to work hard in the Internet. Therefore, to make this work easier and quicker, teachers should know how to evaluate a website. After discussing, our group comes to an agreement about ten criteria for teachers to evaluate a web. These are:

1. Language-learning potential: it means what teachers or learners will achieve or have after they make use of this web.
   
   
2. Learner fit: the learner’s level, language level which is suitable for learners or not.
   
   
3. Meaningful and contextualized presentation: that means all the vocabularies, grammar, etc. have to be put in a clear sentence and context so that the learners can catch the meanings easily and remember in a long time.
   
   
4. Practicality: the learners know how to use what they learn in life and communicate with other people.
   
   
5. Content is culturally appropriate: that means the contents of a website have to appropriate to learners’ culture. If not, learners cannot apply that knowledge in their country for the reason that those are very strange or even ridiculous to their culture.
   
   
6. Variety of items: a lot of exercises, practices, grammar, knowledge about many different fields or games.
   
   
7. Text quality: that is the font is large enough or small, the background or color of the text is easy to read or not, etc. Moreover, clear navigational aids are also important things to evaluate a website.
   
   
8. Interface: instructions should be clear and simple. In addition, the metalanguage is not difficult for students’ level.
   
   
9. Interactivity: feedback is a significant thing to consider. The feedbacks have to be sufficient and fitted with learners’ psychology.
   
   
10. Navigation: it is very important for learners when exploiting a web, with this, they know where to have a hint, where they can go back or next or where they can find the hyperlinks to other texts or images.

Take this link to onestopenglish.com as an evaluation model. In our opinion, this website meets these ten criteria in its wide variety of skills and topics which are authentic and practical to students. If you access this site, you will see clearly about what we have already found out.

Here come the CUTE penguins

Friendly and lovely as penguins, the four members of our group have been friends since we entered the University of Education. We are working together not only because of our long-lasting friendship but also out of our share of interest and personal traits. We would like to say a few words about each member:

- Nguyen Cao Nguyen, the handsome guy with an ever-smiling face, is one of the key figure of our group for his good sense of humor and excellent skills in computing.

- Dao Thi Anh Thu, the cheerful girl second from the left, is best loved by her approachable and sympathetic personalities. She brings life and colours to our group for her keen sense of beauty and amicability.

- Pham Huy Cuong, with a baby face, lovely smile and a mind crammed with funny stuff, he sometimes makes us laugh, which helps wash away our tiredness of hard working. There is one thing we must reluctantly accept as one of his features is his studiousness and innovation in everything he does.

- Dinh Ngoc Thuy, quite extroverted and sociable in her traits, never fails to stir us up. She is admired for her interesting ideas and deep insights into her major. Thuy is always willing to share her experience as well as personal problems so that we can together do a socalled “problem-solving task”.

It is a great fun that we should be in the same group in which we can conduct mutual learning and sharing. We have also been able to find out a good deal about one another. The coming of the PENGUINS group can be seen as the joint of heart and meeting of minds. We have been doing very well together so far ….:-)

(From left to right) Cao Nguyen, Anh Thu, Huy Cuong, Ngoc Thuy.

About our final project, we will make a four-day unit for teaching Reading and Listening to the tenth graders whose English level is pre-intermediate. We will do our utmost to complete the project timely and satisfactorily. It will be piles of hard work ahead, but nothing can stop us from moving forward, non-stop learning and achieving the goals.