Nilufar Begibaeva's Writing Improvement Toolkit

This week is the time when all of us think what has changed during these ten week inside of us. I had a blog before but never thought of it as a teaching, effective teaching tool. Here I learned it. Having read the article IMPLEMENTING THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES: Technology as Lever by Arthur W. Chickering and Stephen C. Ehrmann http://polaris.umuc.edu/~cschwebe/gsmt800/7principles.htm I agree with authors that if are asked to design antennae you are noe expected to invent it . It build deep understanding of its principles. The same with our sites, bolgs and exercises we create. By this we understand better the kernel of all these tool and in fiture we can easily use these tools and explain to our colleagues why it is for.

This week we have to try different tools and implement them into our practice. Even though Deborah told us to work with one option but I would like to try them all and created both site for my students and nicenet class for teachers whom I train these days. In addition to these sites for collaboration we were given sites to create fun and intersting activities for our classes. I made several bingo games and an on-line crossword. Both these activities are on the same topic - my project one - "British Festivals" Another activity we should do was to complete the survey. It gave me food for thought and I decided to create a survey for my teachers of ETTE project by British Council. I am still working on it and hope to publish a link to it after completing. Survey was another very useful tool for me as a teacher. What I really worry about is my project feed back and report...

This week we were assigned to complete the following tasks: 1. Project report draft submitting and peer review 2. Learner autonomy reading articles and reflecting them 3. One-computer classrom design. As well as sending my project plan draft I have received project documents from one of my peers Hamid and am still waiting for another peer report draft. The mail point of the articles is that it is more beneficial to teachstudents how to look for information and study independently, teach them adapt and apply rceived knowledge into individual practice. Students should not be the containers, which teachers have to fill in. Learner autonomy requires some personal qualities as well, such as to be responsible and self confident; creative thinking and decision making skills. Why according to some research students who come after high school to universities often fail during the first session? Because students at schools used to be lead by the teacher. At university a student decides ...

This week was very fruitful for me as well as challenging. Youtube did not play well because of slow Internet connection and I had to ask my friends to download for me, what they did and sent me vie Skype. But it was a half of the problem as my computer did not play .flv format and I had to convert into another format to watch Jeopardy tutorial. But untill I did it I experimented and could manage at last with Jeopardy game. Here they are- 2 Jeopardy activities , 1 USA review, second one - Festival , what I was going to implement into my project. The first one I did using the ready template with hyperlinks inserted into each slide. As to Festival PPT I was really mine although it is very simple. No I know how to generate this game and other games of this kind. Another important point is choosing a partner for the project work. I offered Hamid to work together and he kindly agreed. I believe this tandem will be useful for both us. As to the discussion for this week "Interactive Pow...

This week we discussed alternative assessment tools, learning styles and created rubrics for our classes. http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?screen=ShowRubric&rubric_id=1908895& Above is my rubric link. I have tried rubric generators on www.rubistar.org and on http://teachnology.com Both of these sites have their own advantages and disadvantages. Advantage of Rubistar generator is that it lets you integrate several types of rubrics. For instance presentations of my students include both oral and PPT. But you may not give different value and scores for different accomplished tasks. For the content the value of the score would be more than for appropriate images in PPT. You have to adapt and then explain to your students modifications you make there. Advantages or rubrics on teachnology.com is that you may give different point for different criteria. But you cannot add your own criteria. Besides of it you cannot save it on the web site you have to print it out. For this re...

The biggest achievement of mine surinf this week is understanding deeper what WebQuest is and creating my own one on www.zunal.com for the 2nd year students of Geography Faculty in our Andijan State University. The crucial elements are enumerated on given above web site. They should contain 1. Introduction 2. Task 3. Information sources 4. Process 5. Guidance 6. Conclusion Thinking about WebQuests I have come to conclusion that the best example of the long term WebQuiest is our DL course due to which we all have created this blog. Why? Because by the end of the course we will have analyzed a bodu of knowledge deeply, transform it according to our class needs and demonstrate an understanding of the material by creating the project task as it follow in the author’s definition of a long term webquest. I have looked through a lot of projects designed to learn Enlish and some ideas related to my issues described in my previous week came to my mind. I will try to realize them I have some tro...

"Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." Francis Bacon DISCUSSION. This week was devoted to studying reading and writing improvement with the help of CALL. We have read several articles related to this topic. Here are links to some of them: http://www.udel.edu/ETL/RWN/Encourage.html This site provides with ideas of using TV, newspaper, telephone books, maps to stimulate reading Renee Ybarra in his article Using Technology to Help ESL/EFL Students Develop Language Skills(http://iteslj.org/Articles/Ybarra-Technology.html) says that first of all when students use e-mail writing they can see what a native speaker has written while answering, then scroll up and down through the message which is visually helps them. Students get self-motivated to write in a new for them way and to communicate with a real native speaker and get a real respond. Often, the students need to feel confident in their new language before putting it into print. So he...

This week 3 was so informative for me in tems of getting knowledge about speaking and web resources. I tried some site with my students in my lessons but there is too much information just for the too short perios of time that I think sometimes I am a backward student in this DL course. So these are sites I wouls recommend to my students and my colleagues to practice speaking and listening. 1. I used http://www.manythings.org/ to practice speaking. My students of the first year enjoyed the quizzes provided there and while doing testing pronounced the given words. They like it because the correct answer they get immediately and the scores are counted. In the first year of study a part of each lesson devoted to phonetics so studying phonetics using this web site was fun for them. There is a link which leads you to watching video (that is beneficial for listening to watch gestures and expressions to understand better) and after one can practice sounds as many times as he want. The most t...

I always faced difficulties with storing web sites. As I have never heard about Delicious I wrote a message with copied and pasted links in the content of the message and sent it again to my e-mail then saved it into separate file inside my mail. That was the way I had my favourite links always with me. Some useful links I keep on my web site on teachnology.com but it is so time consuming to update the site for me. So you can imagine how I am glad to have Delicious with me! My address on Delicious is http://delicious.com/nilufarb70 The reason why I like Delicious.com: 1. Even if I kept my links in my e-mail box using Delicious.com saves me steps to find my links because I do not open e-mail, find file with links, open it and then find necessary one and follow it. 2. Delicious.com is your mini search engine where using tags you may easily find appropriate link. 3. You are able to see ho many people saved this link for their bookmark (following link http://www.uoregon.edu/~dhealey/techt...

I decided to make websurf on all links. We have to get familiar with as many search engines and web directories as possible during our course in order to make the work effective and to be a good source of advice for our students and colleagues. Additionally, as all of us see different search engines are helpful for different purposes like academic research, teaching materials and practical tools for collaborative use with your students. Clusty. I have chosen the topic for the search "Games in English learning", which opened me not only search results, but also divided them into categories like "Kids, students, English Language", ESL games, teaching English, mobile phones e t.c. As I did not clearly understand mobile phone division I explore that one: it explained the technique of playing a game using cell phone and offered to download. Somehow this display of search results is useful, while searching we can narrow the topic ourselves though. It had "Tests and q...

(Audience) The class for which I have developed ABCD objectives consists of 13 students of Psychology Department, all of them are female, age of 19-22, second year of study, 4th semester. All our students pass State exam on English at the end of their 6th semester, 3rd year of study. As we do not have appropriate environment to practice speaking outside the classroom, we do not have native speakers at all in our city, their knowledge of English considered basic , although most of them study English at schools. In addition two months of the academic year they spend picking cotton (September-October). We begin studying Phonetics and Grammar in the first year of their study by "English text-book", N.Bonk. On their second year of study students use books, published in Uzbekistan in collaboration with Ministry of Higher and Secondary Specialized Education and British Council "Word Wise". This book contains 15 Units, each of it involves all skills: reading, writing, liste...

Hi there. I received a lot from other posts about education facilities and digital literacy of students my classmates teach. I would like to follow Juliet’s template of the description of her school and class. I consider it gives full picture of both environment and conditions you teach. 1. Overview There are 5 higher education establishments in Andijan, the city where I live. We do not have private Universities. Our Andijan State University consists of 8 faculties, where study about 7000 students. This year is the last one we have our students study correspondently, government recognized these study ineffective and stopped it. University has about 300 teachers and lecturer that disseminated into 35 Departments . I work at a Foreign Language Department (Chair), with my 20 colleagues-teachers of English, French, and German. Official language in Uzbekistan is Uzbek, Russian is the second language and English along with German, French, (in some schools Hindi and Urdu) is taught as a f...

Participation in the first week discussion and reading related articles let me know better about blog history and possibilities in teaching English. I decided if a teacher is creative enough he can use each feature for his teaching advantage. Looking and studying others' blogs set me thinking about my owm blog design. I do not know still many features of blogs but during this course I hope to be confident with this.

I am proud of being one of the students of the Distance Learning Program offered by the US Embassies worldwide. Happy to meet in cyber space my highly motivated colleagues from whom I can also learn useful things and tools related to our work in addition to the knowledge our teacher Deborah provide us with. This orientation week has given me much in terms of using Nicenet and analyzing ribrics. My expectations of this course are great and I wil do my best to meet our teacher's expectations as well.