Nilufar Begibaeva's Writing Improvement Toolkit

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...