Weekly Reflection- Internet in Language Teaching

In the final project, our team has to choose one to two technologies to apply in my classroom to solve a specific problem. We have chosen a class of five undergraduate students to implement our selected technology. Students in this class have issues mostly with speaking skills, specifically, pronunciation, idea organization as well as the lack of confidence and learning autonomy. Within only six lessons for three weeks, we chose applying "Flipgrid" to deal with students' learning autonomy in practicing pronunciation.  After a few lessons, I realized some of the problems mainly caused by learners' reluctance to speak and procrastination in doing homework and classroom activities. Though I can observe positive changes happening in the last two lessons, these problems are still unavoidable. If I had a chance to reorganize my lessons, I would definitely provide my students with more comprehensive instructions, maybe a demo for using Flipgrid as a tool to enhance pronuncia...

This week, I learnt to use some apps and websites for organizing activities in a flipped class. There are some flipped learning models for me to choose to base on.  (Example) There are other models such as Flex Model, Enriched Virtual Model, and Standard Inverted Classroom, etc. In my writing, I use Flex Model to design my lesson plan. I believe this model contains both online instruction and classroom time for discussion/activities. I choose this model because I want my students to watch the instruction multiple times and they have to actively acquire the knowledge and research before asking teachers for further explanation. In addition, several apps and websites are recommended to implement in flipped classroom, for instance, Nearpod, Kiddom, LessonUp, Blendspace, and so on.  In my lesson plan, I hold a course for students who want to learn IELTS academic writing skill. Teacher will use Zoom/Veed to record their instructional videos. First, students will have 15- 2...

This week, I learnt to create a rubric using RubiStar.  This tool is the most suitable for beginners in designing rubrics for a certain activity, for example, speaking tasks, a presentation or a listening test, etc. Being a beginner means a person has not created any rubrics before, so he/she does not know which criteria should be involved as well as how to justify the score and descriptors in the rubrics. That is the reason why RubiStar will be helpful because it provides users with clear and detailed criteria, descriptors for scoring range and so on. Users can depend on these to design their own rubrics within just a few clicks. However, if users have already had experience in the field of establishing rubrics, RubiStar may not work as well as we expected. Firstly, RubiStar only has one range of score from 1 to 4, so if users want to add a wider range of scores such as from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, then it cannot help. In addition, RubiStar only has a limited number of columns; therefo...

This week, I have learnt to design a lesson plan using technology as a tool to help organizing learning activities and assist students in enhancing their skills. In this lesson, I use YouTube Video, Mentimeter and Quizizz Online Game to design classroom tasks for my students. In general, I think that all of the websites are useful and easy to implement; however, they need the Internet to work well. In case there is no Internet, teacher should be prepared to change the way holding the activities. In addition, not all topics can have videos found in YouTube and for Mentimeter , if users use the free version, they will meet quite a lot of limitations in terms of templates or service.  Despite some drawbacks while using, YouTube Video, Mentimeter and Quizizz Online Game are still worth trying to implement in class. Considering reading/writing skills building sites, I recommend Breaking News English and Academic English Listening - Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab. Breaking News Englis...

During this week, I have experienced making my own website link to save some of my important bookmarks using Diigo. This is an extremely straightforward website to use. The first thing that needs to be done is to create an account (you can use your email), then click at the "plus" button near the right top corner to edit a bookmark. Next, there are some detailed information users should fill in, for example, the link of the platforms they want to save, a short description for each link including the target audience, the suggested level of audience suitable for the site and some characteristics/ purposes of that website, etc. In addition, users can add hashtags for their links and then public those links so that other people can see them. It is claimed that users can save unlimited links in this website and share to their audience easily and freely. Mentioning oral/aural skill-building websites, I have been using Udemy Business as one of the tool to help me with learning langu...

In the second module, the knowledge that I remembered the most was the ABCD learning objectives model because I will have to use it multiple times during this course and also in my daily teaching lessons. It could be clearly seen that ABCD model had four components namely Audience, Behavior, Condition and Degree. To be specific, the Audience element described the target audience or the group of individuals that the learning objectives were designed for (Often, my audience will be my students). And, one thing should be noticed was that when writing the Audience for the objectives, teacher had to specify the proficiency level of students as well, so that he/she could outline the appropriate actions or behaviors that learners would be able to demonstrate in the Behavior component. These actions and behaviors had to be observable and measurable.  In terms of Condition component, it illustrated the circumstances or conditions under which the learners would demonstrate the specified beha...