Week 4: My learning progress

Hi everybody,

I would like to share with you what I have learned and what I have done this week.

First of all, I would like to mention that this week has been quite crazy for me because as I mention in one post I had to deal with the end of the month exams and reports, the days of enrollment and the first days of class and as a coordinator and teacher it is quite a lot of job. So I have been able to start immediately this week session as I wanted, on Monday as soon as I got the material to work on, but I had to wait until Thursday to be really okay to start.

I found again this week really interesting and productive and I see more and more opportunities to introduce what we are learning in our academic program.

I am adding more and more interesting websites I found or you guys mentioned in your posts on my DELICIOUS:COM webstite which is RAFGOGO and that I invite you to visit.
I do not only add websites about English teaching but also about interesting stuffs that could indirectly be useful for my students. As all those websites are in English, it is indirectly a way to make them read in English.
I already gave my DELICIOUS.COM website to my students this month so that they could consult it and maybe find helpful websites.

Now I see so many uses to improve my students skills that I think that workshops should be organized in our institutes, universities or schools in order to make our colleagues aware of the potential the Internet could be in improving our students level in English (or any other languages) and the necessity to adapt to new technology.
We have already programmed a workshop for all our teachers for June-July.
I also think that working as team is the best. Everybody could contribute to implement an e-teaching system in his or her school, universtity or institute and very fast it could be implemented.

I also find the use of technology very useful as it could reduce part of the time we spend in class for some activities like writing and assign those activities as homework to our students. This would give us more time for some other activities like for example grammar that requires more the presence of a teacher to be well understood. It would also make our students more skilled with technology.
Reading and writing in class are time consuming. We can reduce that time by assigning it at home and then checking it in the classroom. For example, a reading activity could take up to 15 minutes and then you start checking their comprehension which takes also 15 minutes. If you assign the reading at home and then you check their comprehension in class or through an e-mail or blog, you can save those 15 minutes to dedicate to other important activities as for example speaking.

So these are my comments on this again very interesting week.
See you soon

Raphaël