2 This week's topics were very delicious

Dear colleagues,
Welcome to my blog… This week I learned a lot of fruitful things again.

Firstly, I have to admit that how practical and convenient it is to use Delicious.com. Until last week, I used to save my favorite sites in my PC, but always had difficulty to find them. But now I can bookmark my search engines under different categories, so the next time I need specific information, I don’t have to search for the website anymore. Delicious definitely saves time. Another advantage of delicious is that I can share my bookmarks with my friends and see their bookmarks as well. For instance, when I looked some of my colleagues’ tags, some were really interesting and beneficial for me. I think saving important web pages allows us to work collaboratively with other colleagues when we work for the same goals. Last but not least, I noticed that we can use delicious as GOOGLE. For example, instead of googling, I can find websites that I need just by tagging and I can see how popular that search engine because of the number of the people who tagged that search engine. It’s just great.

This week’s another topic was exploring skill building web sites. Thanks to my colleagues, I learned many useful sites especially for listening and speaking skills. I also want to mention that, this week I felt very sorry to have been misunderstood by some of my colleagues. I think my wording caused this misunderstanding. Once again, I would like to mention that I am NOT AGAINST sharing web-sites with my students. In fact, we already had given the addresses of all skill building sites in my institution’s web page by the time school opened. However, teaching English is very different from teaching literature. Literature instructors should be careful when delivering his/her course. Some instructors may copy the analysis of literary texts instead of interpreting them. If students find the resource of that instructor then it may not be good for him/her. For example, SparkNotes is a very popular web-site especially for analyzing literary texts. You can also find some very good examples of essay topics with their answers. Imagine that a teacher using that site for preparing the exam and asking the same essay question without realizing that students are also using that site. Then, students do not have to question or interpret the literary texts. Once they discover that the instructor is using that site for both lecturing and preparing exam, they definetly abuse it.They can copy down the answers form the internet. That’s why I wrote “it’s not good for students to know all the resources of teachers”. However, this kind of thing can’t happen in English teaching. On the contrary, I believe that especially at the early stages of learing English imitating is necessary. There are quite apparent differences between English teaching and English literature teaching in terms of teaching strategies and application of methods. I hope, I am clear enough...

In my next post, I will talk about the ways of integrating technology to our lessons. Please continue to read my post.