1 Week 4

What a tough week! Days are passing really fast. We’ve already ended up the fourth week. I did many things this week. To start with, the spring term is starting on Monday so I had to arrange my class schedule, review my lessons and attend a very fruitful workshop about vocabulary teaching. Moreover, this week in my institution we hosted a very precious guest from İstanbul, Kristina Smith, who is a teacher trainer working for Longman Pearson. She gave us very useful information about vocabulary teaching. Then, at the beginning of the week I gave my students two writing assignments and told them to post their assignments by Saturday. Their first homework was using specific details they were supposed to write a paragraph continuing the action in the story, and the second homework was reading the story about Helen Keller they were to write a paragraph about what it would be like to go to school if you could not see nor hear? What would be their greatest challenges? Students started to post their homework dating from Wednesday. What I did was checking and giving feedback to all the papers they sent. 70 paragraphs…

Dealing with the things I mentioned above doesn’t mean that I neglected my assignments. On my part, I again learned many fruitful things from Sandra, Leslie and my course mates. Here would like to thank Leslie Opp Beckman once more for her invaluable contribution. The web-sites she gave in her new thread JUST FOR FUN was amazing. As Aleyda stated the web-sites such as Wacky Web Tales and Crazy Libs bring variety and creativity to the classroom. Even I have tried creating a story and it was fun…

This week on Nicenet, we had many topics to discuss and share. To be honest, I was a bit challenged about this week’s topic: creating a technology enhanced lesson plan. It took me a long time to think and create a lesson plan. However, after seeing nice comments from Sandra and my course mates, I felt very pleased thinking that I am on the right way.

I also noticed that that step by step we are progressing towards our project. Considering our classes and writing about some issues that technology might help with was a good start which helped me to think about my project in a deeper sense.

This week’s another topic was looking at technology enhanced lesson plan from University of Tennessee and comparing it to our lesson plan. Seeing the different lesson plans from different countries, I once again learned a lot from my course mates. It was interesting to see that none of my course mates used technology component lesson plans in their institutions.
Last but not least, this week I went through the reading texts and I’d like to comment on Krajka’s article “Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction”. In the article Krajka was quite successful at presenting the teaching of the different genres in the context of an on-line classroom. His suggestions on how to use the Internet in the classroom to enhance learning was also beneficial on my part. It is worth mentioning that not only he gave some concrete examples of incorporating technology to the curriculum but also he clarified some unclear points for me such as why one should incorporate on-line lessons, what the benefits of such a method are in comparison with traditional instruction, and how the Internet component fits into the syllabus.
That’s it for the time being.
Hope to hear your comments,
Gülsen