Reflections on Week 4

Part Two

This week, I did four assignments as part of the requirements of the Webskills course. The first one was to review one article and evaluate and select 3 activities for teaching EFL college students reading and vocabulary.  I also reviewed another article for teaching writing and selected 3 activities and I wrote down the ABCD objectives for using such activities in the EFL classroom. For more details refer to the previous post, Part One.

The second assignment I did was to create a technology enhanced lesson plan. I did this task after reading 2 useful articles. The first one is written by Robert Elliott  of the University of Oregon, Webskills team https://sites.google.com/site/webskillsuo/lesson-plan . The second one was E-How website whose URL is http://www.ehow.com/how_2324320_write-integrated-lesson-plan.html. I found them very useful and convincing.  I downloaded a template which was prepared by Deborah Healey of the American English Institute, Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon. This template helped me a lot to accomplish my task. Then I searched the Internet for some activities and games that I can incorporate into my lesson plan. I found some interesting games and activities for teaching English homonyms. I downloaded them into my laptop in PDF forms  and they are ready to be used in my class which has no internet connection. I really liked the idea of having Plan B alternatives to be always ready for whatever circumstances that may occur in the class. The URL of my Lesson Plan with Technology on my Google Drive is https://docs.google.com/document/d/18neg0xR4DGIMJynP1zczNAuu4r0nx6da6Vn4jDnRvs/edit . I also shared this link with the participants of Webskills on Nicenet.

The third assignment that I did was completing Task 3 of the project. I briefly described the learners of my course who are 10 M.A students. Then, I had a brainstorming activity to write down some of the issues and problems that face my students and I. The most dominant issue in our context  is the absence of fundamental resources like an e- library, internet, multimedia, computer lab, data show projectors, smart boards, etc. My students and I need such facilities to perform our tasks and enhance the learning and teaching  process. The only available teaching aid in the classroom is a non- interactive whiteboard without markers. Our Faculty of Education has a small library and the University has a Central library, but the most recent book or journal that they have is dated 1990 and before. Thus, our students face difficulties in finding out relevant research references to accomplish their tasks and later in writing their dissertations. What aggravates the situation is that our graduates become English teachers and I think they should be introduced to such technological devices at least during their training. There are also other issues related to instructors. As teachers, we are unable to follow the progress of our students in our courses or in the other courses that they take with the other teachers due to the absence of the technological software and hardware.

The final assignment is what I have been doing right now. That is to describe in a  Blog post on what we have been doing this week and to comment on one of the Blogs of our colleagues in the course of Webskills.

Having come to the terminal stage of my assignments for Week 4, I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation to my Instructor Mr Sean McClelland for being always ready to help