Week 3

       This week our task was to create a Delicious page. I have already been using this service for several years, but during this week I have found and added a lot of new links there. I'd like to thank Deborah, Courtney and my classmates for that as visiting your pages was worthwhile. And, of course, I have found a great deal of useful information, articles, resources, links on our course site.

       As for reading materials, everything was extremely interesting, informative, thought-provoking and useful for me. The article I liked very much is New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation by Maria Grazia Busa as it is connected with a research I conducted a couple of years ago.Nowadays we (teachers, students, parents) are technology addicts (I am as well), but I have a strong believe that "there is no substitute for actual human-to-human contact in learning a language". In my opinion, to make using of CALL correct and effective every teacher nowadays while deciding "to use or not to use" this or that tool in the classroom should take into consideration one and the same principle. I call this principle "necessity and justification". It means that technology should be used if it's not possible or very difficult to get the lesson objectives or a certain teaching effect without them.

       Our course objectives are extremely close to it, as while solving our weekly tasks we should be very selective (to choose the articles, projects, useful links). In addition, we can't just publish a couple of links to share with our classmates, but every time we should justify the necessity of using it in the classroom. I think there appears a new philosophy, based on a collective wisdom.

Magician of the Net

This week I have become the magician of the Internet searching strategies and instruments due to Noodletools  and Technology Tip of the Month by Deborah Healey (maybe it's not true, but I feel so and don't think it's a joke!). But the best outcome of the second week for me is ABCDobjectives. It really helps to understand the destination our teaching ship is going to. Besides my regular work in Sevastopol Institute of banking I have a part-time job in Yalta University of Humanities where I teach Methods of Teaching English for prospective English language teachers. At last I have understood how to teach my students the most safe and precise way of writing Learning Objectives. And as for the "Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally", the resources mentioned as additional should become desk books for everybody of us.

University of Oregon, thank you greatly for that.

Choosing the best searching engine

As a lot of people around the world I have always used Google as a search engine for my queries (especially for the English ones as for my Russian or Ukrainian queries sometimes I use rambler.ru or yandex.ua), but sometimes it takes a lot of time to find real scientific articles and scholar reports among all the sources the engine brings to your screen.

Some time ago I got familiar with Google Scholar. The tool is much more convenient for searching information for an academic research as it includes scientific articles and legal documents into its answer. So, I like the tool and its slogan “Stand on the shoulders of giants”. 

Today I have tried Twurdy (“Too Wordy”). The engine sorts the texts according to the Readability Level (it highlights different levels texts on your query in different colours) that give you opportunity to choose the language level you can clearly understand. This engine can be helpful for children and students with lower than intermediate English level. As you is an ESL teacher than the tool can be helpful for you in order to find articles relevant to the language level of your students while preparing tailor-made materials for the class.

Sometimes I use an engine ASK where you can ask simple (and not very simple) English questions. I should say that it seems to be not  just a search engine, but a kind of social network with its own community. This tool can be used in ESL classroom to practice asking questions and reading real authentic materials. And my today's question was “What is the best searching engine?” and I got “The 10 Best SearchEngines of 2013” list which proves that "Google may not be the best choice for all searches."

As the sphere of my interests is connected with using technologies in ESL classroom, I used three different search engines (Google Scholar, Go Comb and Noodletools) to find relevant information.

Results: Go Comb gave me a great deal of resources, but not all of them were relevant and reliable, more over it took me time to find valuable scientific articles among all the posts. As for Noodletools (according to me results in Noodle Quest I was redirected to Infomine), the result list was the most precise and valuable, but it took me a lot of time to compose a concrete query. And in Google Scholar I got an accurate list of scientific articles including resources of different libraries, it didn't take me a long time to make a query, but when I wanted to specify my question, I couldn't do it.

So, different horses for different courses… There are a lot of powerful searching machines on the Net and each of them is good for its purpose. And it's up to us to decide…

Search Engines

The second week has started.

So, the topic is "Search engines".

Firstly, I have read carefully everything assigned as a week's task and visited all the pages. 

Among them: Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need, here I completed NoodleQuest  and I was amazed because it helped me to find a great deal of sources connected with my scientific research. It's really helpful, useful and wise.

It is also very convenient to use this tool as it's up to you to use a simple search or an advanced one (it depends on the level of your computer skills and your needs).

This toll helps not only to find relevant information, but it can refine and narrow your topic, in addition you can get library research questions answered in five days.

So, the tool is very valuable and I will certainly use it now and recommend it to my colleagues.

To the world

Hello world,
It is great to write to you!

Starting a blog

Today I am starting online “Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web" (Web Skills) course with the American English Institute in the Linguistics Department at the University of Oregon (UO AEI). And the first task is to create a reflective blog. So, every week I am going to publish here my reflections on the course.