I mainly use the Ohio ESL http://www.ohiou.edu/linguistics/esl/ for my action research. The learning objective is to arouse student’s interest to the topic “Halloween” http://www.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/halloween1.htm and to train their reading skill. I expect students can explore more on the topic by doing other related language-use exercises like gap-fill, matching & jumbled sentence. For the evaluation, I will do class observation and a short survey about the effectiveness of this website. I may also interview some students if necessary.
From the class observation, I found that most of the students enjoyed to do the exercise and could be handled quietly themselves within the time limited. From the data of the survey, most of the students were interested to use the website. Some of them suggested if there are animations, pictures, audios and even videos, it will be more attractive.
I think it is a trend to incorporate teaching with online resources. It is especially true to arouse students’ interest and even support to explain difficult concepts with the help of animations and videos. I think schools can tailor made some online materials and buy some suitable software from different publishers which match our syllabus and the school-based curriculum. Teachers can also mark students’ work online. This would make teaching more effective in future.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Week 9: Practical Considerations for Multimedia Courseware Development: An EFL IVD Experience
I think IVD (interactive Videodisc) is quite attractive compared with the computerized graphic displays. Students may be interested in Authentic learning input such as their familiar movies.
To design this kind of Multimedia courseware, we should consider at least three things (as mentioned in the paper): the media, the institutional needs/constraints, and design principles. First, we need to know what the IVD is about and what are the strengths of the program. Next, we need to find out the language needs of our students and whether they can learn from these authentic texts as many idioms may be appeared. Third, we need to set the objectives why we decide such program – what language skills are we expecting students can learn?
The access to computer is very important. Before we use this program, we also have to consider whether we can provide support for students in this area. I know some of our classmates do not have a proper MMLC in their school. It may difficult to conduct this activity.
After reading Paul’s comment on this week’s reading, I also agree that this IVD program is a bit out-dated. We can find different kinds of similar resources online or from some publishers. It is no longer time consuming and too expensive to develop such courseware.
To design this kind of Multimedia courseware, we should consider at least three things (as mentioned in the paper): the media, the institutional needs/constraints, and design principles. First, we need to know what the IVD is about and what are the strengths of the program. Next, we need to find out the language needs of our students and whether they can learn from these authentic texts as many idioms may be appeared. Third, we need to set the objectives why we decide such program – what language skills are we expecting students can learn?
The access to computer is very important. Before we use this program, we also have to consider whether we can provide support for students in this area. I know some of our classmates do not have a proper MMLC in their school. It may difficult to conduct this activity.
After reading Paul’s comment on this week’s reading, I also agree that this IVD program is a bit out-dated. We can find different kinds of similar resources online or from some publishers. It is no longer time consuming and too expensive to develop such courseware.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Week 8 - Hong Kong's Amended Copyright Law
Apart from educational purpose, it is important to set copyright law for protecting the writers and the publishers. We need to respect people’s work as their “Intellectual Property”.
I think that sometimes it is quite confusing to decide the meaning of "reasonable portions of copyright works". How many pages of the book can we photocopy? Is there any percentage limitations?
It is interesting to find out that teacher cannot play a DVD of a currently shown movie in class, but what about those not currently shown? Actually, many of the DVDs we can buy in the market are quite new but not currently shown.
As the development of IT is quite fast, people can download updated movies, dramas and pop songs by BT. It is quite difficult to stop people infringing the right of the owners.
I think that sometimes it is quite confusing to decide the meaning of "reasonable portions of copyright works". How many pages of the book can we photocopy? Is there any percentage limitations?
It is interesting to find out that teacher cannot play a DVD of a currently shown movie in class, but what about those not currently shown? Actually, many of the DVDs we can buy in the market are quite new but not currently shown.
As the development of IT is quite fast, people can download updated movies, dramas and pop songs by BT. It is quite difficult to stop people infringing the right of the owners.
Proposal of Group Project - Group 5
Proposal of Assignment 3 by Fanny, Jenny, Joyce and Sherlock
Our target students:
We design the CALL website for upper primary and junior secondary students. As Cantonese is their first language and English is their second language, students are weak in English comparatively.
Our aims:
Since students are passive learners, we would like to make use of this website to arouse students’ interest in learning English. We want to improve students reading and comprehension skills. We can expose students to read authentic texts such as online news articles and motivate them to share their feelings and opinions about the readings. Besides, students can do interactive activities and writing activities like writing instructions, “Dos and Don’ts” in a notice after reading some recipes.
Students needs:
This website focuses on reading and comprehension skill. We link to some interesting and attractive websites which provide a lot of online readings. We choose some simple, familiar and interesting topics for our students such as food. We also want to attract them by creating some interactive activities using Hot Potatoes (exercises like fill in gap, matching, multiple choices, etc.) We set some hints and feedback for students when they try the activities. Here, teacher becomes a facilitator and is responsible to explain rules and guidelines of these interactive activities to students. The doers are the students where they are also the active learners and controllers.
As reading comprehension is included in the school curriculum and the syllabus, this website is useful for teaching and learning in schools or at home. We will design one lesson to do these interactive activities. With Internet connection in the MMLC, students can use the computers and does the task. They are asked to do the activities and write down their scores. We can assign follow-up writing exercises like poem / recipe / notice. Students may download the writing frameworks from the website and can summit their work to teachers via email. Teachers can mark it or share it with the class.
Benefits
After the lesson, students can:
1. learn a set of vocab about food & action verbs [the verbs appear in the recipe]
2. learn another kind of genre [recipe + writing instructions]
3. tailor-made material to speed up reading texts
Technologies:
We design our website by using Dreamweaver and Hot Potatoes. We ask students to share their feelings and ideas about the activities on the website. Links will be set to our blogs, wiki, online dictionary and some useful and interesting English websites.
Our target students:
We design the CALL website for upper primary and junior secondary students. As Cantonese is their first language and English is their second language, students are weak in English comparatively.
Our aims:
Since students are passive learners, we would like to make use of this website to arouse students’ interest in learning English. We want to improve students reading and comprehension skills. We can expose students to read authentic texts such as online news articles and motivate them to share their feelings and opinions about the readings. Besides, students can do interactive activities and writing activities like writing instructions, “Dos and Don’ts” in a notice after reading some recipes.
Students needs:
This website focuses on reading and comprehension skill. We link to some interesting and attractive websites which provide a lot of online readings. We choose some simple, familiar and interesting topics for our students such as food. We also want to attract them by creating some interactive activities using Hot Potatoes (exercises like fill in gap, matching, multiple choices, etc.) We set some hints and feedback for students when they try the activities. Here, teacher becomes a facilitator and is responsible to explain rules and guidelines of these interactive activities to students. The doers are the students where they are also the active learners and controllers.
As reading comprehension is included in the school curriculum and the syllabus, this website is useful for teaching and learning in schools or at home. We will design one lesson to do these interactive activities. With Internet connection in the MMLC, students can use the computers and does the task. They are asked to do the activities and write down their scores. We can assign follow-up writing exercises like poem / recipe / notice. Students may download the writing frameworks from the website and can summit their work to teachers via email. Teachers can mark it or share it with the class.
Benefits
After the lesson, students can:
1. learn a set of vocab about food & action verbs [the verbs appear in the recipe]
2. learn another kind of genre [recipe + writing instructions]
3. tailor-made material to speed up reading texts
Technologies:
We design our website by using Dreamweaver and Hot Potatoes. We ask students to share their feelings and ideas about the activities on the website. Links will be set to our blogs, wiki, online dictionary and some useful and interesting English websites.
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