Week 4 - Learn and Make Others Learn

“The future depend on what we do in the present”

- Mahathma Gandhi

Oh! Fourth week of the E-skills scholarship programme. It has been a week of hard work. Like Robert, our online instructor we all have the ‘Tale of two classes’ with us. I know Robert conducts face to face classes and online classes. I think in face to face classes the feedback is prompt and quick. But in our case ie online course, there is delayed feedback. Most of us also have ‘Tale of two classes’ to tell. The story of our own classes and our experience in the online E-skills course. This makes the entire course unique and interesting.

 Fourth week is a fruitful week. The article by Jarek Krajka, lesson plan from University of Tennessee and exploration of Multiskill websites- all are interesting and resourceful. In her article ‘Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction’ she makes a few important observations. She makes it very clear that as Internet instruction is integration, teacher should think about how to integrate on-line activities into the syllabus rather than adding these on top of the rest of the classroom activities in a disconnected fashion. I fully agree with this observation. Teachers have to clarify course goals. It is an important step toward the successful use of the Internet in teaching.

The article "Using Technology to Assist in Vocabulary Acquisition and Reading Comprehension" written by Andreea I. Constantinescu is also very interesting. The article highlights the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. But the activity I enjoyed the best is exploring Lauri’s ESL Website http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/. It is a repository of resources. The webpage ‘Make a story’ is really fantastic. My teacher trainees love it. I tried these webpage activities with them. They enjoyed it. Sometimes the activity generated a lot of fun.

 Presently there are 44 trainee teachers undergoing in-service teacher training programme in my institute. I have tried some of these activities with them. I would like to try some more Interactive Web techniques to help my Teacher trainees. I want them use technology integrated lesson plans for teaching English. My Institute also wants to tack them and to give support to them once they leave the campus and go back to schools. I think I will get enough experience, knowledge and skills for using Interactive web to help the teachers.