Reflections Week 3“Voyage to find self-tutorial programs”

There were three tasks this week. The first task was to make my own delicious.com page. What an inviting name that is! Up till now I was quite satisfied that my web browser has a place called “favorites” to bookmark sites, but I learned about http://delicious.com and how it organizes bookmarked sites. The amazing concept of this site is not just storing and organizing your sites with categories, it enables sharing sites easily. Thus if people use it more, the infinite amount of information in cyber space will be organized bit by bit. I have a virtual storage place now. My delicious page is http://delicious.com/toyozatok. As voyaging into the various sites, I will learn how to be a better organizer. Thanks to my colleagues, my storage is getting great sites.

The second task was to read one of two articles and to explain how to bring technology into my lessons.
One of the articles is “Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials” (http://www.elthillside.com/up/files/article4.doc) by Lindsay Miller and the other is “Best Practices in Technology and Language Teaching” (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121675554/PDFSTART?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0) by Dennie Hoopingarner about the CALL program for listening, speaking or pronunciation skills.
I usually use authentic materials for consolidating or integrating the whole lesson staying with the theme, vocabulary and the grammar of that particular lesson. However, I found out the sites such as ESL. English Video Lessons, quizzes, Grammar Exercises, http://www.englishmedialab.com/survival%20English/listening/ticket%20to%20Glascow%20.htm and ESL.-galazy.com ESL Resource Planet, http://www.esl-galaxy.com/speaking.html have very effective audio pages. But one drawback might be that I need to go through the online materials to find pages that are fit to the level of my students.
One of the colleagues, Dilip introduced us to his experiments of implementing authentic materials using an audio freeware, “Audacity.” It seems like a fantastic tool that could introduce a variety of learner-oriented uses. In the future, I would like to try to implement it in my classes. After all, I have to remind myself of the goal of education. That is “to teach students to learn by themselves.”