Week 3 reflective post

Week 3: MOVING AHEAD WITH:

• Oral/Aural skill Building Websites 
• Using Delicious.com to store useful links.

This week 3 was busy. I did four activities which are:

• Discussion- Oral/Aural skill building websites
• Task- using Delicious to store useful links
• Project Task 2- Read and analyze one sample project, post on nicenet.
• Blog- Share reflections on what learned this week and comment on another person's post.

For the discussion, I went through very informative and useful readings. I have chosen to focus my discussion on " The Employment  of CALL in Teaching Second/foreign language Speaking Skills" by Julia Gong.

CALL (Computer-Assisted language learning) offers possibilities to provide learning experiences that are impossible without a computer. For example interact with a native speaker in a meaningful way. In this article, the author gives many advantages of CALL but also give some disadvantages. For example, computers do not always imitate a human voice very well. Later on, she states that nothing could replace a human. But because native speakers are not available, one can compensate with digitized audio and video files that provide a range of natural authentic phonology for language learners.

For speaking purposes, vocaroo and voxopop are nice and can help enhance learners speaking skills. The students as well as teachers can record their own speech, listen to it themselves for self-evaluation or post it for peer evaluation in order to improve their speaking skill.

But the best site to practice speaking is: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/03/17. A second site which is not the least is: www.bbc.co.uk.worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/sounds/vowel very good for pronunciation. 

Thanks to our instructor  Courtney's instructions,I have created my own Delicious page that I am proud today. I can now easily save my links and store them there. No need of several sheet of papers on my desk. It's time saving. Here is the URL of my Delicious page already saved on our class wiki and on Delicious page:

https://delicious.com/linganiber

At last, I read a past final project report by Bruno Nikiema, from Burkina-Faso. After reading it, I tried to say briefly what he did and I comment on what I liked in this project. Through this project I learned how to write my own project report. Bruno's aim was to teach students letter writing through e.mails. He succeeded in helping his students become familiar with technology in their language learning. We really need this kind of innovation in Burkina. Congratulation to you Bruno, you have done well. Thank you for paving the way for us. Thanks a lot to the organizer of this course, you are doing a great job.

Waiting impatiently your comments.

Best regards,
Bernadette