A myriad of online tools to help me in my job… I always find
the idea of having to learn how to use a tool a bit scary. Mainly because I do
not think that I am a competent technology user. I really don’t know why since
my English teaching colleagues find me more competent than themselves. I
believe that the problem is that I am surrounded by professors and teacher
assistants who teach Information Technology and I usually find myself in an
environment where I do not understand their professional discussions much. If was much more difficult at the beginning,
six years ago. Now I can understand most of the tech phrases of their jargon,
which is good.
I tried some of the tools. Nicenet seems to be a perfect
tool for my teaching context. It’s almost like our university forum. I
appreciate the fact that I can easily observe the interaction, intervene when
needed and shape the discussion threads easily. I hope I will be able to
provide students with more possibilities to engage in meaningful peer-interaction.
They will be writing their responses, which would allow them to pre-plan and
check their posts before publishing. I hope they will be able to become more
confident when using English out-of-class for activities not related to English
language learning.
I have used Survey Monkey to prepare surveys, but I might
switch to googledocs. It seems challenging since I had not used them before. I
will have to experiment with the other tools more.
I was also happy to discover software to create crossword
puzzles. I have used them for a long time, even when I was working with teenagers.
They were creative and engaged in learning in a way which was not very common.
Even their parents were happy to see how engaged their children were when doing
them as homework tasks. I would present the software to my students and
encourage them to prepare some puzzles for their peers. I hope they’ll be motivated to
practice vocabulary even without realizing that they had been doing so.
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