During Thanksgiving

This posting is just a self-thinking process. You might not be able to understand what I mean. But if you want, go ahead and read, please.

Happy Thanksgiving to people who are working on assignments during Thanksgiving!! Me? Yes, as you may have already guessed, I am one of them. Well, my Thanksgiving is basically spent on APP, but now it seems that I have to consider about Activity 5 since the library will be open on Sunday; there I can use Dreamweaver. I am thinking about writing activity for the final assignment, and now working on Hotpotato to make genre-based quizzes, such as claim and support matching, vocabulary exercise, and grammar based on the target genre. In order to make the grammar quiz, I have to conduct a small genre analysis. I anticipate that it will take a while, so I had better start now.

The most difficult part of my product will be Audacity part, since my activity is writing. It is not very difficult to integrate listening activity in a writing lesson; however, I am afraid that it will extremely difficult to justify that it has to be in the form of listening. If I use a video, perhaps the visualized information would help them to construct their argumentative essay, but if it is only listening itself (for the sake of using Audacity)… hmm, I am having a hard time. Maybe I should make up some conversation related to a writing prompt for them to listen to or should provide students with a simple and short model argumentative essay in the form of audio file so that they can recognize the rhetorical structure? I guess the latter must be too difficult for students and there must be better way…

Anyway, if you read this, I appreciate that you went through my chaotic thinking. I wish you luck on your assignment!

What I did on Nov. 19

Week 13: Start thinking about Activity #5 . Finished the basic frame of the website.

Week 14: Work on Activity #5, meeting with Solen and Diana. Put the contents in website.

Week 15: Activity #5 (Coming soon) and Polish the words which are already typed in my website. Add reference information.

Week 16: Activity #5 (Coming soon) and complete the website.

In class, I was working on the website to create more links. Frames and links are almost done (I learned how to link to a WORD file). However, I still need to put some contents in.

From the readings for Nov. 19

The activities introduced in this part of the chapter do not seem to fit my students except for Activity 6. I am not saying Activity 6 fits my students perfectly, but perhaps I can do something like it for my students. It could be a two- or three-week project. The author provides several possible elements, and each of them could be suitable to a specific age group, I guess. For example, student biographies would be suitable for beginner students and if this project is conducted closed to the beginning of the course before students become familiar with each other, it will help establish rapport among them. If we focus on what kind of genre they create, it can be useful for genre-based writing, too. For instance, if the course chooses to work on reviews of local attractions, flyers will be effective models and we can also teach how the features of something can be described briefly and effectively.

Class on Nov. 12

I was mainly working on my webpage. I was creating links between my webpage and my favorite websites, my blog, and lesson plans that I made before.

Although I already have a lot of thing typed in, I am very anxious because it will be online. I do not want to make any statement which is wrong.

Currently, I am trying to come up with ideas for Activity 5 while thinking how to organize them around my website. It will be tough work, but I would like to make it very simple so that I can really use it for my students in Japan. I would like to create some activities where my students can go back anytime and learn with little of my help, if possible. Well, I haven't come up with anything yet.

From the reading for Nov. 12

Oh, I have just realized by typing the title above that the next session is going to be the middle of November… Well, deadline, deadline, and deadline…

Rather than reflection, I would like to share my interests what I found in Chapter 9, since this chapter is informative. Table 9.2 calls my attention because it has the column "Technical difficulty." Technical difficulty is what I have been always thinking in this class. As a language teacher (and Digital Immigrant), I would like to learn technology so that my class can benefit from it. Especially in my teaching context, students are definitely Digital Natives and they will feel more comfortable with technology than I am. However, technical difficulty should be one of the criteria for choosing the way of teaching.

Then what I have to think with this table is if the activity is worthy. Does it deserve my effort? To be honest, I would not use Class Website (Difficulty 4) since I do not see any advantage of this over the traditional ways. If there is a ready-made website for teachers like D2L, yes I will definitely use it because I do not have to make any effort to receive its convenience. My criterion is always if my effort on technology pays. In other words, does the effort make my teaching better that much?

What I learned on Nov. 5

Second Life! I bet my future students would never come back to reality... I do not know, but probably it would not work very well for high school students. They need to be more mature and responsible for their learning if I use it in my teaching. But I definitely admit that it is interesting to me, but I need more time to think as for utilization of Second Life for my language teaching.

According the discussion we had in class, probably our experience in "taking" online course is consistent with what Johnson-Curiskis said in the presentation via ADOBE a few weeks ago. How much we are engaged in the course totally depends on our motivation. In that sense, teaching online course could be demanding to teachers.

From the readings for Nov. 5

Since this week's reading is not very long, I did small research on copyright laws in Japan. There are, if not as many as in the U.S., a number of rules in my country, too. Discussions related to fair use of copyright materials for educational purpose exist online. I found a very helpful organization which runs a good website for people including teachers who are anxious about copyright rules. The name of the organization is Copyright Research and Information Center (CRIC). I found that this website had an English version as well. So if you are interested, you can go to http://www.cric.or.jp/cric_e/index.html. IF you click "3. Case studies 'Formal Education and Copyright' " in the left column, you will see basic or frequent questions from teachers and answers to them.

Also, this website has a good small workshop page for kids to understand Copyright. If teachers try some creative student project, it is possible to start with having students working on the workshop so that they can obtain the basic knowledge of violation of copyright (No English version).