Week 3, Reflection

Dear web-mates and colleagues!
On this week we could have a chance to discuss issue of aural/oral skills that so essential in learning English. Our Professor suggested reading that was interesting for analysis with the following discussion with my classmates. We discussed issues of pronunciation, especially for foreign students and effectiveness of using BBC news, TV, radio, and CD-ROMs in the classroom. For instance, Lindsay Miller writes in her article “Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials” that students have to be free of stress in practice of pronunciation and I agree that students have to be motivated and encouraged by teachers and other students for learning. It can create only the positive atmosphere in the classroom and proper strategies of learning that will improve all student skills such as pronunciation, speaking, listening, writing and reading. Author mentions that practicing of listening skills and pronunciation reduced in last years. For example, in schools of Kyrgyzstan and Moldova (as Ion wrote) we do not have enough cassettes, audio and video materials for teaching. The last exam at school might contain multiply choice questions and teachers have to prepare students in order to pass it. At this exam, they do not have chance to demonstrate their speaking, listening, writing, reading skills, skills of presentation and communication. Nonetheless, students have to pass TOEFL exam when they go to the prestigious University. This test includes several parts for listening, writing, reading, and, and the test with multiply choice questions. Thus, we can conclude that there are absence of connection between the school and University and students themselves have to “catch “missing knowledge, which is unreal in short time.
I could open the sites and look through them with concentrating on pronunciation, speaking, listening. These sites can be successfully used for the students, because they include several activities, lesson plans with well-prepared worksheets, cards with colourful pictures, and games.
At the same time, I could find sites that I can use for my Biology lesson that I teach on English in medium Instruction level at Aga Khan School. At this week I knew a wonderful social bookmarking tool that will keep all of my sites that I am interested in and let me open them quickly. I can't memorise all the sites that I am looking for studying and preparing for teaching, but the work with the page (http://www.delicious.com/deryabki) inspires me to maintain it.
By the additional resources, I knew that there are other social bookmarking services that store many bookmarks online. I assume that I can insert my files that would be kept for several years in delicious page.
The project that has to be written to the end of the course is on the step 2. At this week I could read the samples of the project that were proposed by different authors. The project that I chose for deep analysis was written by Camelia Pagila, from Romania. She introduces the idea to work with the students according to their learning style and multiply intelligence through different activities that were included into the blog. That blog integrated many points from classroom task to International collaboration by messages with friends around the world. The questions and answers that structures the project allow me think about my future project deeply.
At this week I experienced the crash of my Flash USB drive with all the documents that I kept there for 3 years. Thus, knowledge about “back up keeping” information is valuable for me as never before. We have to learn for practice and use our skills into the real life. Isn't it a main goal of education?

Thanks a lot for all of the comments that were given by Nicenet discussion and comments into the blog! Our communication is the way of encouraging each other in studying at the course that we enjoy through activities, research, and 'authentic' learning from the literature, Internet, web-sites, and articles.
I believe that through the communication and sharing our thoughts we will achieve the great result in the course. With the best,Natalia.