Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Website Evaluation

Website title LessonWriter.com

Website URL http://lessonwriter.com/html/index.asp

For English teachers.

The new Web site that creates lesson plans for teaching English language skills. It can save hours of work and, best of all, it's free. LessonWriter.com, you can copy any text you want from any source: from a Web page, from a Word document, a pdf file, you can write your own. You paste it into a Web page and Lesson Writer does a linguistic analysis of the text, and it creates a complete student worksheet and teacher lesson plan in about one minute." It goes through all the words in the article, identifies dominant phonemes and then suggests pronunciation exercises to accompany the lesson plan. As we have had article by Guariento and Morley 2001 that they are highly emphasized on authentic material. I always liked to use authentic materials in the classroom. I found myself teaching different students that had different interests. I wanted to find things that motivated my students and I can choose new material for my class that can motivate the students. It was difficult to teach things that were [from] now or that my students were asking for. You can sign in and start making lesson plan. IF you want to learn more click to demo movie it gives information you need.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Reading Reflection

The two articles mainly defined the definition of CALL in many angles. Specifically Egbert (2005) defined CALL briefly. CALL is focused not only on technology to dominate the class but is mainly used as an effective tool to facilitate language learning. In CALL practitioners need to prepare to meet a variety of needs. CALL pedagogy should be used in both theory and practice from many fields especially in second language acquisition. Egbert characterizes CALL as optimal technology-enhanced language teaching and learning environments. Also he added CALL as one of the vigorous and effective tool for teachers and researchers. Call has come to include many different technologies such as laptop computers, personal digital assistants, digital audio recorders, modem and cable Internet access, drill software and also to use the internet as a medium to support native and nonnative speaker interaction.
In terms of eight conditions he brought out from Egbert and Henson (1999) I do agree but I am a little confused about number 6 that learners have enough time and feedback, because it takes a lot of time to give them feedback. Also, sometimes more feedback can demotivate students when they see more feedback in their work. As a teacher one of the points that really impressed me was in Integrating ESL Standard point that learners should be able to communicate effectively in social and academic settings and that they have should also learn ways to continue their learning beyond the school settings. In school setting learners in general spend less amount of time than outside of the class and this will give the opportunity to interact outside of the school.