Response Process: Blog

Blog address: http://esl.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=esl&cdn=education&tm=1779&f=00&tt=14&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.listen-to-english.com/

Grade: Secondary Cycle 2 Subject: Podcasts

Activity: In this blog, students are required to listen to Podcasts. This blog features a great amount of interesting podcasts to use with student in class. Students can be paired-up with a partner. Both students listen to the same podcast and share their ideas and understanding of it through the use of a blog of even through oral interaction. It could be used by the teacher for in-class activities, homework or even for students to improve their listening and understanding of oral texts skills. Another great idea for using podcast is to have students from the same level but from different class share about the podcast in a non-synchronous way. When doing this, the use of blogs is a great idea to have them keeping record and traces of their work. A good way to assess their participation in the process of the activity.

Relevance for ESL students: The podcasts are a great tools to help student to improve their C2 (Reinvest Understanding of Text). Podcasts are good to use for potential reinvestment tasks. Podcasts featured on this blog are authentic and help students to improve their listening skills. The podcasts are narrated by native speakers so they can feel very proud of understanding native speech, consequently increasing their motivation level. It is very user friendly as each podcast is accompanied of a series of ways to download the podcast; they can even download them for their smart phones. There is a brief description of each of the podcast to ensure their understanding and to provide students fairly good background knowledge to avoid miscomprehension due to a lack of knowledge on the topic. They can even download a PDF form of the podcast to read it afterwards to make sure they understood it well or to look-up words they did not understand orally. Grade: Advanced

Blog address: http://www.proticblog.net/profs//index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=6022&blogId=13

Grade: Secondary Cycle 2 Subject: E-book making

Activity: In this blog, the teacher creates an e-book for Christmas with her students. She asks the parents to help their child to download the application “IBook Authors” which is available on the Apple Store, and this for free. This application allows creating e-books with a multiple set of tools and interactive features. It is easy to use and the application provides a lot of templates so that students do not have to spend too much time trying to elaborate a complicated layout.  Through the use of this application students can create a book which they can be very proud of, consequently increasing their motivation.

Relevance for ESL students: This idea of using e-books is a particularly good idea for end of cycle projects or to develop C3 (Writes and Produces Texts), this, in a very creative fashion. This is a very motivating way to having the students to write. It could be like the teacher suggests in her blog; to write a Christmas related story. But it can also be used for any even or reason, for instance: Halloween, Easter, Valentine’s day etc. I believe that is a relevant activity to use in class as it combines their development and acquisition of skills in the use of information and communications technologies (ICT). A skill required by the MELS and which is increasingly being used with the expansion of technologies in today’s education. The works created by the students could be presented in a very creative manner, using smart boards or Ipads, tools which are being more common and very often available in schools. Grade: Any

Blog address: http://deborahharris.edublogs.org/

Grade: Secondary (or very advanced readers)

Activity: This teacher seems to put a lot of emphasis on the importance of reading. Her blog is well equipped of a virtual library where students look for a novel, short story, or any kind of book she would recommend to her students. This type of blog could be useful for any type of reading activity. It could be for independent individual reading where students have to choose a book themselves, based on their personal interest, and for instance they can summarize it orally to their classmates. It could be also interesting to use this blog to have students working in teams, choose a novel as a team and do literature circles just like we did in this class. It could be discussion sheets, body biographies, logs, journals, anything to get them to read and share their reading experience with their fellow classmates. Reading activities are a good way to evaluate student’s competencies in reinvesting their understanding of written text (C2) and the team readings are excellent ways to evaluate their oral interaction skills (C1) when they share with their teammates.

Relevance for ESL students: I believe this blog and the way the teacher uses is as a virtual library helps to develop various competencies and has a lot of advantages in the classroom. It is motivating for students to browse through books which are rated by their classmates and which the teacher has chosen so that the content is appropriate for them. I think that it is a good way to enhance student’s motivation towards reading. They have the responsibility to write a review and to grade the books after they have read it, the review and rating could be viewed as rewards and self –accomplishment from reading an authentic text. Grade: Advanced