Week 4: Skill-building Websites for Reading/Writing Skills and Technology-enhanced Lesson Plans

This week we had a very exciting topic, Reading/Writing Skills and Technology-enhanced lesson plans.

I must confess that it's been a while since I last wrote a detailed lesson plan, what I often do is write a short list containing a sequence of activities, the duration, the type of grouping (pairs, groups, etc.). Therefore, writing a technology-enhanced lesson plan was an interesting task.
The most challenging aspect of this week’s activities was to choose a website from the myriad of possibilities we can find. In a post I made on Nicenet, I suggested we shouldn’t try to incorporate too many tools at the same time, for several reasons.

For starters, if we choose various tools we are not sure our students know how to use, we will have to help them familiarize with each, and that is time-consuming. Secondly, we might find it difficult to keep track of the students’ activities and so helping them might not be possible. Last but not least, we might decrease the students’ motivation, as they might become overwhelmed with so many things to care about at the same time. 

A final note: I might need to reconsider what I am doing for my Project, as I have another course where participants are mostly real beginners. These are elementary school teachers who do not speak English, but are being trained to become EFL teachers within a short timeframe (2 years). After the application of a placement test online (the name I am not authorized to mention), most participants have been classified as zero beginners (A0), so this is a real challenge. I have to find a way for them to use technology in order to practice English at their own pace, as we just meet twice a week, for a total of 8 hours a week. 

Well, this is it. Looking forward to reading your comments.