Week 4: how important
is to integrate internet in the classroom?
Wednesday, February 08, 2017
Rate: 5
My initial impression for this article was “another reading
regarding CALL” but when I started reading it my mind was changed. Something that
I learned from this article and every teacher should know was the use of internet
as a personal tutor for students or teachers.
Nowadays, the internet has become a fundamental element for almost
everybody and teachers are not the exception. So here I show you how important it
is.
A belief of mine that was confirmed was the internet for
advice and analysis. For Advice: maybe
you, once in your life as an English-learner, have misunderstood an English topic
such as the use of restrictive Clauses and Nonrestrictive Clauses. For such reason,
internet can help you to discover unlimited resources to understand easily any
topic and use them as a guide.
Here I left one link which is a perfect example of these
resources. http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl
For analysis: to have a better understanding of English words, there are also many websites which
provide you the meaning of any word you want to know and also the context it is
used. Here I left you a sample website. You just enter a word and you find many
ways to use it.
For Activities: internet can provides teachers a great amount
of websites with interesting examples and tasks that can motivate students to
continue practicing while playing. Freerice.com is a page that gives a word and
some other for you to guess the meaning. If you win, you will be helping to
feed poor people.
What surprised me in this article was the use of the internet
as a tool to foster creativity and communication. What really bother students
is to have homework assignments without a specific purpose for them. However,
internet seems to be the solution. Some websites such as http://www.drawastickman.com/ or http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/ provide
an interactive platform. The http://www.drawastickman.com
contains a series of interactive mini games that ask the user to follow some
commands like draw a tiger costumer around me. And the second one allows you to
create your own comic by adding pictures with movement and text. They both
challenge students to continue with the task until it is done. This are tools
that teachers can use in their classes to change it a bit. Also for
communication, we have http://alice.pandorabots.com/ which
is a program that allows the user to communicate with it by receiving answers
of any question you have asked at the moment. That chat can be used for teacher
to see in which area their students are failing.
Something that made me want to read more about was selecting
an. For selection content, what is pretty important to know is what kind of
content to show students. We cannot only take an article to make an activity in
the classroom. We have to consider whether to use authentic or semi-authentic
material and its usability.
I’m agree with you Will! You have a very optimistic view seeing learners and teachers driving the exploitation of what the Internet has to offer. The Internet provides a wide range of materials which can be used in teaching language lessons. This technology offers an endless range of topics to choose from. The information available is updated on regular basis, and the number of Internet sites offering ELT materials has been growing. Therefore, many topics may be irrelevant or uninteresting for the class. As a result, teachers may need alternative texts or topics which can be found on the Internet. Internet gives teachers and learners the potential to use the web for communication, access to authentic materials, and collaborative content creation, all in order to improve their English.
ReplyDeleteHello Will, I really like your comment about how important has become the internet for everyone and teachers too in todays. Also, the internet helps learners, as a virtual tutor, giving them activities to do in classes and at home. The information, activities, exercises that learners can find on internet force them to be creative how communicate with others through games, messages, or activities that they can do. But, some information may be not relevant or some exercises do not have a specific purpose on communication, in that case teacher need to monitoring the use of information, or present advice to practice at home. To finish, I like the links that you provide for advice, analysis and activities.
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