Dear colleagues,During this week, I read about uses of the internet in teaching/learning writing skill. "Authentic materials offered in the WWW paves the way for natural language learning." Jarek Krajka offers a lot of activities with "internet component" in his paper: "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction." However, being written 10 years ago, specifically in the year 2000, means that fundamental changes has taken place replacing old methods and approaches.
I believe there are lots of new and fresh uses of the internet in teaching writing that deserve allocating time to be studied. For my point of view, I see e-learning by all means a practice that embodies the idiom: "actions speak louder than words."
What I find very exciting is the discussion about the issues related to e-learning. For example, I am interested in tracking the progress of students in language learning. As most of the e-lessons created by MS PowerPoint are one-dimensional, when it comes to tracking, the teacher's risk losing his efforts!
I believe in the necessity for the e-lesson to be equipped with the features of logging the student's actions/behaviours and sending them, the logs, by email to the teacher. These logs should have useful information such as when the student opened the e-lesson, what his score is, how many times he tried, and other statistics that show his effort and progress. Also, automated or automatic correction and grading to the electronic exercises, assessments, quizzes and tests is another vital feature. Such e-lesson would be perfect since they relieve the teacher from the burden of corrections/ grading and will allow him to focus on more important aspects of the educational process. Only then we would feel the true use of the computer in language teaching.My to-do list for this week will be to prepare an e-lesson template with the progress tracking feature.
What do you think?
I am looking forward to hearing from you,
Amjad
Bahrain
2 comments:
Dear Amjad,
The online program we are using at my university called Moodle has all the features that you are looking for. You can create your course there, post materials, add links, post assignments and announcements. Students can send their homework there too, so that you can check it online, give points or grades, write a comment and so on. You can check students' activities, which posts or links they have opened, so there are a lot of options. And it is free. Check: www.moodle.com. I am sure you will like it.
Best wishes,
Nina
Dear Nina,
I am familiar with Moodle's basic features and I think it is really great. However, I guess it would be too complex for my 9 years old students because the majority of them lack the basic computer skills. That's why I opt for automated actions triggered by the students and handled in the background by the computer requiring no, or minimal, human interaction.
Thanks very much for your comment and suggestion.
Best wishes,
Amjad
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