Week 4: Technology Enhanced Lesson Plans

Hi everyone, 

This week we have read articles mostly dealing with benefits of using technology for instruction. The most important is we had to write a technology-enhanced lesson plan. Let me honestly tell you that I have never written lesson plans at our university; I learned how to write lesson plans when I was a university student. Actually, we do have lesson plans but they are the intrinsic ones, in our mind and we do not need to submit the plans to the university academic section. We know what we are going to do in a class because we have relied on course descriptions which we have to set contents accordingly. Mostly, we are encouraged to produce instructional materials by ourselves. 

The lesson plan model of the College of Education, University of South Carolina directs me to be more professional in my career. My technology-enhanced lesson plan proposed in nicenet might not be best because I have never used the Internet for my teaching. However, it is my first step for further plans. I do agree that planning the instruction is much more difficult than delivering the instruction as mentioned in "Lesson plans" from http://www.ed.sc.edu/caw/lessons/lessons.html

I think the new generation of teacher of English should take technology-enhanced lesson plan into consideration since they are surrounded with technologies. Perhaps they can easily apply them to language instruction. What do you think?

Best,

Arifeen

Week-3: My Experience

This week was full of many theories to read about implementing technology in our teaching classes plus  lots of practical tips to be used in implementing various types of technology.

Next, the websites those give tips and lesson plans. Specially Randall's Cyber Listening Lab: http://www.esl-lab.com/ which is directed to improve students' listening skill. I searched the site and found it really organized and clear. It depends on the pre/while/post form of presenting the listening activities and it ranges from beginner levels to upper intermediate from which teachers can choose what suit their students' needs.

Coming to what is really delicious and tasty "Creating my delicious".  I was doing to save a link using Favorites/ Bookmark in menu of a browser. However, when I was using another computer, I had to save the link in my email and come home and save the link in my Favorites (if I didn’t forget to do so). Now, Things have got a lot easier.

Thanks to Jodi and Sherie for delicious.com for all of us as a nice gift.

Nice experience

In this week, I  am going with another opportunity to improve my skill and furnish my knowledge. Thanks to Jodi and Sherie. Thanks again for the Noodle tool. Three or four days back Google was the only engine, now I’ve around 100 and many I am not familiar with. My eyes got exhausted finding out besides Google which one suits best for academics. I’ve already put my opinion on Nicenet but  my searching will continue.

In addition to this, I worked with ABCD learning objectives and a project task. I have already posted my input on Nicenet and received few suggestions from my learned friends. Now, I have been thinking and planning how to bring my classroom under technology though resource is limited.

However, a long way is there and has kept my mind open to receive comments till the course ends.

Reflection

This week was really hectic to me. Cause, I told you I'm a slow learner as well as technophobia works in me. However, I've learned a lot and this week was full of new experiences, tensions above all creativity. Specially, blog, which's made me enthusiastic. Do you know why? After the successful posting of my first blog, it was full of ecstasy. May be there is nothing  to impress you but it was totally new to me. Again, getting new friends, though I couldn't say hello to every body, Hi!, is much more enjoyable. Not only this, from next week receiving some constructive suggestions from our fellows will bring extra charm to the course.

My first step into blogging

Hello everybody!
I'm Muhammad Shajedul Arifeen. Since the project has started, I'm going slow and till today I'm a slow participant. The reason is I don't have any technical experience except checking mails. This time when I started, I found myself in a mess and seemed that creating blog is a difficult one; even the posting as well. This time I'm on the way of having my first blog but I don't know whether it will work or not. However, this is a tool to be used for language teaching as well as a communication tool for both teachers and students.
Before conclude, I must show my sincere gratitude to Jodi and Sherie for their cooperation from the very beginning of the course and providing me an opportunity to have a course like this.