Sunday, April 25, 2010

A long great and fruitful night of learning!

It is never too late to learn. This week brings me a lot of new information and useful solutions for using technology in teaching.

I have learned and created a place for keeping the bookmarks which could be shared to many students and colleagues later. Delicious is an interesting place for posting the good and useful links as easy as my account to be created. This website resolve a disadvantage of the saved bookmarks on other web-browsers that the bookmarks will be deleted after a certain period of time. It is very useful when we can see that the Delicious account can be accessed at any time and anywhere while the bookmarks I stored on my laptop could not be opened when I used another computers during a working trip. Many useful and interesting URL have been shared and posted. I think that these useful tools would help me even more in my real teaching in the coming time after I explore them.

It could be seen that most of the participants this week showed their experiences in using technology as a useful tool for EFL teaching. I have learned many different ways of using, teaching, or integrating the skills to the web sites. Hundreds of excellent web-sites have been introduced. For further learning objective, I would prefer to learn from anyone of this class a way to post the MP3, wav. files, or videos to a free web host. This could help me create my own sources for listening courses in the future.

In addition, the readings are also very interesting and I could see different perspectives from their writings. For all what I found, the most valuable thing from their articles is the confirmation about the philosophy of using technology as a tool of EFL language teaching. It is not a teacher, but a tool. Using this tool with a clear purpose or objective brings us the most effective results.

It has been useful a lot after a week of reading the discussion. It is unfair for me this week that I do not have enough time to read and give comments to all of my friends' posts. I will continue doing that and hope that my friends pay some attention to my posts as well.

Khang
KGCC

4 comments:

  1. Hello, Khang!

    When I saw the title of your post "...night of learning", I thought that you are like me don't sleep at night and read posts at nicenet... And I was right... I think, this week a lot of us do the same - because we had a lot of work, do you agree with me?

    I agree with you about delicious page it's really very useful.
    I don't understand exactly, what do you want to create - is it your own site or blog with links for file-hosting sites? MAybe I try to help you?

    Ruslana Shamanska
    Ukraine

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  2. Hello Khang,

    Before the delicious website was introduce to us, I usually carry my laptop anywhere I go so that I can always follow discussions on nicenet. Just like last vacation when i had my beach vacation. I took risk of carrying my own laptop knowing the risk of getting wet on the boat.
    But now as long as there is pc available even without my own laptop I can always open my save bookmarks.

    Thanks to delicious...

    More power to you Khang.

    grace,

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  3. Hi there,

    I used to do the same thing with Grace when trying to show someone else the bookmarks I have. It is memorable now.

    In replying to Ruslana's question about creating a site, I mean a website which allows us to design and post the audio or video files. I don't want to post these files to the shared-file sites.

    It is something like in http://fog.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~lfried/activity/listening.html
    and I want to have the possibility for students to download the files for offline usages as well.

    Khang
    KGCC

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  4. Dear Khang,

    The issue in finding free web hosting for video files, in particular, is that they are very large and bandwidth-heavy. Most teachers save video to specific video sites like Vimeo and YouTube for large files. Sound files are a bit easier, but they're still potentially large and bandwidth-heavy.

    There are some reviews of free hosting sites at http://www.absolutely-free-hosting.com/free_hosts_01.php

    With most of these, you will need to know how to create web pages and understand how to name files, as well as how to upload files to a web server. It's a level of complexity that we won't get into in this course. If you have tech support in your institution, you should take a look at some of these.

    Yours,
    Deborah

    ReplyDelete