Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Messengers: The Birth of Gendolos Group

On 30 March we discussed how to use messengers in the teaching and learning of English. Basically, a messenger is a software that we can use to chat online. Some examples are:

beeYahoo Messenger http://messenger.yahoo.com/
beeWindows Live Messenger http://download.live.com/Messenger
beeGmail Chat http://gmail.com/
beeICQ http://www.icq.com/

Despite very limited facilities in the classroom, we managed to try to use Yahoo Messenger (YM) in the teaching and learning of grammar, especially the past tense. Many of you have had a Yahoo account so I could add you as a friend in my list. Then one of you asked whether we should make a group for our class, and we came up with an idea of making one and calling our group GENDOLOS.rolling on the floor


So that’s it… Gendolos group was formed on March 30, 2010.big grin

Monday, March 8, 2010

The use of email in ELT

Last week I asked you to create an email account in Gmail. Don’t forget to submit your name and your email address to me on 30 March.

This Thursday you are going to discuss about how you could use email in the teaching and learning of English. Here is an excellent article that you should read before the discussion:

Using E-mail in Foreign Language Teaching: Rationale and Suggestions by Margaret Gonglewski, Christine Meloni and Jocelyne Brant

Try to find more papers about the use of email in EFL by using search engines, and share them with Mr. Ali, your peers, and me.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Using search engines in LT

Search engines have been widely used by people all over the world to get information they need. They are so easy to use that even kindergarteners would probably have no difficulties at all in operating them. Despite the ease of use, you cannot underestimate the role of search engines in Language Teaching (LT). They’re not as trivial as they seem.

Here are some ideas about using them in your English classes:

1. Reading
Before you give a reading text about a particular topic to the students, ask them to search for information about the topic using the search engines. For instance, you’re going to discuss a text about April Fool’s Day. As a pre-reading activity, have the students search for information about April Fool’s Day. The information will activate their background knowledge and make it easier for them to understand the text later.

2. Writing
Ask the students to search for papers about a particular topic, then the following activities may follow:
a. summarizing a certain paper they like most.
b. synthesizing the important ideas in those papers in an essay.
c. comparing or contrasting the ideas in several papers.
d. etc.

3. Vocabulary
After you teach some vocabulary items, have your students search for more related words or phrases in the internet. It’s even better if they can organize the lexical items in a chart like the following.

Search engines

If you want to search for information of any types in the internet, you can try the following:

General search http://google.co.id/
Blog search http://blog.google.co.id/
Scholarly papers http://scholar.google.co.id/
Book search http://book.google.co.id/
PDF search http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/
PPT search http://www.powerpoint-search.com/

After searching for scholarly paper or books, you can organize your search results by using Endnote, which is a very useful software that can compile and automatically sort your references. Endnote is so convenient to use and helpful that I can’t imagine living without it…