Week 3: Skill-building Websites for Oral/Aural Skills and Saving Bookmarks with Delicious

Writing these lines I am hoping to be just in time with this week's asignments. I have been extremely busy all the time at work and I was afraid I was going to be late with all the tasks. Luckily, there was more reading than technology this time, which allowed me to fulfil the tasks not only working on the computer but also on my way to and from the university. Now, I will put briefly down what I have done so far.

1. As I have proudly announced in Nicenet classroom space, I have read all three articles about CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) in terms of speaking/ listening skills development. All of them are worth reading and I am sure I will need to refer to them in the future, since they discuss different aspects of using computer for foreign language education. "The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills" by Juila Gong clearly explains how computer sofware can help to learn a foreign language, discussing both advantages and disadvantages of CALL. In "Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials" Lindsey Miller touches upon practical application of authentic materials available online for improving listening skills. "New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation", written by Maria Busa, is about researches in the field of teaching pronunciation through special software packages. I feel I need to go back to this paper some day and try all the links provided in order to learn more about newly developed tools for teaching pronunciation.

As for the web resources designed for improving listening and speaking skills I enjoyed finding Lindsay Clandfield's ready-to-use lesson about "Using OK" on the OneStopEnglish web-site, "Job hunting" activity at Randall's Cyber Listening Lab and and a BBC Learning English course about Pronunciation.

I know that resources for listening activities can also be found at http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com, http://www.ted.com, and http://www.manythings.org/pp/, or in educational platforms like EnglishCentral, English,Baby, Busuu.com and LiveMocha.com but I guess I still need to explore what Larry Ferlazzo's blog offeres to try and the NPR podcast collection holds.

2. It is a shame I have never heard of social bookmarking before, but now I have a Delicious page https://delicious.com/tess_moli and can keep records of web-pages I would like to refer to in the future.
I wish I had more time to look through this week's additional resources, suggesting further readings about alternatives to Delicious and even more.

3. Finally, I have read a project report, which is the one written by Nadina Nicolici Carmen from Lorin Salagean Technical High School (Rumania). The main idea of the project was to enhance students' reading skills by creating a blog where they could share their thoughts and feelings, and do some vocabulary exersices. In addition, the teacher created a wiki space to upload the materials the students might need for studies, for example links to grammar games, on-line dictionaries, etc. In the end, the teacher created a class web-site so that to give the students extra materials to what they learn from the course book in class. I may well choose to do something similar in my final project, unless other technology tool turns my attention away from blogging. I am excited to learn more and more in the next weeks, the only thing that upsets me is that project reports are so long that they are really boring to read and, in all probability, to write!