Friday, June 1, 2012

Week 8: The craft of an exercise.


This week we had the chance to explore lots of sites to create our own exercises according to the goals of our class or the needs of our students. There were different creative sites; the ones where exercises were ready to go just print and give away. Others required more teachers crafting. However, the one that caught my attention was ANVILL. This one is a super tool. It is especially good for developing listening and speaking skills. It also allows you to create classes and lessons with embedded audio and videos plus make evaluations with multimedia. I will definitively explore and use this platform in my future classes. It has everything a language teacher can ask for in terms of enhancing aural abilities. 

As part of our training we had the great opportunity to have a live webinar from Oregon with the creator of ANVILL, Jeff Magoto who “walked us through” the application and gave us a general overview of the tool and how to set it for creating our classes. It was nice to see and listen to other classmates and get to see our instructor Janine on the screen. 

On the other hand, we finally gave in our first drafts of the projects. We are working based on peer reviewing, so everyone is checking everyone´s work. It feels so nice that this revision protocol has been laid out very well and we all know what to do next. At the moment most of my classmates are engaged in the polishing phase of our writings and joggling with other things like creating an interactive exercise; but we enjoy it. I tried a Google Docs survey that I used for my project and I have seen some other examples of my colleagues in Nicenet which are very creative.  

5 comments:

  1. Hello Julio
    Good Morning!

    I fully agree with you that this week was really enriching as far as knowing and using the Online Tools are concerned.
    Our entry into ANVILL's depth-less world made us richer like anything.
    I also feel that it is a useful tool for developing the Speaking skill by making the students to listen to different audio clips.

    Our attempt to create our own test, or site or exercise was also a novelty for us.
    Moreover the process of Peer Review gave us opportunity for better insights into Report Writing.

    Rest is cheers....
    Have a great week end!

    Shirish More

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  2. Can read simple English labeling.
    Can use the phonics method (phonics) to understand the corresponding relations of the English spelling and pronunciation rules, and try to see the word pronunciation, listening, spelling.
    Able to identify stories, verse, songs of common words.
    Can make a simple question, answer and narrative.
    Enthusiastic about the extra-curricular English textbooks.
    Be able to read simple sentences.
    Singing songs, verse followed by the teacher or tapes.
    Can understand and identify some of the commonly used in everyday life communication in English

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  3. Hello Julio ,
    Unfortunately I missed the webnar Ill check the recording hopefully .
    Well ,it IS an interesting experience to integrate such technology in our classes !
    My mother tongue is Arabic Julio ,so I teach EFL .As you mentioned about the interference of the mother tongue when speaking English its the same case with my students.
    In addition to problems preventing them from speaking out in the first place !I suppose ANVILL will help improve my students speaking ability in a recognized way.
    Good luck with your project .
    Batool

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  4. Hello Julio,
    I agree with you. This week we hada great opportunity: we could expand our knowledge about developing students' speaking skills.
    The site are great creative tools. The problem with some is the trial period or if we want to enlarge our possibilities with the tool, we have to pay like Easy Test Maker.
    ANVILL also caught my eye not only because of the possibilities we have to develop activities with our students but also because of the support team.

    regards


    Fatima (I,m on a different computer, so I can't write my name correctly)

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  5. Hi Julio,
    I think we all feel the same about this week and we have all fallen in love with ANVILL. It was very nice to actually see you and being able to hear your voice at the webinar.
    Mari Carmen

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