Week4 Reading/writing skill-building websites

Reading the articles (http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html, http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Liang-ExtensiveReading.html, http://iteslj.org/Articles/Liao-Emailing.html, http://iteslj.org/Articles/Constantinescu-Vocabulary.html ), exploring the given sites (http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/, http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/, http://www.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html, http://a4esl.org/, http://www.manythings.org/ ), and analyzing my colleagues' posts I found much useful and interesting as usual. 

Teachers can use the Internet for gathering information. If you need additional teaching/learning materials for the class, you can find a quite large number of materials on the web. There is a huge amount of material for listening, reading, writing and speaking. No doubt the Internet can be used as an effective application for the development of grammatical and lexical skills. This includes all sorts of training in vocabulary, grammar, phonetic exercises, tests on reading, grammar, IQ- tests, etc. (e.g. Various tenses quiz http://a4esl.org/q/f/x/xz88mgu.htm , FL Vocabulary Practice http://iteslj.org/v/ei/verbs1.html,  Multiple choice grammar quiz http://www.manythings.org/voa/040229pa.htm)

You can select appropriate materials for your students' interests and level of English proficiency. There are some teaching plans which include materials may help you to teach your students. It is a good idea to go over those materials when you have free time, and classify the ones that interest you according to their topic or how you might use them. Since there is a huge amount of material available on the web, there should be many useful materials for your students, if you look for it.

 Teachers can arrange key pal experiences for their students, and the students can exchange e-mail with key pals individually or as a group, like corresponding with pen pals. Students can use the Internet as a resource for their projects. That is, the Internet can provide access to such resources as dictionaries or encyclopedias. Students can also find thesauruses and various reference materials for writing papers.

There are library web pages at http://www.cyberkids.com/cw/sto/re/simpson/simpson1.html,  http://www.backyardnature.net/r/reddog00.htm, http://www.manythings.org/voa/stories/ ,  where you can look for e-books. Students can subscribe to student lists and participate in general discussions for low and high level English students, or discussions on business, economics, current events, movies, music, sports, science, technology, and learning English. You can give students assignments to obtain certain information on lists, and students can bring the information back to the class. There is Kidlink, where students can participate in global projects for teenagers conducted in English (http://www.kidlink.org/).

Students can read journals or newsletters for students of English. Many of them have readings and fun activities to do as well as useful information. It is worth investigating these and making plans for what your students read, and how you can use the materials for your class.

Students can get news from various sources on the Internet. Teaching the English Newspaper Effectively (http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/Lessons/Kitao-Newspaper.html  ) is useful, if you are thinking about using English newspapers to teach English. It has some exercises which you can use with any newspapers. (The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/?fbid=0CEx-5hCwbq  ,The Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/ BBC World Service (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice )  - provides an opportunity not only to read but also to listen to the news, in many languages and even choose the appropriate level of English, The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/ ) in addition to the above offers its readers a training version of the newspaper with ready lesson plans (http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/picture-this-building-photo-based-writing-skills/).

I can imagine how my students will appreciate creating my own movies with http://www.dfilm.com/live/moviemaker.html  .