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Module 03: Skill-building Websites for Oral/Aural Skills and Saving Bookmarks



In this module, I learned about different websites for developing oral/aural skills, as well as how to use social bookmarking sites.

First, I learned about using technology in class to teach listening and speaking. I find one of the required readings "Technology and Speaking" by Julie Vorholt very useful, as it gives me an overview of the technology activity types that I can use in class. The activity type I find most interesting is "recording on video". My learners have already been doing this, but now I know that there are other more interesting platforms for my learners to upload their videos. 

Speaking of interesting platforms, I was also introduced to some websites to develop learners' oral/aural skills. My favorite site is Flip, I think it offers creative ways for my learners to create videos. Some of the teachers in my center have also been using this site, so I think I am going to give it a try in the near future. One thing I am concerning though, is whether or not the site allows my learners to video call and record the video since at my center there are some tasks that require them to practice speaking in pairs. I am going to look into that in the future.

Lastly, I learned to use some social bookmarking sites in this module, specifically Diigo and Symbaloo. I tried using Diigo and I have to say, I did not have a good experience using it. It was quite laggy at times, I had trouble registering for the site, and it did not save my annotations. Some of my classmates also had the same experience as mine. Meanwhile, we think that Symbaloo is a better tool than Diigo since it has a better interface and offers a better user experience. Nevertheless, I think that an advantage that both sites possess is that we can share our bookmarks with others. I think this is going to be beneficial during group projects, or when we want to share interesting resources with our learners. In the future, I am going to find a way to use the two sites so as to take full advantage of them.

    

Comments

  1. Cao Thành CôngMarch 4, 2024 at 6:54 AM

    Thanks for sharing. I absolutely agree with you on the points about Diigo. It certainly did not provide a good user experience. I tried switching browsers and actually managed to save annotations, so you can try that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hà TúMarch 5, 2024 at 8:16 AM

    Thanks for the blog. I also think Diigo can be laggy and a bit complicated to use, but once you get the hang of it, it can be of great help for organizing documents.

    ReplyDelete

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