Week 3: Exploring other projects

Week 3 was all about exploring previous projects. I went through some of the other students' projects that they did last time. Among them, I liked the projects of Phyak's done in Tribhuvan University, Nepal. He taught research skill and academic writing skill to his Masters students.

Besides, I also explore a social bookmarking site - delicious.com. I had no idea of social bookmarking site before exploring this site. I found this site to be very user friendly. It is a great platform to share my favourite links with others. Findings important sites has become easier now since I can save all of them in delicious.com. 

Learning of Week 2

         Week 2 was exciting for me for many reasons. First of all, the whole week was off because of Durga Puja and Eid. So, everyone in Bangladesh was in a festive mood. However, in terms of teaching and learning, the week was also exciting. 

         The concept of writing an ABCD objective was really interesting to me. Writing an objective was nothing new to me since I have to do it very often for my classes but the term ABCD was new to me. I think my students are also going to like this because it is much more easier to write the objective following the rule of ABCD. 

         Apart from Google, yahoo and Wikipedia, I have never tried any other search engines. But, in this week, I learned about a lot of search engines. Though I am not very happy with their search results, I am still exploring them to know more details. However, I have applied the web searching task into my class but in a different way. My students searched for different websites of language learning whereas I looked to different search engines. During the vacation, my students did this task online and they really enjoyed it.

Web Searching for English Language Materials

          Last Week I asked my students of Materials Designing course to select 5 websites for English Language learning and teaching. But, the condition was that they cannot select the same website. Everyone had to chose 5 unique websites. We have a group in Facebook where the students posted the websites they selected. It was students responsibility to check the previous posts before selecting websites to make sure that there was no similar websites.
           I have 18 students in this course and all of them came up with (18X5) 90 unique websites for English language learning and teaching. Later, they evaluated those web based materials in terms of their usability in Bangladeshi context.
         My students really enjoyed the task and I could realize that from their enthusiasm. Once they finished their task, they said that it looked like a small database of web based English language materials. The best part of this database is that the pros and cons of each website is mentioned here. So, someone can easily look at it and understand which website would suit his/her purpose.