Week 4 #1: Reading, Writing, Vocabulary; Lesson Planning and Problem/Issue Identification Week

Hello Everyone!

Welcome to the fourth week of our exciting Web Skills Course. 

One of the greatest discoveries I made this week was that I came across two articles that completely revolutionized my beliefs and the stance of the Cameroon government regarding the use of phones by learners in primary and secondary schools in our country. The first of these articles is "Use of Cell Phones at School--25 Tips for Teachers and Students (at http://www.useoftechnology.com/cell-phones-school/). The numerous ways in which cellphones can enhance teaching/learning on this page have compelled me to start reflecting on possibilities of convincing the state of Cameroon to wave off the ban prohibiting primary and secondary school students from bring cellphones to schools. For now, Cameroonians keep stressing the bad sides of these gadgets in schools, but Meg Ormiston, author of the second article titled "How to Use Cell Phones as Learning Tools" (at http://www.teachhub.com/how-use-cell-phones-learning-tools) rightly argues that: 

      We didn't ban pens in our schools because students can pass notes during class. The pencils                have also survived even though you could poke someone in the eye. And the amount of paper             that is generated in most schools is almost criminal.
Besides the reading articles for this week, I also explored nice pedagogic websites like Children's Story Books (at http://www.magickeys.com/books/) and Reading On the Go (at http://americanenglish.state.gov/ebooks). I also found very useful material about English-French bilingual teaching like translations of basic conversation words at http://iteslj.org/v/fr/cm-conversation_basics.html. My students speak French as first official language. Thus, this will help them so much in improving their English, especially vocabulary.

Story Bird and Advance English Lessons are other great websites that I discovered and explored and hope you will all find them amazing.

As a researcher, I found some good journals where I can publish my papers without paying any publishing fees and I quickly bookmarked them on my Delicious page. I also bookmarked all new good sites that I discovered and exploited this week. In all, I added more than 10 new links to my Delicious page. You can check them at My Delicious Page.

Any challenge of the week? Yes, there was one; I struggled to narrow down my task problem or issue. Thank God Donna was there and prompted me to the right track as usual. Her comment on my Nicenet task problem/issue helped me to formulate my class problem in one sentence. It now reads like this: 

      Thus, the problem with my students is that their reading and writing skills are poor and I intend to       use blogging (perhaps accompanied by social media) as a technological tool to improve this                 situation. 

Did you miss my photo on this blog this week?

Thanks for commenting. The best is yet to come.

Nsah Mala

Cameroon