Hong's Reflective Journal

In this module, I learned about project-based learning and rubrics as well as alternative assessment. Besides, I was given tools to create my own rubric to assess learners' performance. It was so intriguing and productive when we discussed enthusiastically and raised some concerned questions.  Firstly, regarding project-based learning, I strengthened my knowledge when I read Hoan's reflection on the difference between doing project and project-based learning. I was surprised like him when I realized that my students and I did projects more than project-based learning, where I required them to do the project in limited scope and duration with content they have learned. However, doing project-based learning requires learners to address real-world problems and driving questions that can't be googled and have no single right answer. They have some input into how they answer these driving questions. They learn lessons from reflection on their learning through discussions, format...

 In this module, I learned about different websites for developing reading and writing skills and how to make a technology-enhanced lesson plan. Firstly, I was introduced to some useful websites to improve learners' reading and writing skills such as  British Council Writing ,  Purdue ,  Breaking News English , and  Many things . They were experiences by my classmates with very positive feedback. Besides, they suggested some other interesting ones, including  News in Levels ,  ReadWriteThink ,  Write and Improve with Cambridge ,  National Geographic .   I was quite interested in the website   Learning A-Z   suggested by Huệ Dung and Bùi Hà because it provided a huge source of reading materials for kids and young learners. I need to pay a membership fee if I want to use it for a long time. I will consider it to teach my son vocabulary and reading skills.  Most people prefer  Quill   to teach writing, but I found i...

  In this module, I learned about different websites for developing oral/ aural skills and how to use social bookmarking sites. Firstly, I was into reading my classmates' discussions because they were useful and versatile. I collected a variety of websites for my teaching listening and speaking skills and saved them on my social bookmarking site. Here are some sites that I was interested in and had the intention to use in my classes: +    Flipgrid  which is like an app to support learners to make a video for their talk and provides tools to check their pronunciation by themselves. +    Podomatic :  which is suitable with camera-shy learners, or with topics that require answers longer than 10 minutes +    TED-Ed : which provides various  educational videos and discussion questions to enhance students' listening and speaking skills through engaging and stimulating content. +    Voicetube Links to an external site. which is a glob...

  In this module, I learned the ABCD learning objectives framework to write my lesson objectives and effective web searching to support for my teaching. Regarding effective web searching, after reading the article "Say goodbye to Google: 14 alternative search engines" and my classmates' suggestion, I was impressed by various search engines that are unfamiliar to me such as  Researchgate  ( a reputable website uploading articles from scholars around the world in many different fields that we can use for our sophomore research paper),    DuckDuckGo  ( providing a wide range of results when searching for academic content), Edpuzzle  ( providing a variety of videos with a wide range of topics for students from all levels) .  I am interested in Ms. Thu Trang' suggestion about  Edutopia .  From her description, I believe that I will collect a lot of original articles for my designed handouts to teach reading and writing skills. In terms of the...

In this module, I have learned how to make an academic blog for ELT purposes. My classmates and I discussed how to use blogs in language teaching and the elements we could use in the class blog in Canvas and shared our blogs in the Zoom meeting in the breakout room. From the discussion in Canvas, I was fascinated by various ways of using blogs suggested by my classmates. For learning, they are used for not only sharing authors' opinions and knowledge but also enhancing the interaction between teachers and students or encouraging introverted students to raise their voices in online classes. This broadened my knowledge of the benefits of blogs. Thanks to their sharing, I got a lot of interesting ideas for designing my class blog which was introduced in the third lesson.  In the breakout room, we took turns presenting how we design a blog with specific elements such as what purpose of the blog, who the audience and author are, and what tools were used to design it. I learned a lot of ...