Week No.10: Web based lessons

Our ICTs in ELT course is almost over, but in this fascinating experience we have learning diverse positive and interesting aspects related to information and communication technologies and all the alternatives to apply them in the educational area and more particularly in our English Language Teaching contexts.

One of the most effective tool to be used and integrated into language classroom is the Web. On this tenth week of the course, our facilitator, Professor Evelyn Izquierdo, explained us about the Web- based lessons and thei usefulness for English teaching and learning.

Paraphrasing Professor Izquierdo, a web- based lesson is a lesson that in certain way includes a website or a group of websites. A web-based lesson can be taught completely on line or can be a traditional classroom lesson complemented with an online element. It has different uses.It can be used for research, reading, writing, publishing, communication and cooperation with teachers and learners.

Among the advantages of web-based lessons, we can mention the following:
- They are more interactive, dynamic and interesting.
- They develop creativity.
- They promote authentic activities, critical thinking, digital skills progress, cooperation.
- They offer opportunities for all types of learning.
- They are adaptable to any target language level and students´age.
- They improve teacher-student and student-student interaction and communication.
- They are interesting and attractive for learners since they include a variety of formats, images, videos and sounds.
- They are useful tools for teachers since they allow them to share their course works easily.
- They can be used for multicultural exchange purposes.

If we want to integrate Web-based lessons into our English teaching classrooms, the first thing we should do is a Web-based lesson plan that includes the following items:
- Period of time (Date)
- Teacher
- Class level

- Lesson length
- Topic
- Learning objectives

- Materials

- Description of the learning activities
- Web site(s) used

- Description of follow up activities

I will put into practice the previous recommendation regarding Universidad Nacional Experimental Simón Rodriguez (UNESR) teaching context in order to illustrate how to do a Web-based lesson plan.

- Period of time (Date): 1 class of 90 minutes

- Teacher: Jhon Quiñones

- Class level: 16 students of the fourth semester of English Teaching career.

- Lesson lenght: 90 minutes

- Topic: The current seven wonders of the world

- Aim: Students will identify the main aspects related to the topic analyzing an oral English text.

-Objectives:

1. to develop listening comprehension skills applying audio-video tools on the internet.

2. to associate visual aids with spoken English language.

3. to put into practice speaking skills

-Material resources: 16 computers with internet acces and headsets

-Description of the activities: students will be asked to access internet in order to watch a video about the current seven wonders of the world in English. They will associate the spoken production with the images of the video and then they will determine the main points concerning to the topic such as: ubication, creators, creation date, main characteristics, etc.

- Website to be used: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/

- Follow up activities: students will practice speaking by discussing their information and comments about the video watched in class.

Some Web-based lesson samples
- http://blogbasedlessonssample.blogspot.com/
- http://tech.worlded.org/docs/gailmohl.htm
- http://www..alri.org/pubs/lessonplans.html

References
- http://www.slideshare.net/evelynizquierdo/webbased-lessons-and-eportfolios.

- http://ww.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/webbased-lessons/