An Exploration Day For Everybody in TILT Class

Today is a hard-working but meaningful day. What we need as an English teacher to create activities and exercises is delivered clearly from the very beginning of the class.

Soundforge and Audacity breathe a fresh wind to the design of Listening tasks. We can actually manage and exploit an audio file in a number of ways, not just only play and stop. Indeed, these are useful tools enabling us to manipulate listening practice in an efficient way, a far cry from the traditional method of recording, pausing then playing over and over – which is too inconvenient and results in poor quality.

Besides, our attitude towards using Software in language teaching is dramatically changed after we are introduced to Hot potatoes – which is the key point of today’s lesson. We were fully immersed in creating Cloze test, Multiple choice Questions as well as Matching and Crosswords activities. They are so amazing and beneficial. Our group is considering them in our project. How can these programs be inserted and exploited in our final product – the CD ROM? We are all eager to try, to explore and practice with the new Software, yet how to apply them logically and methodologically in a lesson plan? We have just come up with the topic, perhaps about the environment, more specifically, about the UNDERSEA WORLD.

With clear and detailed instructions of Ms Marta, we have better and deeper understanding of the software so that we can apply them in teaching and learning English. Also, the thing that we are interested in is the way teachers can use well-designed activities for students to do at home and also get students' results via email or saved document. In that way, both teachers and students can make use most of technology in studies even if their schools don't have multimedia rooms or labs. From what we discovered today, our group has a number of ideas for our projects and our lessons in future as well.

Ya, there are still a lot of things to be done for the next two days. Wow, the TET is coming, shall our group be able to settle everything before we enjoy ourselves? Will our fine appreciation of this subject and the exhilarating moment in class remain vivid to guide our way through the busy festival? We hope we will find a way!