My Words is a program to learn English vocabulary from any website. The way to use My Words could roughly say as two functions. One is to highlight the new words learners come across in the websites. From this step, learners could quickly access to the meaning of the new vocabulary and add it to the word list of learners’ own. Function 2 is that learners could systematically learn the new words in the word list and even learn more from the relevant information.
This is very good for self-study. Learners could learn new vocabulary, not only the meaning but also the correct pronunciation. Moreover, a word list could collect all the random words picked up from the website and become valuable materials for revision.
I find that this program is quite useful for it is convenient to some degree. However, I don’t think learners would fall in love with it at the very beginning. It looks complicated and sometimes it really is. Steps involved in creating the word list are sort of distracting. Thus learners would be impatient to go through all the steps needed. After all, not everyone is genius in using the computer.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Review of LIOU's
This article has given a great insight to those who will develop or use CALL multimedia in the future.
Liou demonstrates a clear picture of how to use interactive videodisc(IVD)courseware in practice. Before teachers choose or design any software assisting in teaching, the most important thing is to set a goal. The second is to instill teachers’ teaching philosophy into the software. The evaluation approaches provided by Liou are also applicable, which point out clear directions where the teachers should go. Besides the practical implications and recommendations in such kind of teaching process, Liou raises two obstacles of applying CALL. First, there are few satisfying products available on the market. More CALL materials for all levels of students are needed in order to integrate CALL into the regular EFL curriculum. Second, the software development is time consuming and labor intensive.
As for CALL, I don’t want to spend an hour or more to explain how excellent it is. What matters is how to relate it to the reality. No matter how fancy or amazing the teaching software is, as a teacher, all we should bear in mind is that whether it could facilitate our teaching and help us reach the ultimate goal.
In Liou’s study, we are told that to prepare our own CALL, we should instill our teaching philosophy into the courseware. For me, this is an extremely difficult part. To create a courseware, for lay teachers, is not practical because it needs professional supports and the cost of that is way too much to afford. However, through Liou’s project, we could learn a lot on how to choose the appropriate materials and think about whether what we choose matches our curriculum goals.
Liou demonstrates a clear picture of how to use interactive videodisc(IVD)courseware in practice. Before teachers choose or design any software assisting in teaching, the most important thing is to set a goal. The second is to instill teachers’ teaching philosophy into the software. The evaluation approaches provided by Liou are also applicable, which point out clear directions where the teachers should go. Besides the practical implications and recommendations in such kind of teaching process, Liou raises two obstacles of applying CALL. First, there are few satisfying products available on the market. More CALL materials for all levels of students are needed in order to integrate CALL into the regular EFL curriculum. Second, the software development is time consuming and labor intensive.
As for CALL, I don’t want to spend an hour or more to explain how excellent it is. What matters is how to relate it to the reality. No matter how fancy or amazing the teaching software is, as a teacher, all we should bear in mind is that whether it could facilitate our teaching and help us reach the ultimate goal.
In Liou’s study, we are told that to prepare our own CALL, we should instill our teaching philosophy into the courseware. For me, this is an extremely difficult part. To create a courseware, for lay teachers, is not practical because it needs professional supports and the cost of that is way too much to afford. However, through Liou’s project, we could learn a lot on how to choose the appropriate materials and think about whether what we choose matches our curriculum goals.
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