Week 8: Teacher Resources Online

 This week looks very exciting. We were asked to put into practice all what we have learned during the course. Based on this, I created a blog on Blogger for my English III students. This is the URL: http://myenglish3journey.blogspot.com/

As you might remember, I teach ESP/EAP at the School of Education of Universidad Central de Venezuela, the largest and oldest public university of my country (almost 300 years now). We deliver the instruction under two modalities: the traditional face-to-face (f2f) modality and the distance education one. Almost all courses offered under the distance education program are blended. They include a f2f component (four encounters a semester, mainly for evaluations) combined with online activities developed on Moodle and Blackboard, our official LMS.

Within the distance education program, the Foreign Languages Faculty offers a three-level English course distributed in three semesters. English III is the third of them. The course is focused on reading and summarizing academic texts.

The blog created is a support to the Moodle activities. It is aimed to guide the students in the process of a) reading and understanding academic texts (originally written in the English language), and b) summarizing them in Spanish. The blog is still under construction, but I hope to have it ready at the end of week 9. It will offer a space for the students to discuss the topic developed in each of the course readings. Among the information to include will be the mandatory readings, links to the students' blogs with their corresponding tasks, how-to tutorials, and resources to learn and practice the target language.

Hope to have the time to feed the blog with all artifacts I have planned.

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Besides this, we were also asked to review our partner's project plan or report. I am working with Virginia Canabal from Uruguay. She gave me some valuable insights concerning my work, which is still under construction like hers. Although we are teaching, we are both working with plans. We are both planning for future academic terms. In my case, for instance, I am planning to implement the whole project next semester. We already started the semester and have covered more than 60% of our content. We are following a chronogram that includes face-to-face encounters and online activities previously established and cannot be changed at this moment.