Week 3: Orall skills and Delicious page

Every week we have two deadlines - mid-Wednesday and  Sunday. The first part of the week is for reading course materials, completing assignments and participating in discussion thread. So the second part of the week gives us possibility to continue our "investigation" or to think over the results we got.

This week I learned two things.

First is a possibility to have access to necessary resources from any computer. Being at home or at work or participating in some seminar or courses you can find your favourte sites which you use or used at any time and you don't need remember its name, address, etc. I appreciate this possibility very much as sometimes I prepare for my classes at home, sometimes at work. It the Discussion thread I compared it with Dropbox or Google drive. As for students it can be useful for them, for example, for my master’s students while doing their research – in their delicious page they can create the list with sites for their research and they’ll have access to these sites and to this list from libraries, from home, cafes, from everywhere and at any time.

The second thing I learned is podcast. Some my colleagues told a lot about it because they have their research in the domain of podcasts and students’ autonomy. They even showed its options but John Gay said: “Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand”. That’s the true. Due to our assignment I had to do it and finally I know what it is, how to work with it and where it can be used.

Let’s see. Some assignments suggest students to prepare a speech or report and in the class it’s impossible to listen and discuss all the reports. Podcasts give possibility to discuss all the reports: some of tem will be delivered and discussed in the class and others – on-line. Next time students who reported in the class will do it on-line and vice versa.

A lot of variants can be used and their number is infinite.