Hi there,

Week 4 has also come to an end and we're starting a new one. As I wrote last Sunday, the level of difficulty is smoothly increasing as we are moving towards the end of the course. The proof that the level of difficulty increased can be seen first of all through the length of the reading material made available to us.

The first article that we had to read was very resourceful.

http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html

It went from reviewing the previous research as far as possibilities offered by the internet to learn languages are concerned to suggesting ways of using this internet efficiently in a motivating way for students to practice what they learn in class. A number of things in this article are not new to me as I use many of the suggested teaching way-outs with my own students, but I learnt a lot from it, especially its point 9 on how newspaper reports can help increase their reading and writing skills and I was very happy to learn that this website

http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/

is a central index of newspapers around the world.

The second reading text

http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Liang-ExtensiveReading.html

deals with a crucial problem in our environment. Our students do not read as they are supposed to. What they do read is especially their school books when their parents buy them. Even adults are not very much attracted by reading and they usually complain, even though this is not actually evidenced, against the cost of books. The possibility of reading e-books eases the access to original books and the story map

http://www.educationworld.com/a_tsl/TM/WS_storymapws.shtml

can be very helpful to teachers as they do not need to catch headaches for building story maps on their own. The advanced story map suggested in that article did not open.

It is however worth mentioning that there are downsides to these activities:

1. Electricity supply is not satisfactory in our country and some parts, including some neighborhoods in the capital city, can stay several days without electricity.
2. The internet itself cannot be accessed from everywhere in Cameroon and even in places where it is, participants, namely young secondary school students, may not have enough means to have access to it.
3. The teacher, before starting a series of lessons based on internet resources must first make sure that his students are computer literate. If that is not the case, he must, if possible, provide his students with this computing know-how, which is not always very easy to teachers themselves.

Thanks for reading my blog and commenting on it.