In part 2 of the tools for task-based activities the focus will be on tools that promote independent and self-directed learning. Teachers can create complex learning activities like webquests where students have to use the internet as resource target-oriented and sufficiently to find specific information. They can also add in language corpora to retrieve organised lists of linguistic data from the corpus in question. Or else, create their own interactive language exercises with enclosed feedback so that the learners get an immediate response why their chosen answer is right or wrong. All the above tools assist the learners in acquiring, managing and applying knowledge independently and thus improve their language skills greatly. Therefore, participants will be introduced to these tools in this module and given ways to how to implement them into their language classroom.

WebQuests

In this course participants will learn how to use the World Wide Web for inquiry-based instructional activities called WebQuests. What purpose do they serve? What do they consist of? What potential do they offer to language teachers? Where to look for them? How to use them in the class? Is creating a WebQuest a difficult and time-consuming process? Participants will find answers to all these questions within the two weeks of the course in which the newly learned theory will be put into practice.

Language Concordancers

Concordancers are among the most useful and fascinating language tools that computer technology has on offer to language learners and teachers alike. They are computer programs which make it possible to search and retrieve language samples stored in a corpus. This makes concordancers invaluable for analyzing the relationships between words, solving various language problems and improving one’s writing style.

In this course participants will investigate and compare several web-based concordancers, paying attention to their strengths and weaknesses and learning how to use them to their fullest. Participants will be given a handful of practical language problems to solve and analyze, followed by a discussion on practical classroom implementation. The course will take two weeks to complete.

Interactive Exercises 

Practice makes perfect is a quite commonly used idiom to express that the more people practise the better they will get at something. This applies also to language learning and can be achieved in several ways, e.g. by completing specifically designed exercises. Those are a good approach to promote language learning in self-study. However, ample feedback is necessary when language exercises will be done single-handedly which helps learners to understand and apply the rules of the target language better and thus improve on their language skills. In this course participants will learn what so called authoring tools are as well as how to use them to create various interactive exercises for their language classroom. Samples of interactive exercises will help them find out what is essential to create interactive exercises and which types of exercises are available. They will gather ideas why and where they can implement such exercises. Moreover, a pool of ready-made exercises will also be provided. Finally, participants will create a set of interactive exercises themselves using the software HotPotatoes and lastly learn how to publish these either in the internet or a pc lab.

Příloha:

DE_Modul5.pdf	[TOOLS FÜR HANDLUNGSORIENTIERTE AUFGABEN: TEIL 2 - DE]	163 Kb	10/04/10 08:56
EN_Modul5.pdf	[ICT Tools for Task-Based Activities: Part 2 - EN]	164 Kb	18/03/10 22:31
CZ_Modul5.pdf	[IKT - Část 2 - CZ]	164 Kb	18/03/10 22:31