Pheew! It is such hard work trying to keep up with our weekly program. Luckily, it is inspiring and instructive all along.

I am recording here some comments about our TASK this week, which had to do with planning a technology enhanced lesson plan. I tried to study the background material suggested by Courtney with some care. I recognized with some pang the gentle word of warning by the Webskills team in their article, that you should not get carried away by just being excited about the ICTs and some cute tools and sites you have found on the net (or learnt from a colleague) but that planning your lessons should always bear a meaningful link to the syllabus and the standards. The use of ICTs should be a value added to what is being learnt. Moreover, as suggested further in the reading, the assignments you compose should be clear and concise to your students so that they can grasp  why you are providing just those tools and exercises to support their learning.

I liked the suggested reading about writing integrated lesson plans a lot. This is as we in Finland firmly believe that kids will benefit if teachers collaborate with their colleagues all through the students’ learning paths (this is not necessarily what is happening in all schools and all the time – of course not; in Finland we are notorious for wanting to get by all obstacles on our own).

The benefits of integrated teaching learning assignments are obvious as the learners (and teachers, mind you) will come to look at the topics from more angles than one - which is how topics are composed in the real world anyway, are they not. Also as a teaching professional you may be lucky in getting help from a colleague in your own learning as a user of the ICTs and  of the resources available on the Net.

There was another significant tip further on in the reading which was about extending the learning experiences through field trips, research, and art. In Finland we talk all the time about extending the schools’ learning environments, there are even heaps of state discretionary funds going to providers of education in order to enhance the environments, especially through clever use of the ICTs. The latest fad is now providing as many kids at school as possible with tablets. The kids are then – hopefully – taking the tablets to all kinds of learning sites where they can use them for taking notes, taking pictures and videos, consulting the web for more information on what they are studying, also, they can use the tablets also for geo-caching (a fad within a fad), and of course, for asking for help from teachers etc etc. But it is a fad so far, I am afraid the pedagogy that would help make sense of all this tablet learning is evolving only incrementally. (You may not remember but earlier on I was referring to a massive EU survey on the use of ICTs in European schools. The results showed that Finnish schools are well equipped but the teachers do not always know how to put the technology into proper use. The highly enlightening survey report is here http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/KK-31-13-401-EN-N.pdf.)

One or two notes still: as the Webskills colleagues suggested, ICTs can make learning quite fun and exciting if you find the right help through them. I tried the games at the suggested site https://elt.oup.com/student/englishfile/elementary/c_pronunciation/ef_stressgame?cc=us&selLanguage=en.) Now for some reason I could not really make the games work (I refuse to admit that I would not know where the stress is in elementary or intermediate level words;-) but was able to get thrilled anyway!

Thanks Courtney for the extra pages with ‘multi-skills’ to look at, I was happy to find a useful list of slang words http://www.manythings.org/slang/slang6.html  and a pronunciation site to practise with minimal difference pairs at http://www.manythings.org/mp/m30.html, two neat little needles out of a haystackJ By the way, I’ve learnt to use Delicious, these links are of course now secured there for further disposal.