Usig website

Using websites in the classroom

- you can choose from authentic(written for Internet surfers in general) sources or ELT - specific sites (made by, and for, teachers), monolingual or mulitilngual sites, sites with muli\timedia, or just simple text, for those on slower connections.

- Just as the Internet is becoming more of a collaborative medium, so should your use of it in your teaching.

- You can use web pages in the classroom in a varitey of way

• as printed pages, with no computers. (Indeed, a lot of activities using web pages will onl necessitate the printing of one or two pages, which can subsequently be photocopied)


• with one computer with an Internet connection. ( This can be enhanced by connecting the computer to a daa projector or even an interacitve witheboard, allowing for greater sisibility in class)


• in a computerlab with a set of networked and connected computers

- We would therefore recommend that, if you plan to use the internet, you should talk to your learners and explore the reasons for using this resource with them. this cn be done at lower levels in their own language or in English with higher-level classes

ELT websites or authentic websites?

- as with all authentic mterials, the level and language challenges posed by these sites can be largely mitigated by the type of task you expect your learners to carry out.

- A well-designed task will allow your learners to deal with authentic sites, guiding them through not only the text, but also the layout and navigation problems that may otherwise impact on their learning experience.

- Of course there are plenty of ELT websites which provide content that your learners can use, for example language practice activities they can do on their own. They provide valuable opportunities for more controlled lnguage work and are often a great help to learners who need to brush up on ertain aspects of the language or to prepare for an exam.

- Authentic sites can be chosen to fit your learners' interests. This is a key factor in keeping motivation high in your electronic classroom. When evaluating authentic sites for possible incorporation into your teaching, try to find ones which have an easy structure and navigation, and with smaller chunks of text per page.

- They can be guided towards being comfortable with understanding the content of a site and identifying whatthey need to know or find out without getting boggeddown in having to understand every word on the screen.

How to find useful websites

1. search engines - there is a large variety of search engines, perhaps the most well-known is Google, which currently indexes over twelve billion web pages. Keywords are good for exploring word relationships and lexical areas. ( what google knows about a page is generally the page address on the web, the page title, when it was last updated and a few keywords associated with the content itself. These keywords are defined by the designer of the page, and can resonably be expected to accurately reflect the content of the page. The key to good searching in Google is to define your keywords properly )


2. Subject guides - Yahoo! currently claims to index nearly twenty billion pages, and is still the search venue of choice for many people who remember when it was the only way of searching the Internet. subject seaches helpdefine and refine ideas and contexts.(Yahoo! derives its description of subject guide from the fact that it divides its content into subject areas, and subdivisions of those areas.


3. Real language searches - A real language search such as Ask allows the user to type simple questions as search queries. ( Learners can benefit from an exposure to all three types, as they activate different linguistic and mental processes .) A real search can provide useful practice in questoin formation

or you can use meta search sites

How to evaluate websites

- Having found potentially useful websites, the next step is to evaluate how useful and appropriate they are for the classroom. You will also need to think about the aims and objectives of your lesson.

1. Accuracy (Who wrote the page?, Is the page conent reliable and actually correct?)


2. Currency ( Is the content up-to-date?, When was the page last updated?)


3. Content ( Is the site interesting and stimulating?, Is it attractive and easy to navigate?)


4. Functionality ( Does the site work well? Are there any broken links?, Does it use a lot of large files or alternative technologies e.g. Flash ?)

- Another thing to bear in mind as a language teacher will be the linguistic accuracy of the web page. If this important to you, you will need to add this to your evaluation criteria. This again will depend on the purpose of the site in your lesson plan.

- As far as content is concerned, note that criteria such as ease-of-use and interest are taken into account , but you may also want to consider adding a further set of criteria here along the lines of appropriateness.

- Careful preparation and investigation in the lesson planning stage can go a long way towards making the learners' experience enjoyable and trouble-free

Planning lessons using the internet

- The first thing is to plan your session well: visit the websites you intend to use and make sure you know your way around them properly.

- Planning a web-based lesson, rather than one where the web content plats an ancillary role, is not intrinsically different from planning a more traditional one. we like to divide a typical web-based session into three parts (www): warmer, web, what next.

- Make a note of the particular pages you want your learners to work - you can use the favorites option in Internet Explorer, or Bookmarks in Firefox to log web addresses for the later use- and make sure you're familiar with the content.

- The warmer part of the lesson is the kind of thing we all do as a matter of course, with introductory activities, interest-generating ideas, and so on.

- We prefer to take learners to a computer room for this part rather than spend the entire class in there. This has the double advantage of allowing more group to use the room and of keeping learners to stretch their legs and provides a change of pace. On the potential to disrupt your class, so careful planning of the logistics may be necessary.

- you may even chose to incorporate the use of websites more consistently into the curriculum of the course you are teaching - perhaps substituting a part of the course materials you are using for websites

- Make sure your learners have a clearly-defined task to achieve and a clearly-defined time frame in which to achieve it.

- Once the group has got what you intended from the computers, it's time to move them back to the classroom for the what next stage of the lesson This part should deal with the tasks set for the web part and then proceed with more familiar follow-up activities to round off the lesson

Sample lesson plans _ page 37-39

Working with lower levels of language proficiency

Choosing the right websites can go some way towards raising their comfort levels, though you may need to have shorter lessons than the higher level one described above. Websites which are more suitable for lower levels will include

• websites with simple, clearly presented text.
• websites with non-linguistic data which is easy to interpret (e.g. data in the form of a chart, such as a weather page)
• websites with visuals - a task can be based around the visuals only.
• ELT websites, where the content has been written, edited, and prepared with this audience in mind.

Look at Page 40 to 41

Web teaching dos and don'ts

- Planning carefully and adopting a structured approach to the way you use websites in the classroom should give you the confidence to try out different ways of introducing your learners to Internet content.

- Don't discount simple text-based websites which might be very beneficial in your own context. Apart from anything else, they are less likely to malfunction or cause problems when you go to use them.

1. Whenever you use technology you should always have a backup plan in place.
2. Use the knowledge of other teachers and of your learners to help you with the technical side of the lesson.
3. If it's a lesson that involves relatively few web pages, try saving them to your computer hard disk.
4. Unless you are working on something like an email pen pal exchange, it is rarely conducive to have learners working alone on computer.
5. As was mentioned in chapter 1, try to arrange the computer room in such a way that you can easily maintain control over learner activities. An ideal layout is to have the computers around the outside walls of the class
6. Not all of the content that you come across with your learners will necessarily be suitable for them