Exploring and Exploiting the Internet:
Concepts and Practices for Teaching ESOL

Michael Krauss, Lewis & Clark College

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Idea Center!

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Exploring and Exploiting the Internet:
Concepts and Practices for Teaching ESOL

Michael Krauss, Lewis & Clark College

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Idea Center!

The following is a list of ideas submitted by those who have taken this workshop. Feel free to develop them and try them out!

Idea-submitted: I plan to have my lower intermediate students explore Portland "virtually" next term selecting a list of restaurants to visit and examine their menus for comparisons.

Idea-submitted: Use digital photographs taken of or by students. Upload to www.zing.com. Put link to the zing site in your web page. Have students go to the page and write comments under the photo of their choice. It is also possible to have the student right click and save a copy of the photo to a floppy disk and then write about it.

Idea-submitted: Use the Density Lab at ExploreScience.com as a science lesson with my Level 200 (lower intermediate) students in Earth Science, a course I'll teach in Spring 2001. I'll create a handout with the vocabulary and concepts of density, mass and volume that students will need. Also, this interactive site can be easily used by any level ESL/EFL student to practice the prepositions of place. Teachers could dictate, TPR-style, while students move objects on the screen. Or for more interactive oral/aural practice, students could sit side by side; Student A places objects around the screen in the Density Lab. Then Student A describes where things are to Student B, who places the objects using her computer. When finished, the students can compare screens. A follow-up would be for the students to write a comparison/contrast of what they did that was correct/incorrect: e.g. "I put the green oval below the red one, but Sung Jin didn't." "Both Toshi and I put the red triangles in the water tank." Students could also work in teams, with one student manipulating the computer while the other gives instructions. Lots of possibilities.

Idea-submitted: The next time I teach the highest level reading class, I'll develop an activity that makes the students evaluate websites. I think this is critical before students move on into mainstream courses. They use the Internet for everything now even though we try to get them to use other resources (magazines online indexes, etc.). Just plug in some key words on a search engine and take whatever comes up highest on the list seems to be the motto. Does anyone know of some good techniques, exercises for evaluating websites?

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