Week Three's Reading

Chapter 7: Sample Web Projects
This chapter describes several projects which explain how teachers use the Internet in different contexts. There are ten examples in total, five from K-12 schools and five from universities. I’m going to explain it one by one.

1. Primary School Webfolios
This project was carried out by Rachel Arenstein, who teaches English at Arazim in Maalot, Isreal. Fifth- and sixth- students were asked to create portfolios and design their own web pages on webfolios in English during the computer laboratory time.
Topics and tasks for the portfolios corresponded to the specific elements of a portfolio recommended the national English Inspectorate of Israel.
The merit is that the project has tapped students’ multiple intelligences well, but the downside is that it takes a great deal of time for children to master the computer skills and carry out the tasks.

2. A Primary School E-Mail Cultural Exchange
This project was carried out by Teresa Almeida d’Eca, who teaches six-grade English in Portugal. D’ designed a whole-class cultural exchange project via e-mail as part of her curriculum. The project began in October and lasted until early January.
Students were asked to work in groups of five with some topic, including Christmas decorations, shopping, and the meaning of Christmas during class, with d’Eca’s assistance. After school, volunteers from each group took turns typing the letters on school’s computers, and D’ sent the e-mail from her home computer.
Students’ enthusiasm for English increased a lot because of this project. Their writing skills also improved a good deal.

3. A Middle School Web Publishing Project
A web publishing project in a seventh-grade English class based on a detective story was carried our by Markus Kneirum and Alexander Mokry, who teach English and social sciences in Germany.
Aim of this project is to give their students the opportunity to develop their writing skill for more natural and communicative purposes.
Students need to finish three writing assignment for the project, including a short summary of the book, a writing activity with students working in groups to develop ideas on a topic, and a personal home page that were include in the site.
This project imposed many new expectations on students, like independence, creativity, cooperation.

4. A Junior High Virtual Classroom
Jack Tseng, who teaches junior high in Taiwan, created a bilingual virtual classroom on the WWW called Jack’s English Classroom to assist his in-class teaching of a grammar-based curriculum.
Students can access the virtual classroom through their computer at home. They can post homework and discuss them on-line, and sometimes they discuss the on-line activities during the regular class time.

5. A High School E-Mail Exchange Project
A collaborative, task-based e-mail exchange project was developed by Roseanne Greenfield , who teaches English at a secondary school in Hong Kong.
Exchange between Greenfield’s students and a class of native English speakers from the U.S involved three elements: project-based learning, cooperative learning, and process writing.
In the e-mail exchange, student in this project worked on essays in two genres of academic writing, descriptive essays and imaginative essays. First, they exchange personal letters containing their own descriptive essays; second, they work in groups at each home school to propose topics for the imaginative essays; then, students employed peer-editing techniques by using a grading rubric developed by teachers.
The project helped students see English as a valuable tool for international communication rather than only as a subject required for the national examination.

6. An Internet Research Project in an Intensive English Program

7. A University-Level Content-Based Course
This content-based language course which was taught by Randall Davis in a university in Japan called Crossing Borders via the Internet. This course can help students to develop skills and knowledge about hands-on technical, language and intercultural communication via the Internet.
Students need to learn how to get information and materials from a variety of Internet sources. A research paper and home page project were also included in this project.

8. A University On-line Writing Course
John Steels’s on-line writing class is set up to maximize students’ opportunities to communicate in writing with each other while teaching them to access resources from the www. Students can get textbook, post homework, get teacher’s answers and other’s comments through the home page and e-mails.

9. A University-Level Problem-Based Learning Course
This course was established by Susan McGregor to help students develop their Internet and English skills while solving a practical problem related to their own life goals. This language courses focuses on many things, including planning projects, preparing curriculum vitae, developing written communication skills and oral communication skills and so on.
This course helps students develop language and technical skills as they work on a task important to their own future.

10. A University Environmental Project.