My self-reflection about the technologies that applied in our group project

My self-reflection about the technologies that applied in our group project

I want to talk about it from two aspects:
One is the application and use of Hot Potatoes and Dreamweaver;
The other one is the application and use of wiki.

1. Hot Potatoes and Dreamweaver.
Frankly speaking, these are the most difficult but also the most useful technologies that I learned from this course. These two technologies provide me a whole new and creative approach that can be used to design on-line exercises and edit webpage.
Hot Potatoes is really a practical technology which can be used to create various types of exercises, like cloze, match, MC, quiz, etc. We can also use Masher to mix different kinds of exercises together, making an integrated exercise.
Dreamweaver can insert videos, flashes and images which are relevant to exercises into the on-line quiz page. For example we can make an exercise page including the video of a song’s MTV and gap filling quiz of the lyric. By using this exercise, students can do the gap filling quiz and at the same time watch the video. I always believe that students like visual learning and practices, because students’ learning motivation and interests can always been inspired by visual learning materials.
Hot Potatoes and Dreamweaver are not difficult to operate and the exercise made through these technology are really practical and creative to assist both language learning and teaching, but there are also some problems that I found about my experience. One is that such kind of exercises is really condition-limited. That means students must need a computer-based environment when working on such on-line exercises, especially in class. Most of the mainland China schools can’t provide students the required computer-based learning environment. But if teachers prepare such kind of exercises for students to do as homework, the situation may be better because at present most students get computers which can get access to Internet at home. The other problem was found when we were preparing the group wiki. As our focus is IELTS, and IELTS listening don’t have practices based on videos, it was really difficult for us to insert audio materials by using Dreamweaver.

2 Wiki design
I think the design of our wiki homepage is really a challenge but interesting experience for every member of our group.
First, it was a tough task because we really met a lot of difficulties in both the use of technologies, finding materials and editing the homepage.
Second, I have to say that wiki is really a powerful tool that can be utilized by both teachers and students for specific teaching and learning purposes. It is an integrated on-line website which can incorporate various kinds of resources, like on-line exercises, on-line videos, on-line discussion board, on-line chat room and so on.
Although it is a practical teaching and learning tool, it also have problems just like the two technologies I listed above. Again it is condition-required. If there is no required computer-based environment, the wiki can’t exert its effectiveness and power to the most. Another problem is that to design a wiki and include the materials and practice you need is not an easy thing, it required some technological skills. I think a large number of teachers don’t have a good master of such skills.