Chapter 8 Online Reference Tools

Electronic dictionary provides a powerful resource for students working on their own and for you in the classroom. In the classroom you can have the dictionary available all the times to check the meaning of the words and if you are fortunate enough to have a PC linked to a data projector or interactive whiteboard you can integrate the dictionary into your day to day teaching seamlessly and also carry out dictionary use training sessions more effectively.

Beside dictionaries that can be used at all level, thesauruses are more suited to the intermediate and advanced levels. For higher level, they can be used to enrich and extend your learners’ vocabulary. Thesauruses can be used for writing projects. It can encourage learners to be more adventurous in their creative writing at the same time as helping them to analyze their output more critically.

A concordancer is similar to a search engine in any respects. It is a small program that can examine large quantities. Corpuses are compiled from variety of sources like written collection such as newspaper or journals, spoken collection taken from radio.

Translation software is still in its infancy and at the time of writing remains unreliable. Encyclopedias can be used for research and project work. The wealth of information contained o these sites opens up the world to our learners in a way thet more traditional collections of classroom objects simply cant.

Chapter 7 Blogs, Wikis and Podcast

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Blogs, Wikis and podcast are example of social software. These tools can be very motivating for learners, teachers are themselves are sometime fearful of the technology or feel that they are not technically competent enough to use these tools.

The most common type of blogs is kept by one person, who will regularly post comments, thoughts, analyses, experiences, interesting links, jokes or ay others form of the content to the web. blogs use in education are known as edublogs. Edublogs cover a wide range of topics related to education, from amusing on educational policy and development to learners composition. An edublogs can be set up and used by the teacher, by individual learners or by a class. A blogs set up and maintained by teacher is knowm as tutor blogs. The teacher may decide to allow their learners to write comments in the blogs. Another type of blogs is class blogs, one used by the entire class. Blogs provide a real world tool for learners to practice their written English. For teacher the further area is assessment. Given that student or class blogs is essentially a written assignment; blogs can be used for evaluation. First step for start using blogs is setting up sample blogs, second setting up student blogs, third preparing posting and visiting blogs, the last is giving them task.

Another social software is wikis. It is essentially an online journal or diary usually written by one person. One of the best wiki is wikipedia. It is an online that anyone can add or edit. The best way to start wiki is using wiki with a group of learners by setting up collaborative writing project.

The last social software is podcast. A podcats can be downloaded automatically to your computer. Podcast directories are one place to start looking for padcast. There are two main uses of podcast in teaching. Firstly learners can listen to podcast made by others and secondly, they can produce their own podcast.