Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy in the Saudi EFL Classrooms

Bloom's Taxonomy is a form of classification for different kinds of questions according to six levels of higher level thinking. Bloom's taxonomy has contributed to the teaching styles of most, if not all, teachers. Also, while it represents the learning process, it does not enforce the notion that learners must start at the lowest taxonomic level and then slowly work their way up. Instead, the learning process can be started at virtually any level.
Bloom's Taxonomy was revised by Anderson and Krathwohl and accounts for many traditional practices which take place in the classroom practices, attitudes and behaviors. Bloom's revised taxonomy is related to critical thinking in that it encourages students and individuals to move past lower-level thinking skills and to not simply attempt to "remember" information. It instigates students to use critical thinking by assessing, analyzing, evaluating and applying information, with the end result of creating something new.

Bloom's Taxonomy is not very evident in Saudi EFL classrooms, due to the fact that almost all questions put to students in the classroom utilize only remembered knowledge and does not demand that students synthesize and evaluate information. Bloom's taxonomy is very necessary for teachers to use it in the classroom, especially in EFL and ESL classrooms. I would personally use Bloom's taxonomy in order to encourage my students to use higher-level and critical thinking skills. Gone are the days when students will simply be asked to remember information to order questions. Students will be expected to understand, evaluate, synthesize and apply the information in order to create innovative new creations and to come up with interesting new answers.

Evaluating Websites

The website we decided to evaluate was bogglesworldesl.com. An enjoyable and informative website that offers ESL teachers a plethora of material for use in the classroom during lessons.
We evaluated the website based on the following criteria: purpose, authority, objectivity, appropriateness, relevance, currency, responsibility, clarity, accessibility.
Purpose: the website is a .com website meaning that it is either a commercial or personal website. In this case, it seems to be a mixture of a both.
Authority: The creators of the website are a group of ESL teachers located in Asia and North America. The group includes Chris Gunn (web and materials design), Stephen Gordon and Cam Lirette (editors and content creation) and Thomas Lovelle (writer and content direction). It appears to be an authentic website with no hidden agenda.
Objectivity: the website is objective and there doesn't seem to be any kind of bias.
Relevance/Appropriateness: The website is appropriate for its goal. It contains ESL teaching materials that are appropriate and good for a variety of levels and ages, most especially K7 teachers. The website and materials are well written and include lessons plans that can make a teacher's life much easier.
Currency: The website's content seems to be current. From what we saw, there didn't seem to be anything outdated. Although, this was hard to confirm since there doesn't appear to be a date for when the website was last updated. A very important point is that the website contains no dead links which can be very irritating and detrimental to a website.
Responsibility: The authors are upfront and honest about their website and what they hope to accomplish. While it is a primarily free website, they aren't adverse to donations and such. They can be contacted via the email gunnchris@bogglesworldesl.com. There doesn't seem to be a section on the website for references or credit but it's possibly because they created all the material or content. Although, this is doubtful.
Clarity: The website is very clear and somewhat colorful and visually appealing. Finding information is easy. On the other hand, a slight drawback is that the text is somewhat cluttered. There are graphics that add to the visual appeal of the website rather than detract from it. As far as we could see, there is only 1 advertisement on the website and it quite small and doesn't interfere with the website in any way. The pages and links are well organized and there didn't seem to be any spelling, grammatical or word-usage mistakes.
Accessibility: The website is open, free to use, and can be accessed by all. The site loads very quickly and has no problems as far as we could see. It is clear and easy to navigate from page to page and from link to link. There are no dead links or dead pages. As far as a text-only version goes, there doesn't seem to be an option to view the website in that form, although, this can be remedied by using Google's cached feature and choosing the "text-only" option.

Wordle in EDU 401

The role of WebQuests in learning a foreign/second language

It is interesting to me in this course exactly how much new information I have gleaned that I was completely unaware of.
Even though I consider myself a complete and total Digital Native, I have never in my life even heard of the term "webquest" before last week. You may be wondering at this point, "what in God's name is a webquest??"

Bernie Dodge, of San Diego State University, is generally credited with being the original creator of the webquest concept. He defines it quite adequately as an "inquiry oriented
activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources
on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing."
To put it simply, the teacher is basically designing a small quest or "treasure hunt of information" that students will complete by searching on the World Wide Web.

To those who are intrigued by this concept, you may be wondering what the teacher's role is throughout the whole webquest. Basically, the teacher can choose a ready-made webquest for the students, or he/she can design a completely new one by choosing out of the many choices available on the internet. My personal favorite was Zunal.com. The teacher can then decide exactly how much information to provide the students with and how much to let the students find on their own.

Which brings me to my next point. The role of the students. Well, basically, the students will be doing most of the work. After all, the webquest IS for them. Webquests are a prime example of the kind of task that could be used in a task-based or "project-based" language learning approach to teaching. The students will be accomplishing activities and tasks that are relevant to their own lives, all while being exposed to many instances of authentic language.

In most cases, the students will be working in groups and collaborating with each other in order to accomplish the tasks. Completing the webquest, in most cases, is often a case of team work. It also requires a high level of critical thinking. The students should not be spoon fed every bit of information but must search for what they need themselves, employing their own faculties of judgement and criticisms to decide on what to use or not use.

As a future EFL teacher, I am quite intrigued by webquests. While I can clearly see their inherent value, if asked whether or not I would use them with my future students, I would have to answer, "it depends." My answer depends on a lot of factors. Would my students be interested in the first place? Would they enjoy the webquest and learn from it, or would they think that I'm just being lazy and want to waste their time? Would I be allowed to try a webquest on my students? Or would I be brutally rebuffed from even attempting it from the school/government administration?

If all these factors were in my favor, then I probably would indeed use webquests during lessons.

How would English language teachers use blogs, wikis and delicious with their students?

It is a crying shame in this day and age that so many teachers disregard the importance of technology and don't see the need to incorporate it in the language classroom. However, the fact remains that students today are very different from students 50 years ago. One of the best ways to interest a student, in the present time, would be to use different technological methods, so that the student feels that what he/she is learning is actually relevant to his/her real life.

• Teachers can use blogs when encouraging students to use a particular grammatical structure. For example, if the students that week had just learned about the past tense, the teacher could ask them to create a blog of their own, and then to write about what they did over the weekend using the syntactic structure that they'd recently learned. The teacher could also make the students write a minimum of 150 words a week on their blog, or comment on their friends' blogs to develop their writing skills.
• Wikis can be used to encourage students to hone their reading, writing and creative skills. The teacher could implement an activity or assignment that requires the students to create their own wiki and to fill it with relevant information to the course. For example, if the course is about English history, the students would have to seek out information pertaining to this course and fill the wiki with it. This would make them read and help them to learn how to seek out the knowledge on their own. Designing the wiki to look more fun, creative and interactive would engage the students with the task.
• Using delicious in a language classroom could help to develop a multitude of language skills. For example, the teacher could create a delicious account, fill it with links that would lead to various websites that could help the students to develop their language skills (for example, websites with simple English quizzes on them, instructive videos, etc.) and then ask the students to create their own delicious accounts and start going to the links provided.

The bottom line is that technology is around to make our lives easier, so why not use it to make learning easier and more enjoyable?

The Possiblity of Reaching Bax’s Normilasation in our national context: Why is it possible? When is it possible/reached/achieved? How will it be reached?

Bax suggests that in order for normalization to be achieved, we must first start with changes to our attitudes towards computers and computer software. We should regard CALL as something normal and nothing out of the ordinary and not have unreasonable fear or expectations of it. We must change the mindset that believes that if the hardware and software is made available, then everything else will fall into place.
This can be done by ensuring that all individuals involved with CALL are aware that in order to successfully integrate CALL, a number of other factors must be taken into account, such as technology, software and that teachers and learners have a positive attitude towards it. Also, we need to study, in depth, ethnographic data concerning the individuals that will be using CALL and to work on overcoming any barriers to normalization.

Normalization of CALL can be achieved in the near future in learning institutions in Saudi Arabia by doing the following things:

• Computers must be made more available to all learners, regardless of age or gender, and they should be properly equipped with the appropriate software.
• Teachers intending to use CALL must be properly trained.
• Students must be made to see that computers CAN in fact be used for educational purposes and not simply for social or entertainment purposes such as chatting.
• It must be taken into account that not all students can and will be proficient in the use of computers and so allowances must be made.
• We must slowly work on overcoming the mindset, that a lot of people in Saudi Arabia have, that individuals that spend long hours on computers are inherently doing something bad.
• Computers must be made smaller so that they are easier to carry around, smaller even than laptops nowadays.

Hello fellow sufferers of YUC!

Hello my fellow sufferers of YUC!

Let's have fun blogging together ^.^