Sunday 22 January 2012

Week 2: web searching and ABCD objective

Refresh.... I teach Research Methods to English teachers at university. In the building there is no internet, the only bibliographical information for coursework are. So *free* online academic libraries is what I need.

First of all, I got to say that www.noodletools.com is wonderful! Knowing that there are other free tools online made my week. I have been wondering about this last year and could not manage to find anything like it. I was looking for free digital libraries for my university course and found some interesting sites.

I tried Intute, looking for articles on primary education and there are tons! But the backside is that you have to pay for most of the articles. And my language school is not subscribed to any digital library that I know of. Hmmm I might look into the big campus for that.
have access to it and if what they have available would be useful for us.

On the other hand, I really liked INFOMINE for keys words and academic articles are free!
University of North Texas (http://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/CRSR/browse/)and Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=searchArticles&q1=primary+education&f1=all&b1=and&q2=&f2=all) provide several free academic articles. I found very easily a variety of research academic articles on primary education and EFL education. These will be useful for my students to read to get inspired on their possible research topic at the end of the semestre, plus practice basic research skills on education. I think I will be using these search engines to develop certain research skills with my students. And why not, even see what other research methodology tools to use for certain academic research read on these sites.

The downside is that very few of these research engines are in another language, other than English. English is the main source of information. So teachers and students should have a high level of English in order to use these tools properly.

Another thing we read about this week was on learning objectives. It was new to me the name 'ABCD model', but had come across something similar. I love Bloom's taxonomy and found the list of verbs very useful. I will keep in mind these verbs for my planning . See this link http://www.techlearning.com/article/blooms-taxonomy-blooms-digitally/44988
There are probably many others. Feel free to share if you found other lists.
Now to be honest, what I struggled when writing the learning objective was with 'degree' because when trying to write an objective for my class for Research methods, it just sounded off.

One of the objectives of my class, considering the ABCD model would be:

Given a specific topic provided by the teacher on Linguistics (CONDITION), the students (AUDIENCE) will be able to write a 10 note cards, layout in bullet-points the content of their topic and bibliography for their topic -MLA style-, illustrating the first 2 steps of a term paper (DEGREE).

What do you think? I am open for input.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Melissa
    It is very great post and you have summarize all the activity on week 2 on it.
    I agree with you that ABCD model is new for most of the webskills course but as teachers I think we have use some technique on behavior objective writing similar or close to this model.

    Best Regards,
    Nasser
    http://webskills4teachers.blogspot.com/

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  2. Hello Mellisa,
    I like your post and there are many useful pieces of information. The week was so great where we have learned a lot of it concerning search engines and the ABCD model. I also like Bloom's taxonomy and all verbs are very useful. I also agree with you about writing the DEGREE.
    Kind regards...

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  3. Hi Melissa, your intuition is right about the degree being off here. I'd be happy to help you out with this. But since week 2 is over, just email me your objective, and we can have a private discussion about it.

    Janine

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