ICT to improve motivation in the classrooms

Last Tuesday July 11th, I attended an interesting presentation called ICT to improve motivation in the classrooms delivered by Lisbeth Rivas, a teacher trainee from UPEL-Caracas. It is the first presentation of two related to ICT. Lisbeth Rivas is a student of Seminario de Investigación EFL (EFL research seminar) taught by Prof. Nahir Aparicio. Lisbeth Rivas’s research proposal started with a review of the literature on ICT and ended up with an ICT lesson to develop reading comprehension for secondary school students. Its application is pending for next school year. 

For this web- based lesson, Lisbeth used a weblog. This has two main blog entries:  

First entry: 1) An extract of the online text selected 2) Pre-reading activity (a multiple choice question) 3) A link to a reading taken from USA.com (semantically complete, unedited)  

Second entry: 1) Instructions to check comprehension after reading 2) A worksheet Also, it has got two entries with pictures of students and teachers. 

Here’s the link for Lisbeth's blog: http://lizcrivas2.blogspot.com/ It is worth mentioning that Lisbeth Rivas participated in the workshop ICT in ELT given by the British Council Venezuela last March at the Instituto Pedagogico de Caracas, El Paraíso. She told us the workshop motivated her to learn more about ICT and choose this as her research project to fulfill a requirement of Seminario de Investigación EFL. I do invite you to read the research abstract and have a look at the lesson plan by clicking in the links below: Abstract: ICT to improve motivation in EFL classrooms Web-based lesson plan Congrats Lisbeth Rivas and keep up the good job! 

I'd like to say, as a final comment for this entry, that seeing these young generations of Venezuelan teacher trainees getting interested in integrating ICT into the classroom is quite heartening and promising. It’s them who will be held accountable for promoting the use of ICT as an EFL resource in our country.