Reflection 2

In Week 2 of the course, we had a chance to learn about search engines and ABCD objectives, both of which will be reflected in this piece of writing.

The module offered a large number of alternatives for Google. Among the suggested search engines, I have had the most experience using SlideShare to search for slides on academic matters, and I have suggested the website on Canvas. SlideShare, as a search engine, has its strengths and weaknesses. Its biggest strength lies in its vast collection of presentations, making it a valuable resource for academic research. Presentations there are brief and visually appealing, which facilitates quick understanding of complicated ideas. It also provides a different - and less dull - approach to knowledge sharing from conventional text-based materials. Also, SlideShare frequently offers slides made by experts, which helps guarantee the reliability of content. However, SlideShare has its flaws. Particularly, it can be difficult to find specific academic content because of the wide variety of presentations offered. Sometimes it is also difficult to change the language setting to English, as the used language there is French. In addition to SlideShare, I have also experienced Bing. As Hoan (one of my classmates) suggested, Bing and Google are similar to a high extent, but they are different in the sense that Bing offers an AI tool to assist users in generating English learning activities. Nevertheless, to my knowledge, Google also has Bard AI, which is a tool able to provide ideas on English language teaching. From my perspective, regardless of whether or not an AI tool is included, Bing is not an efficient search engine to replace Google. Among my classmates, Uyen put forward LiveWorksheets.com, which is an ESL-focused website. Just like her, I find Live Worksheet very useful, but I think careful content filtering is needed. Some worksheets that I have found contain culturally insensitive content that I have to omit in order not to hurt any students of mine. The first part of this module gave me variable insights into useful search engines that can assist English teachers.

In the subsequent part of the module, I learned about the ABCD objectives model. The ABCD objectives - which stand for Audience, Behavior, Condition, and Degree - are frequently employed in English language teaching. Specifically, “Audience” means the target audience or learners for the objective. “Behavior” refers to the activities or results that the teacher anticipates from their students. “Condition” is the input required for the students to fulfill the goal. “Degree” means how well students should perform. An objective informed by this framework can be “Given the teacher’s instructions on how to use the past simple tense (Condition), non-English majors of CEFR A2 level (Audience) will ask and answer questions about past experiences (Behavior) with no grammatical mistakes (Degree)”. In the sharing session, I was presented with the objectives written by my peers. One of the objectives I saw is Van Anh’s, which is “These non-English majored university students will correctly name and pronounce exactly 8 vocab words after learning vocabulary about hobbies”. In this objective, I could see the audience (“These non-English majored university students”), the behavior (“name” and “pronounce”), the condition (“after learning vocabulary about hobbies”) and the degree (“correctly” and “exactly”). On the other hand, another one of my classmates used “understand” as the behavior, which could make her objective vague. Her objective also failed to follow the learned framework, with the condition and the degree missing. To secure privacy, I would not mention her name and objective in this reflection.

After the module, I have learned a great deal about different search engines and the ABCD objectives model, as evidenced in my ability to efficiently use SlideShare, Bing, and LiveWorksheets for teaching purposes and write learning objectives for my lessons. I am teaching English majors, many of whom want to be English teachers after graduation. After this module, I will definitely recommend to my students some search engines my classmates have proposed, and I will also instruct them on how to write clear lesson objectives based on the ABCD model.