Evaluating Websites

We have chosen a website for English Language Teaching (ELT) for teachers and students also. The website is (http://www.pearsonelt.com).It is a Commercial Site. It is the new home for great teachers. The Authority is for Pearson Education Limited, a registered company in England and Wales. They get to work in lots of different classrooms around the world, from Asia to Latin America, from every day stat schools to privet language schools (PLS). They help the teachers and the students across the world to learn, teach and practice their English skills by looking for combining content, assessment, technology and services every day. This site has free resources for teachers and students to use at home independently. The resources have been created and developed by professionals who worked to design this site to support teachers and help them enjoy their work and improve their potential, their teaching, and further their career. In addition, it is helpful for EFL teachers and students to engage online presentation to help them learn in a fun and interesting way.  The purpose of this website is clear which is being able to improve the teachers' way of teaching English at any level (Primary, Teen , Tertiary)   and have fun in the same time. It has advertisements, which are related to the site and does not have an advertisement that might distract  from  the purpose for visiting. This website have some suitable graphic related to its content. Contact information is listed and there is no dead links (they are well chosen by the author of this website, and they work correctly). It helps students improving their 4 skills in EFL and for teachers also. It has lots of resources online, interactive activities, supplementary materials (at the highest quality, which enable the teachers and the students to achieve their English learning and teaching goals), course test, guides for teachers and useful web links which are reliable. They can share this web site on Facebook and Twitter. They can contact with author to comment or suggest anything they want. There you can communicate with others to response to any article or discussion. There are no misspellings or grammatical errors; everything is well written by the author of this website. You can choose the text size you want to make it clear and easy to read. The choice of website color is nice and attractive.  The style of the page is so professional and well organized, that   has   different sections with different topics. As a result, we found that the website was beneficial, interesting, and easy for both teachers and students. Pearson   website has make this website accessible for all users. The website provides the ability to search  the content. It can be loaded quickly and move around it easily. There is also a site map, which makes browsing the site is very easy

This web site is helpful for English language teachers and students. As a result , we found that this web site is very beneficial , interesting and easy to use it .

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The role of WebQuests in Learning a Foreign/second Language

Reading about WebQuest besides what we read earlier in this course, made me feel ashamed of how primitive is our educational system. Because I haven't even heard about a teacher using  any of the technologies and techniques we learnt, in her classroom. I couldn't find an excuse for not using the Internet and Web to enhance the educational process at our schools till now.

Understanding what a WebQuest is, took me a while, because it was totally a new thing. It also seemed vague for me at the beginning but, different samples made it easier and simpler. WebQuest is difind 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." The role of the teacher is either to bring the students an already-made WebQuest, or to design her own. The students are usually working in groups to complete the WebQuest assignment. They follow the instructions given in the WebQuest, so they can finish it the right way.

-  As a student, I always find it useless to study things that are not relevant to my life, things that turn me off and make me bored and frustrated just by reading their topics, things like King Abdul-Aziz air port, or History of Saudi Arabia or Oil !!
- I don't see that the educational process should be boring and killing the students slowly in order to be successful, I think that we can be creative in delivering the information we expect our students to learn. As I always say, it's not about the fact or the piece of information, it's about how we present it.
- We don't expect our students to be like the previous ones, so we need to develop our techniques accordingly.
Based on what I mentioned above, I think I'm going to use anything that take my students' needs and wants into account. So, yes I'm definitely going to use WebQuest quite often, if it works with my students.