Teacher's Guide
Lesson Structure
Each lesson starts with Lesson Outcomes which help to draw attention to the primary objectives of the lesson. The instructor may build upon the direction given here to both introduce and review the lesson. It is hoped ideally that trainees will have learned enough in completing the lesson to fulfill the stated objectives. In practice, however, the outcomes will function more as a guide or target.
What follows are the lesson's 3 most important components: Grammar Practice, Online Search and Typing Practice. (Each of these sections is discussed in detail in Getting Started.) Adequate time should be spent in completing these 3 sections thoroughly. E.g., trainees should be required to repeat exercises that are done incorrectly or with poor results.
Each lesson concludes with an Extra Practcie, which is not an essential component of the lesson. It is provided mainly for those who complete earlier sections before the class period has ended.
Optimal Use Guidelines
One key point is that trainees should learn to work through lessons independently, regardless of their level. Towards this end, trainees should be carefully led through the Getting Started and Practice Lesson pages and then assisted as little as possible afterwards. Read the instructions is apt to (and should) become an oft repeated refrain.
That being said, the teacher should work through each lesson himself prior to presenting it to the class to become familiar with the concepts being practiced and to be better prepared for the bombardment of questions which inevitiably come. There will be cases when read the instructions will not be a sufficient response. Even more importantly, the teacher can better integrate the online activities with classroom work if he/she is aware of the activities being introduced.
In this regard the teacher may attempt to both use online lessons as reinforcement of classroom work and vice-versa. Grammar lessons will often include a link to teacher & student resources. Here the teacher may find material that can be printed up and practiced with students before the lab sessions.
The topic of Online Search activities, for example, may provide focus to reading and discussion activities in the classroom.
Learner Evaluation
The teacher will be able to evaluate student progress on a daily basis by reviewing learner responses to the Online Search exercises which will be submitted to the following email account:
gttcteacher@gmail.com
The teacher will need to login to this account with the supplied password to view the responses submitted by trainees.
Additional evaluation may be carried out using the Mid-term and Final tests which follow each set of five lessons. These consist only of Online Search and Typing Practice sections, which are simpler for the teacher to monitor and evaluate than Grammar Practice activities. Trainee performance on these tests may be graded according to the teacher's preferred standards.
Ongoing evaluation of students should be carried out with the teacher using a manual checklist to record completion of each activity as the trainees proceed through each lesson. As monitoring trainees' work in this respect can be tedious, this proceedure may be relaxed as students gain more familiarity with lessons and can be trusted to complete the work independently. A standard checklist is provided which may be printed out.
Content Review
The content for lessons includes grammar related material and links to industry related and lifestyle websites. The grammer content was chosen with the intent of reinforcing what is being learnt in the classroom. Evaluation of this material in this context can be helpful. Any suggestions to replace, modify or add content would be appreciated.
The primary sources for grammar-related activities include BBC Skillswise, Activities for ESL Students and ELC Studyzone. Likewise suggestions regarding online search content would be helpful. The primary sites bieng used for this person include industry related sites, governmental portals from Abu Dhabi and Dubai, local news media sites and general search and reference sites like Google and Wikipedia (see sidebar for links).
Refer any suggestions or inquiries to Bruce Dauphin.
