My words

It was a great encounter to meet up with Dr. John and thanks for our tutor Dr. Christoph for inviting him to share us his very valuable expertise and knowledge about My words wesite set up, progress and advancement through the years. It is a very wonderful and effective teachology tool for all English teachers including NETs and LETs in the education field to make use of new IT technolgies in language learning.

Personally I've felt a sense of relief to hear and know about my words. Frankly this website http://mywords.ust.hk is useful to make us students and teachers alike to learn different words and phrases. Make use of them effectively in teaching and learning . For example you key in "go to shopping" to check whether it is correct by using my neighbours, show the words interface, ater and before the input, and show both words / phrases including all possible forms. It a unique tool since it can be incorporated with Microsoft and help us to write in a more accurate and fluent way. Apart from that it has all resources the person needs to improve his / her English.

In addition there is a grammar checking funtion toolbar to spot out all common errors learner make with a word and and find out all members of the word family. Check complex expressions with google is another feature we are glad to know about in this context. There is a possbility for the teacher or student to look out for less frquent expressions with google search engine. Learner or teacher may enjoy retrieving vocabulary from your personal word list and key word list.

Perhaps we need to consider the following questions:

• Does the user need on going support all the time? If yes, do we need to deploy customer support for the user?
• What are going to do if the system we are using crash with another system? How the service provider can assist in this regard?
• As a new user for my words website what are challenges most likely we need to encouter? How to address them?

We need to be careful at the initial stage as new user to make sure learner knows how to use it whether he / she is a teacher or student. I would guess it is time consuming at the begining as we need to be familiar with system, provide more support and feedback for our students to make sure everyone knows how to use it effectively. Besides to that independent learning concept needs to be reinforced in the classroom to make this new IT teachnology more practical and needed by most learners.