Week 10. Lifelong Learning Must Go On!

Ten weeks have flown and here I am writing my final reflection.

Incredible discoveries, unforgettable experience and invaluable knowledge – these are the words which I’d like to use to characterize these weeks of my participation in the course.

Every week had something special for me: creating a blog, writing learning objectives in ABCD style, web searching using various search engines, creating  a Delicious page, visiting skill-building websites for oral/aural, reading/writing skills, writing technology-enhanced lesson plan, learning a lot about project-based learning and WebQuests, rubrics, alternative assessment, learning styles, learner autonomy, creating an interactive PowerPoint slide show, being given the web pages of teacher resources and  creating SMILE activity, resource web page, the Class Blog, the survey. All the topics and materials we covered were very useful for me. I have learned a lot and seriously reconsidered my teaching practice.  But the most remarkable week was Week 8 “Teacher Resources Online” with a webinar about ANVILL conducted by Jeff Magoto.

I am grateful to the University of Oregon and the US Embassy in Ukraine for this unique chance to attend this course. And a big “thank you” to our instructor Robert Elliott for highly professional guidance and support during this course, and to my dear co-participants for their great ideas, valuable comments and understanding.

Helen

Week 9. Multiple Intelligences

This week was special in many aspects. First of all, we were reminded of the fact that while planning and conducting classes we should adjust teaching methods to support Multiple Intelligences. Howard Gadner identified 9 of them: Verbal-Linguistic; Logical/Mathematical; Visual/Spatial; Bodily/Kinesthetic; Musical/Rhythmic; Intrapersonal; Interpersonal; Naturalist; Existentialist (http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic68.htm).

The best thing to start is to offer students a learning style quiz that will give a clue which learning style each student belongs to. Such kind of activity will also make students reflect on how they learn best and it could be an insight to choosing learning strategies to facilitate their personal learning process.

Of course, while applying technology to teaching/learning we should consider it from the point of view of effectiveness in order to reinforce teaching/learning process. I’m definitely going to take my students to PicLits.com  (thanks Ricard for this great resource!) http://www.piclits.com/compose_dragdrop.aspx to let them try their hand at creative writing. I am sure they haven’t done that before and hope they’ll enjoy the activity.

Technology offers us a variety of choice and that, in it’s turn, ensures we can find the right tool and activity to meet a particular student’s need.

Week 8. Fantastic resources

This week we were introduced to a great number of resources indispensable for teaching and learning process. We were given the links to web pages where we can make various exercises to use online and offline or to print them out.

Personally I enjoyed working with Server-Managed Interactive Exercises (SMILE). Though I spent some time learning how to create different activities it is really worth it. This program allows us to create different language exercises: Multiple-choice, True-false, Drag-drop matching, Sentence mix, Paragraph mix, Cloze, Multiple-select. You can also create an activity where you will include your exercises (or “items” as they are called in the program). What is really important, each activity has a unique URL, and students can access the tasks created by a teacher via this URL. And, of course, you can edit, add or, if necessary, delete activities.

Friday was a special day as I attended the webinar, organized by Jeff Magoto. He talked about ANVILL (A National Virtual Language Lab). I would say that ANVILL became my greatest discovery of this week. It offers such fantastic tools as Voiceboards, TCasts (teacher broadcasting), Livechat, Forums, Quizzes and Surveys, PracticalRecorder, Lesson Planning, Course Management. ANVILL is really one of the most appropriate tools for practicing oral communication.

One of the tasks for this week was to create some exercises that could be useful for teaching. I have created  a survey “Technology and Foreign Languages Learning” URL: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEE5NEhiVVliMGVyWHJyb2h3MmN1bGc6MQ ) -

(using Google docs) to learn about students’ attitude to technology and its application to teaching/learning process; and  an activity “Meetings”
URL: http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/mimea/smile/v2/viewActivity.php?ID=105081
(using program SMILE http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/mimea/smile/v2/) to check vocabulary and to practise idiomatic expressions on topic “Effective Meetings”.

We continue our work on a project and this week I presented a draft version of the project to my partners – Imas and Sagun, read their first versions and commented on them.

What a busy and rewarding week!

Helen

Week 7. Fostering Learner Autonomy

This week offered us a great opportunity to dwell upon the essence of the term “learner autonomy”, to analyze different approaches to studies of learner autonomy; think about the changes in teaching practices necessary to be made to develop independent learners. Shifting from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning, giving students freedom of choice, making them active co-participants of the learning process these are the initial steps to be made to foster learner autonomy. As the Chinese proverb goes: “Give a man a fish, and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for life.”

One of the tasks for this week was to think of an activity for one-computer classroom. I came with a suggestion of using a computer to watch videos on Effective Meetings in order to expose students to best practices and tried techniques of effective and productive meetings organization. The learning objective for this lesson is:

Having watched the videos “6 Secrets of effective meeting”, “How to conduct effective meetings”, “Top five tips for running productive and effective meetings” and read the information about effective meetings second year students of International Economics will be able to identify, describe and analyze strategies for effective meetings with 95% accuracy.

We all are working hard on our projects, implementing technology-related changes, preparing our rough drafts for peer-review. The majority of us have already decided who they’ll work with. We have formed a group of three, too: Helen – Imas – Sagun. The next step is to be ready with the first version of the project by Wednesday.

Week 6. Interactive Classes - "Terra Creativity"

This week gave us a great chance  to dwell upon challenges posed by teaching large classes. We were offered some tried and true techniques to make classes interactive. Think-pair-share, conceptTest, Quick-think (re-order the steps, paraphrase the idea, correct the error, support a statement), Minutes Paper, Concept Maps are the techniques that really foster knowledge acquisition.

Teachers should be open to experiment, try some new techniques in order to "transform students from passive recipients of other people's knowledge into active constructors of their own and others knowledge"  (Rick Finnan, Donna Shaw http://umbc.uoregon.edu/eteacher/webskills/material/engaging_students_handout.pdf:).

As a special task for this week we were to create a PowerPoint slide show with interactive elements. That was really something new to me as I had never used interactive elements in my PowerPoint presentations before. Due to detailed instructions I managed to create an interactive PowerPoint presentation "Vocabulary Quiz. Charts and Graphs". Moreover, from my colleagues, I've learnt about different additional resources which are of great help while preparing interactive classes / lectures.

This week was the time to start implementing  a technology-related change to the class I teach. My reflections on that I posted a bit earlier.

Step by step, little by little further we go...

Helen

Implementing the change

Having identified my students' current need, that is - to enhance their listening and comprehension skills, I thought about the possible solution of this problem with the help of technology.

First, I considered our IE Class Blog as a possible option, but Robert suggested creating a resource web page and that was exactly what I did   and started implementing the change.

Last Monday (February,13) I introduced the idea to students, took them to IE Listening web page:
https://www.sites.google.com/site/ielistening and explained that apart from listening during class time they would practise by themselves and that would be an essential part of their homework.

The work is organized this way:
For self-study:

1. Students go to IE listening resource  web page. (There are five great resources for listening there:
Australiannetwork  http://australianetwork.com/learningenglish/xml/businessenglish.xml
Listen A Minute http://l.wbx.me/l/?p=1&instId=f0103d52-afdb-447b-b05d-4bd152521a6a&token=38a5d4713326ebbe20133df4fc89e2f9b68e2e3a000001352b0b783e&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.listenaminute.com%2F
Business at Work. British Council http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/business-and-work
TalkEnglish http://www.talkenglish.com/speaking/Business/Meetings.aspx
Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab http://www.esl-lab.com/index.htm

2. Students choose 2 different listening materials there, do all the tasks.

3. Post their reflection on what they did (specifying the materials they worked with) on our IE Class Blog (http://ieclassblog.blogspot.com/).

In that way, I think, it will be easier to monitor the progress, moreover, students will reflect on their results and one more additional big advantage - we won't neglect writing.

I hope we are on the right track.

Helen

Week 5. At the Equator

We have taken the course 5 weeks ago and now are just in the middle of our learning process. I would call it a gold mean as we have already learned a lot and will acquire much more invaluable knowledge.

This week we discussed the advantages of project-based learning which “aims to engage students in the investigation of real life problems and develop students’ creativity, problem-solving and lifelong learning” (Barron, 1998; Breault & Breault, 2005; Blumenfeld et al., 1991) (http://www.atesl.ca/cmsms/home/newsletters/december-2007/project-based-esl-education/). WebQuests as forms of PBL were a real discovery to me. Having read about these activitiesand looked through some great WebQuests created by educators I’d like to mention that it is definitely a new form of activity to engage our students to and make the process of learning English efficient and enjoyable.

Creative activities need special evaluation and here alternative assessment is of great help offering different methods (checklists, rubrics) to assess every step done by a student. The emphasis is made on a student’s strengths. Performing one of the tasks for this week I have created a rubric on RubiStar  to assess my students’ presentation skills on topic “Describing Graphs / Charts” (http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?screen=ShowRubric&module=Rubistar&rubric_id=2151322&).

We continue our work on a project and this time we were to describe a potential change we are going to implement using technology. As my current goal is to improve my students' listening and comprehension skills I’ve decided to use the Class Blog as we have never done it before and I do hope it will help to enhance my students’ listening skills.