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.

Week 4. Need as a Driving Force

Nearly 4 weeks have passed and I feel that with every step made I'm gaining valuable knowledge and experience which help me to reconsider my teaching practice in order to meet my students' needs better and more precisely.

This week's task to create a technology-enhanced lesson plan appealed to me greatly. And I am proud  to say that this week I had an opportunity to try all the activities mentioned with my students.We have created our International Economics (IE) Class Blog (http://ieclassblog.blogspot.com/) where as our first step I just gave a list of tasks students are supposed to do, but we have great plans. As I sincerely hoped, students were really enthusiastic about the idea of adding some special "technological" flavour to our traditional English classes.

When I was thinking over and planning our lesson the starting point was my students' need - to improve their listening and comprehension skills. And that was our Project task 3 for this week: to describe some issues. I caught myself thinking: " How logically and thoroughly this course is planned and organized!"

Our discussion on "Reading/writing skill-building" is great food for thought. So many brilliant ideas and creative tasks, a vast list of excellent web resources to enhance these skills! And a special pleasure this week brought: I found a very useful web site to improve and check vocabulary skills of students who learn Business English: http://www.businessenglishsite.com/ .

What a rewarding week!

Week 3. A Week With Delicious

Week 3.

This week was full of delicious tasks. I have learned about various social bookmarking sites and created my own page on Delicious. Having all my favourite sites in one place and being able to access them any time I need them is very convenient. What is of special value about Delicious is that you can search within this site and see what other users have and are ready to share.  Saving to Delicious is simple and user-friendly.

Every week we are offered some useful material to read and analyse. I try to read every article given for consideration and explore every site mentioned. It is time consuming, but incredibly rewarding.

This week's topic for discussion was aural/oral skill-building. It goes without saying that good listening and comprehension skills are vital for successful communication and these skills should be developed through authentic materials. I was excited to find some great sites specially created for those who learn Business English. For example:
http://australianetwork.com/businessenglish/
http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/business-and-work

Little by little, step by step we are preparing for our final project and this week we were to read some sample projects and comment on them. I find this task very useful as I had the opportunity to have the whole picture of what I am expected to do in my project.

I am grateful to my colleagues for their interesting and pithy comments as I constantly learn something new from them. And I am not just saying that. I really mean it!

Week 2. We are on the way

We continue our journey and every moment of it is full of discoveries. This week we were given the task to try different search engines in order to find the best one  which would satisfy our information needs. Before this very week I fully relied on Google but now I possess a valuable and reliable list of search engines and portals tried by my colleagues and myself knowing some strong and weak points of many of them. I would definitely recommend my students and colleagues iSEEK for educational purposes; AskJeeves.com and DuckDuckGo.com as fast,reliable and useful  search engines both for academic and class search. Twurdy is just indispensable  to help you find the text of   the precise level of difficulty to meet your students' needs.

Another interesting and important task for this week was to share a learning objective for a class done in ABCD style (where "A" is for audience, "B" is for behaviour, "C" for conditions and "D" for degree of mastery needed). As Dr. Bob Kizlik points out: "Properly constructed learning objectives are about the evidence of learning; they specify what behavior a student must demonstrate or perform in order for a teacher to infer that learning took place." (http://www.adprima.com/objectives.htm).  Good learning objective should be thoroughly thought over and clearly formulated. It is the core of any lesson.

I also made a small step to the final project by describing the course that would benefit from incorporating online tools and resources into teaching/learning process.


There is a good proverb: "Two heads are better than one" and I would like to mention that our productive collaboration this week demonstrated the essence of it vividly.

Week 1. Starting the journey to the WonderWEB

Week 1. Reflections.

I have just started my 10 weeks' journey to WonderWEB. Hundreds of places will be visited, a lot of discoveries will be made and a great number of materials will be studied and analyzed. It's all there on our route-map (the schedule).

This week I was shown the way to Conferencing on Nicenet where I was really pleased to meet the members of our group. We were given precise instructions how to get to our next place of destination - blogger.com and to create a blog. That is where amazing things started to happen. I spent quite a lot of time on choosing a templete, the layout, trying different colours.And I am not still sure about the design of my blog. I feel I will change something a little bit later.

I was impressed by the tremendous potential of a blog as olnine tool for learning and teaching English.
Nearly every lesson I offer my students a quotation connected  with the topic we are working on and I ask them to comment on it. There are some shy students and there are those who always seem to dominate. So, by posting a quotation on a blog and by asking everyone to make their comments, read the comments of other students and be ready to discuss the ideas expressed, could really help to resolve this problem.

Project work can benefit from the class blog greatly, too. Students can share their ideas and findings on a blog. I can observe how the process goes, give advice or help if there is such a necessity.

Blog is a great online tool for developng students' writing skills, taking into consideration the limited number of hours for practical classes. I can post guidelines how to write the indroduction, the body of the paper, the conclusion; direct them to useful websites. By the way, I have found an article "Process writing and the Inetrnet: Blogs and Ning Networks in the Classroom" (Isabela Villas Boas) full of great ideas.

http://exchanges.state.gov/englishteaching/forum/archives/docs/11-49-2/49_2_4_boas.pdf
So, I have started gathering the seeds of knowledge in WonderWEB. It is thrilling!