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!