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