Invitation to take part in conferences

Dear Colleagues!
I am happy to invite you to take part in different European Events for scientists. Choose the conference for yourself.

As for me, I have already chosen the conference that is of great interest for me. It is "Европейские прикладные науки: современные подходы в научных исследованиях".

Hope you'll join me!

Week 10

The last and finish reflective post. First of all, I’d like to thank my classmates for participating in this course with me, collaborating, sharing ideas and experiences, helping, encouraging each other, giving advice, …

Secondly, I am very grateful to Courtney, our instructor, for her professionalism, skillful coordination, patience and help.

And now about my whole experience of participating in the course, which I consider to be one of the best experiences in my teaching career.

My personal outcomes of the course are great – a lot of new friends, colleagues, experiences, knowledge, ideas, a full teaching toolkit, a “bank” of activities (mine and my classmates’) and what is more, inspiration to implement technology into my ESL classroom.

As a result of this inspiration, I have created Self Access Language Center (SALC) for my students, where they can work autonomously in order to improve their language skills. It is still under the construction as I am working on its content now and I can see a very long way ahead, but nevertheless, I would appreciate any comments, suggestions how to improve it, what else to add.

I’d like to say some words about our final project as well. It was very useful experience to choose technology appropriate to the problem to solve. And I’d like to suggest future participants not to try implementing all the tools into the project. The more is the better is not a very good principle when to talk about using technology.

My best and most useful for me weeks were 2 (new searching strategies and writing ABCD objectives), 5 (creating rubrics), 6 (implementing final project), 7 (meeting new service Wallwisher), 9 (using technology for MI), and all others.

And I can’t say that I like very much week 10, as we are parting now, but I hope we are smart enough now to find appropriate tools to stay in touch with each other.

Thank you very much and with hope for further collaboration, Nataliia

Week 9

This extremely busy week is coming to the end and I want to congratulate everybody of our virtual class on having finished and published our final project reports. I should claim that it was quite stressful not to miss the deadlines, but as far as I can judge from our Final Projects Page, we have coped with it! I have looked through all the resources published and found them very motivating, as for me, I’d like to take part in every project.

The materials to study are all of great value. The resource Learning styles online quiz is the most useful for me and my students (to be honest, I was greatly surprised with my results), the site Tech tools that support multiple intelligences is full with new tolls and ideas how to use them to meet different students’ needs and the article Student Learning Styles and Their Implications for Teaching is the most scientific. So, the resources are very different in their purposes and content, but the main idea of them all is: we are teachers and should remember that our students are different, but we should create a comfortable and effective learning environment for everyone in the classroom (face2face and virtual as well).

Week 8

Week 8 is coming to its end and it has passed faster than the previous ones.

As for outcomes of this week, I should admit that it was not very easy to implement a technology related change into my work, but it was much more difficult for me to describe it, and not to forget about anything. I am very grateful to Izela for finding time and being extremely attentive to my report. Being obsessed with launching the project, involving students and coordinating all the work, I missed some very important points in my report. So, the idea of peer-reviewing is very effective, now everybody of us has the chance to look at our projects and reports with “fresh eyes”. Thanks to Izela’s suggestions I am going to improve my report greatly.

As for our Nicenet discussions, I am very thankful to Mariam Kanla for her participating and help, as she invited a very nice friend of hers, Lynn Rosen from New York to communicate with us. Lynn writes books and was so kind to suggest her stories for the students to read and discuss. I am going to prepare some comprehension exercises on some of her works and discuss them with my students next term. Hope, we’ll stay in touch with all our e-classmates and organize much more projects online and not only online.

According to our curriculum, my students are finishing English classes on February, 27, but they still have 2 hour a week of autonomous work.  So, they have got their marks for participating in the Nicenet discussions , but they will continue reading and completing online comprehension exercises. Unfortunately without participating in Nicenet discussions any more as we have a very strict curriculum as for their autonomous work. As usual, I use Quia for reading, listening and grammar assessment. Having met Wizard and Padlet, I got a new idea how to share links to my exercises with my students in a more appropriate way, as these services allowed me to organize all my e-stuff in one place. In addition my students can publish their woks just in one click. They used e-mail to send me files, presentations, etc. And I always had a lot of problems with my e-boxes overflow and so on. Now with Padlet it's extremely easy and my students are happy that they are not now to send a lot of copies to me and each other as we can just share our Padlet link.

As for ANVILL, I have already mentioned on Nicenet that it’s a very short and busy period of time to study this powerful resource. As for me, I need much more time and concentration to use it more effectively. I have understood from the articles and recommended resources that the tool has a lot of useful functions and is of great value, but I need to think over how to prepare something really interesting and engaging for students and helpful for me. It’s the first time for me to hear about the tool and as I teach ESP to prospective computer engineers and it’s very difficult to surprise them with something new on the Net, so after having finished our course, I am going to learn how to work with the tool and I would be glad if I met my e-classmates on the pages of ANVILL service. I have already saved it in my Delicious.

Our weekly task was to create "e-something". So, I have prepared some interactive materials about Films and Movies for my intermediate first year ESP students.

I used these services to prepare it:
1. Puzzlemaker to create Films Word Search
2. Quia Web to prepare Reading and Listening Comprehension Exercises
3. Wallwisher/Padlet to create Film, Film, Film WallWisher
4. Poster 4 teachers to prepare Films and Movies Worksheet
5. Wordle to create
6. Prezi to prepare Prezi example "My Favourite Movies and TV Shows"

Regards, Nataliia

Week 7

Week 7 has passed like one minute as I have been extremely busy with implementing the project. First of all, I should thank my dearest classmates for their help with organizing and carrying out this Reading on-line project. So, my special gratitude and great respect is to Alina-Valeria Petcu, Izela Habul-Šabanović, and Mariam Kanla. They joined the project themselves and involved their students into the project. My dear friends and colleagues, I am more than happy that I have met you here on the pages of our course.

I should say that my students enjoy participating in a project and they ask me to organize such projects as often as it’s possible as they use English in a real context. All in all there are 141 participants in the project now. Among them we are honoured to collaborate with 6 ESL instructors from different Universities (Ukraine, Russia, USA, Burkina Faso, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Romania). There are 5 discussion threads in Nicenet and students communicate very actively with each other. Now their task is to read a story and share own reading experience. Hope, we’ll cope!

As for our weekly reading materials, as usual, I have found a lot of new resources, ideas, as they are very thought-provoking, interesting and inspiring. I am greatly surprised with the number of our messages in Nicenet, it is growing from week to week, as we are becoming more and more devoted friends, colleagues and technology users. The best outcome of this week for me is creating a Wallwisher and learning about using the service in the classroom. The recommended resource is full of ideas (as everything by Svetlana Titova) how be efficient with just one Internet service.

As for leaner autonomy, here I should cite the words by Thomas Carruthers: “A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary” and I fully agree with the main idea of the article Interconnections: Learner Autonomy – Teacher Autonomy that there is a certain connection between teacher’s and learner’s autonomy.

This week I have found my project reviewer, it’s a nice girl from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Izela. Her posts always catch my attention on the pages of our Nicenet discussions, she is a very talented and creative teacher.

With hope for further collaboration, Nataliia

Week 6

Engaging students in meaningful web-based activities requires much more than simple "page turning" or "pouring" knowledge into their heads.

Week6 theme was connected with engaging students, using technology to teach large classes, creating interactive Power Point Presentations and the most responsible part of this week assignment was beginning to implement technology related change into practice.

First of all, about reading materials. The resource Using Technology InTeaching Large Classes is extremely useful. I have found a lot of practical tips, recommendations, and articles here. I like the resource about using Blackboard as well. I also use technology for on-line assessment. But I am used to working with Quia. My Quia profile consists of almost 100 online tests, 15 games and other activities and I am conducting about 10 online surveys. I’ve been using the service for more than 2 years now and should claim about its great effectiveness and convenience. It really helps to engage large classes. To read more about Quia you can here. 

Among recommended resources I met Respondus and found the tool to be very helpful as well, but as I am extremely short on time now, I saved the link on my Delicious and will try it a little bit later.

As for creating interactive Presentations, my favorite book is Prezentationzen by Garr Reynolds and one of our readings was an abstract from this book, that is the best practical guide how to improve our presentations. This book has become a handbook for me now and I often cite it. The best outcome of this week, in my opinion, is creating a great bank of Power Point presentations on different EFL topics. So, it won’t be time-consuming any more to prepare a presentation for our lectures or workshops as we can use each other’s resources. Great thanks to everybody for that!

And finally, about implementing the final project. My student learn ESP and don't want to read. So, I've organized a "Reading on-line Blog" where they will read at least one short story and complete comprehension exercises, I use Quia for designing online tests.

The other problem, I'd like to address, is using technology to organize a real communication between students from different Universities. I have already managed to involve 81 students from two Ukrainian and  one Russian Universities (Sevastopol Institute of Banking, Sevastopol National Technical University and Moscow State University) and they have introduced themselves, told each other about their Universities, cities, interests, asked each other questions about leisure time, reading likes and dislikes. I tell my students about our Webskills course and they are eager to collaborate online with others. We are using Nicenet for that. I have invited my e-classmates to involve their students into the project, and some of them agreed to help, but they must be extremely busy with their own projects now, so nobody has joined us yet.

Also I have designed a project calendar, according to which they will choose one story to read and to complete comprehension exercises. I asked beforehand my colleagues and senior philological students to read both stories and write and publish in the blog their impressions and reading experiences. So, these comments will help students to decide about the story to read and give them examples of expressing ideas about reading a story.

The next step is to discuss students’ likes and dislikes about these stories.

I have invited three colleagues from the Universities mentioned, they can observe students’ discussion and the degree of their participating and we have our Instructors’ Page to discuss our problems on the way to complete the project.

 So, this week has been awfully busy for me, but nevertheless the outcomes are of great value, so I’ve survived and still hope that somebody from our e-team will involve students from other countries into the project and our students will use English in a real context. 

Huh, Nataliia.

Week 5

Equator! We have successfully completed the first half of our course. And personally I am very pleased with my own progress and thankful for my classmates for sharing their progress with me.

As for reading materials, being a devoted TBL teacher, I have found them priceless. I always try to incorporate projects (with technologies or without them) into my classroom. And really can see a great outcome. The article about alternative assessment made me think about using different kinds of students performance beside TBL. 

As for our weekly task, the resource Rubistar is extremely helpful, interesting, fantastic, great, useful, actual, necessary, ... I have prepared several rubrics and I am going to do a lot more. Last term my students completed on a project Famous IT people. The task was: working in mini-groups of 4-5, choose a person from the IT world and design a website about him/her (biography, his/her input into IT progress), write an essay about this person proving the group choice and publish the essay on the main page of the website.

I must admit that assessment was my weak point while working on the project. When I work on the project with the other students next year, I'll use rubrics I have just prepared with Rubistar.

My rubrics for students' website can be found here.

And now about the next step on the way to completing our final project. I have invented a great deal and am working hard to implement it into the classroom. 

Dear classmates, I appreciate greatly your readiness to help me and would be glade to help you if you need. Hope, our students will like on-line reading and collaborating. 

Regards, Nataliia.