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.

Week 4

Our weekly task is devoted to planning a technology enhanced lesson. It is very interesting and motivating to move one step further on our Winter Webskills way. The steps of this week are:

1)                reading about developing reading, writing and vocabulary skills (due to it my Delicious Page has grown greatly, thank for our collaboration with each other on Nicenet);

2)                lesson planning is a very responsible task as we should outline the objectives, anticipate problems, motivate students, choose the content and relevant resources and technologies, think about alternatives in case the technology fails.

3)                meeting goggle documents service, which is very helpful;

4)                thinking about the final project.

My "production" of Week 4:

Huge Delicious

Lesson Plan

As for me, the best outcome of this week is our collaborating on Nicenet as it’s obvious that there is a great deal of interesting online resources and it’s impossible to find and analyze all of them, but while our discussions we can just have a look at classmates’ recommendations and decide “to use or not to use”. I helps to make technology less life consuming and to spend time with our families, friends and students.

This week has been very productive for me as I have decided about my final project and I’d like to ask you, my dear e-classmates, to help me, but more about it a little bit later.

Week 3

       This week our task was to create a Delicious page. I have already been using this service for several years, but during this week I have found and added a lot of new links there. I'd like to thank Deborah, Courtney and my classmates for that as visiting your pages was worthwhile. And, of course, I have found a great deal of useful information, articles, resources, links on our course site.

       As for reading materials, everything was extremely interesting, informative, thought-provoking and useful for me. The article I liked very much is New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation by Maria Grazia Busa as it is connected with a research I conducted a couple of years ago.Nowadays we (teachers, students, parents) are technology addicts (I am as well), but I have a strong believe that "there is no substitute for actual human-to-human contact in learning a language". In my opinion, to make using of CALL correct and effective every teacher nowadays while deciding "to use or not to use" this or that tool in the classroom should take into consideration one and the same principle. I call this principle "necessity and justification". It means that technology should be used if it's not possible or very difficult to get the lesson objectives or a certain teaching effect without them.

       Our course objectives are extremely close to it, as while solving our weekly tasks we should be very selective (to choose the articles, projects, useful links). In addition, we can't just publish a couple of links to share with our classmates, but every time we should justify the necessity of using it in the classroom. I think there appears a new philosophy, based on a collective wisdom.

Magician of the Net

This week I have become the magician of the Internet searching strategies and instruments due to Noodletools  and Technology Tip of the Month by Deborah Healey (maybe it's not true, but I feel so and don't think it's a joke!). But the best outcome of the second week for me is ABCDobjectives. It really helps to understand the destination our teaching ship is going to. Besides my regular work in Sevastopol Institute of banking I have a part-time job in Yalta University of Humanities where I teach Methods of Teaching English for prospective English language teachers. At last I have understood how to teach my students the most safe and precise way of writing Learning Objectives. And as for the "Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally", the resources mentioned as additional should become desk books for everybody of us.

University of Oregon, thank you greatly for that.

Choosing the best searching engine

As a lot of people around the world I have always used Google as a search engine for my queries (especially for the English ones as for my Russian or Ukrainian queries sometimes I use rambler.ru or yandex.ua), but sometimes it takes a lot of time to find real scientific articles and scholar reports among all the sources the engine brings to your screen.

Some time ago I got familiar with Google Scholar. The tool is much more convenient for searching information for an academic research as it includes scientific articles and legal documents into its answer. So, I like the tool and its slogan “Stand on the shoulders of giants”. 

Today I have tried Twurdy (“Too Wordy”). The engine sorts the texts according to the Readability Level (it highlights different levels texts on your query in different colours) that give you opportunity to choose the language level you can clearly understand. This engine can be helpful for children and students with lower than intermediate English level. As you is an ESL teacher than the tool can be helpful for you in order to find articles relevant to the language level of your students while preparing tailor-made materials for the class.

Sometimes I use an engine ASK where you can ask simple (and not very simple) English questions. I should say that it seems to be not  just a search engine, but a kind of social network with its own community. This tool can be used in ESL classroom to practice asking questions and reading real authentic materials. And my today's question was “What is the best searching engine?” and I got “The 10 Best SearchEngines of 2013” list which proves that "Google may not be the best choice for all searches."

As the sphere of my interests is connected with using technologies in ESL classroom, I used three different search engines (Google Scholar, Go Comb and Noodletools) to find relevant information.

Results: Go Comb gave me a great deal of resources, but not all of them were relevant and reliable, more over it took me time to find valuable scientific articles among all the posts. As for Noodletools (according to me results in Noodle Quest I was redirected to Infomine), the result list was the most precise and valuable, but it took me a lot of time to compose a concrete query. And in Google Scholar I got an accurate list of scientific articles including resources of different libraries, it didn't take me a long time to make a query, but when I wanted to specify my question, I couldn't do it.

So, different horses for different courses… There are a lot of powerful searching machines on the Net and each of them is good for its purpose. And it's up to us to decide…

Search Engines

The second week has started.

So, the topic is "Search engines".

Firstly, I have read carefully everything assigned as a week's task and visited all the pages. 

Among them: Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need, here I completed NoodleQuest  and I was amazed because it helped me to find a great deal of sources connected with my scientific research. It's really helpful, useful and wise.

It is also very convenient to use this tool as it's up to you to use a simple search or an advanced one (it depends on the level of your computer skills and your needs).

This toll helps not only to find relevant information, but it can refine and narrow your topic, in addition you can get library research questions answered in five days.

So, the tool is very valuable and I will certainly use it now and recommend it to my colleagues.

To the world

Hello world,
It is great to write to you!

Starting a blog

Today I am starting online “Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web" (Web Skills) course with the American English Institute in the Linguistics Department at the University of Oregon (UO AEI). And the first task is to create a reflective blog. So, every week I am going to publish here my reflections on the course.