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.