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.