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