Final Week: Course review and wrap-Up

In actual fact, this is extremely hard to believe that this 'Web Skills' has come to an end. This online course has been a milestone and created a new era of innovative practices of technology in my future professional career. But I am contented with the thought that this course has ended successfully leaving numerous wonderful learning events which are incredibly useful in shaping my teaching approach.

This course has also acted like childbirth of my technology enhanced project “Improving Learners’ Literacy Skills through Online Learning” which is likely to be continued in FLTC English Course. In this week, I have been occupied with growing my project mature and working effectively with my learners. I have been pleased to see that this project has made them engaging in learning English outside the class.

I am going to make a portfolio of all resources and materials provided in this course. It is really an uphill job to record all precious possessions I have achieved in this course in this limited space of my reflective blog. However, I will dare illustrate in brief the summary of my learning experience in each week.

Week-0 (Orientation to the course): Got a preconception about the course materials such as rubrics, sample posting, course requirements in orientation week that gave me adequate idea about the ways I would be expected to behave in this course.

Week-1: I have learned about class blog and its different uses for EFL/ESL teaching situations. I have created a reflective blog (URL: http://nahid-trainer-elt.blogspot.com) to record what I have learned and have done in each specific week. I created am account on nicenet for discussion board and started using it.

Week-2: I have got familiarized with different search engines such as noodletools.com, twurdy.com etc. and analyzed those web search engines. I have learned how to write ABCD learning objectives for a lesson or a class and write a behavioral objective for a class. I read the articles describing revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy and have learned which of the action verbs is used for writing objectives.

Week-3:  I read two articles on teaching listening and pronunciation through online tools and have reviewed different speaking, listening, and pronunciation web sites. I have created my own Delicious site for bookmarking web links with appropriate tags. I went through some project reports prepared by our previous participants of this course. I also started planning about my project and working for it.

Week-4: I have learned from two articles how to teach reading and writing through online tools and sites and reviewed reading and writing web sites in terms of prospect to use in my teaching context. I read about technology-enhanced lesson plans and reviewed sample of this type of lesson plan, and created a technology-enhanced lesson plan for my class.

Week-5: From reading materials I have learned about project-based learning and WebQuests and how to design a project based learning for a class. I have been aware of Alternative assessment and rubrics and practice creating rubrics for my class. I have created a lesson plan on WebQuest (URL: http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=182926). I continued planning and designing my technology enhanced project.

Week-6: I read essays about different ways of making large class student-centered, interactive and have been aware of the techniques might be useful to create a student-centered environment in my teaching context. I have learned the ways to create active learning lessons while using PowerPoint and created an interactive use of PowerPoint.

Week-7: I have learned about how to foster and encourage learner autonomy. I have also learned about the one-computer classroom and the strategies to be taken in a one-computer classroom. I have created a class walwisher (URL: http://padlet.com/wall/wjzqqlv8de) and posted links and articles on it. Most importantly, we finished planning and designing my technology enhanced project.

Week-8: I explored teacher resources: online exercise generators and teaching tools such as creating a discussion board on nicenet, creating a wiki on Google Sites. I reviewed the teacher resources sites such as  http://www.toolsforeducators.com, Lanternfish Easy Test Maker, http://www.crosswordpuzzlegames.com/create.html, Hot Potatoes and saw some interesting exercises at http://eolf.univ-fcomte.fr/index.php?page=technically-interesting-hot-potatoes-pages. I also visited online sites Web Poster Wizard and SMILE. I found ANVILL particularly important and need to discover it more to make it work for my class.

The most important task I prepared a draft of my final project for peer reading. I shared my draft project report with my partner Yves and give feedback on his project report.

Week-9: I have learned about different learning styles our learners have. I discussed with our classmates how to feed and meet learners’ different learning styles in a class and prepare exercises that meet their learning styles. At I have finally prepared my technology enhanced project “Improving Learners’ Literacy Skills through Online Learning” and submitted it to our course instructor, Robert.

Week-10: I have felt both sad as the course came to an end and excited because I have developed a number of skills to integrate technology and online resources into my class. I evaluated myself with the LoTI Framework and have become aware of their L0TI level considering my class and teaching context. I have come to know many interesting links from
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/about/my-best-of-series. I read  Seven Principles: Technology as Lever – specific, and also come to know about the future of CALL from Phil Hubbard’s article. 

Regards,

Nahid