Week-8 in Web Skills Course

I have been very busy and engaging throughout this week. For the first part of this week, I was involved in planning, reflecting and redesigning my project. I also worked collaboratively in Peer Reading of the Project draft activity and gave feedback on my partner project draft. My partner is Yves AGBANNON from Benin who has designed a project for the middle-aged learners who are professionally very busy and do not seem to be very attentive in an hour class. He has designed a technologically enhanced project for them and has expected to keep them engage in language learning activities through in-class and out-of-class assignments. I gave my reflection on his project by using a template i.e. Peer Review Tool called Project Report Checklist. But I have been unlucky as I have not yet received my partner’s reflection on my project. In this week, I have also been busy in implementing my online tools integrated project in my class. My project has been particularly designed for out-of-class assignments and has been developed to promote my learners autonomy so that they can purposefully practice the target language outside the class. My ultimate goal of this project is to make them lifelong learners of English and find their ways by getting acquainted with necessary tools to practice it even after the end of this three month long short course.

In implementing my project successfully, I have noticed that some of my students still have difficulty in coping with this new teaching approach of my technology enhanced project and also operating these online tools. To help them handle these new teaching and learning tools, I am always encouraging them in peer sharing. Some of them are very attentive in completing these assignments. Most of them have been irregular in doing so. To make them active and serious in completing these online assignments, I have started evaluating their accomplished assignments and published their grade on last two tasks. As I have introduced this project almost at the end of their course and this is completely new to them, I have extended the time of submitting their assignments to motivate them to find pace with new tasks in future. I have also noticed they are facing some challenges in performing the assignments properly, and quite often they are out of the track. I, therefore, developed this week some sample of online postings on other comments and rubric on this sort of postings. Within few days, I am going to provide them sample of posting on reflective journal and rubric on this particular post. In reality, I want them to be regular and attentive in this project so that they can discover various online resources to continue their practice in the target language. I am constantly applying action research in order to successfully implement my project in the class. Above all, this project is being piloted and will be introduced with coming batches from the beginning of the course.   

In second part of this week, I have discovered a number of ELT resources and online tools to try out in my class. Among these, I like my new class creation on nicenet and ANVILL most. ANVILL seems to be very wonderful for me and works amazingly in designing out-of-class assignments. I am very much eager in introducing this online resource with my learners but I have to study it more to discover its various tools in order to implement it successfully. It works great especially in providing learners opportunities to have audiovisual oral communication with alien learners and connecting them for Cross Culture understanding. In all aspects, this week has been very significant for me.