Week 6: Interactive Power Point

Summing up my coursemates thoughts, I can say that one of the things to make students engaded is Interactive Power Point Presentation. After reading the instruction to the task and some of the articles on creating such presentation, I was very willing to create something similar to what was described.

I used Power Point Presentation only few times and they were not made by me. Like was said about simple presentations wihout interactive elements, the ones I used were delivered simply to present the content and that is it.

This week I knew that there are many ways to make it creaitve, engaging and interactive for my students.

The following elements will make any Power Point Presentation interactive and more motivating.

1. Quick ConcepTest - the technique aimed at checking concepts (definitions, notions, vocabulary) 
2. Blank slide- the technique used to attract attention
3. Hyperlinks- to add special content and navigate to another document
4. Quick Write- the technique used to check students comrehension

Generally this information was rather useful as such tools can be used not only to accopmany PPT, but on a regular bacis during the lesson.

Week 6: Teaching large classes reflection

One of this week's discussions is devoted to Tech Solutions in teaching large classes.Although I never taught large classes, I know how stressful it might be. After several readings among which the article found at

http://www.uoregon.edu/~tep/technology/communication/inclassdisc.html/.

I got some crucial ideas on how to maintain, prepare and lead succefful discussion.
Also,on NICENET some of the coursemates offered their own solutions related to teaching large classes issues. Stephen suggested some interesting ideas like tracking and asssessing students online, keeping calendars, and engaging students in projects to make them work collaboratively. In general,while teaching large classes it is possible to divide the students into more working groups and assign one project to such groups. Within this group there may be one project leader who would manage the other students and preapre reports about project development and process.

One more interesting thing, better say tools are about collaborative learning.As large classes imply extended amount of students, this means that they could all work collaboratively as the teacher does not have sufficient time and resources for each of them. I realized that during this online course, we being in the role of students already experience and use such tools as Wikis,blogging,discussion boards. All of them, if used appropriately "allow students to exchange ideas in a manner that closely approximates the face-to-face experience".

Week 5: Issues that technolgy might solve

The world is constantly developing and we are filled with different sources of information that needed to be process. New approaches that make our life easier emerge and substitute for previous out-of-date techniques.

This week discussion was devoted to the issues that tehcnology could solve.
My colleagues offered a very detailed collection of ideas how tehcnology inspired changes might influence the quality and smoothness of their own classes adding their view on this or that implementation.

I thought that all what we have learned so far this course could be applied in practice with success. Though I have certain concerns and doubts related to use of technology, websites, online tools, etc., given the opportunity and right direction I would certainly try my best to use them all in my English lesson.

Among my concerns though is the availability of internet in my institution, unwillingness of authority to change things, and total reliance on the web.
But I hope with time, we would practice all the new things we are learning here in this course.

Week 5: Project based learning and web quests

This weeek we got different tasks and rading. What is surprising for me personally is the fact that I wanted to know about these very things more than I do now. PBL is one of the approaches that I am trying to implement in my practice. I knew some background information about this method, but after reading Susan Gaer's article at
http://www.ncsall.net/?id=385 the things became clearer. This is exactly what I should do with my own students. As (Gaer 1996) mentions in her article, PBL helps motivate students to achieve a purpose. It is learning with a purpose- to create a final product and acquire certain language skills on the way. Sounds like a good idea for sometimes overloaded teacher in search of something inspiring and meaningful apart from constant grammar and vocabulary exercises.
This week, I have found out the gaps in my instruction concerning projects we did with our students. In fact I was too unrealistic putting my students into such time-limits like 3 weeks maximum. Knowing the nature of each project and work load, it is essential to provide clear explanation and requirements for students to know what exactly the project should be about. This is my general conclusion made this week.
Concerning web quests, I may say that at first visiting the page
http://www.webquest.org/index-resources.php) I was lost in the information about what web quest are and what their purpose is. I looked through some of them and thought they are just texts and picture, but after investigating more, I found that they are good learning tool online.

Web-quests resemble projects with some crucial elements, such as
1.Introduction
2. Task
3. Information resources
4. Process
5. Guidance
6. Conclusion

It is necessary to keep in mind that web quests are mostly group activities and sometimes in my opinon it is difficult to evaluate each student performance within the process of web quest creation.

Well, as I said before, we are constantly learning and this week was full of useful information.

Week 4: Working on Lesson Plan

One more task for htis week was to create a tehcnology enhanced lesson plan. Actually, it took me more time than I had expected.
Privided with the template of the lesson plan with tehcnology, I started thinking of how all what we have discussed in our weekly posts can be incorporated in this single piece of work. To tell the truth, I was intimidated by my coursemates and by how they approached this assignment: stating clear and measurable objectives, using multiple online tasks and quizzes. At first, I was thinking of writing lesson plan for Academic writing II course, but thought it would not be so much interesting. So, I focused on Integrated Skills. Though, I followed the example of my coursemate Camelia, my own objectives turned out to be not observable. It is good that Deborah provided her comment on this part of the plan. Now my task is to review the objectives and make them more obvious to students! That is the next step in my task.

Week 4: What I have learned

The fourth week as expected is really intensive in terms of discussions and task. I feel that these weeks serve as preparatory to complete our project task and thus gathering enough theoretical and practical basis for doing this.
This week are discussing  about usefulness of some multi-skills sites in improving our students language skills.
After reading the two articles http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html and http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Liang-ExtensiveReading.html 
I found many interesting ideas of how to implement CALL in teaching writing and vocabulary development.
The authour of the first article Karjka (2000) gives the overview of previously done research and some very practical suggestions that makes this reading some kind of guide for the teachers who have just started to think of CALL integration into their teaching curriculum. To be honest, after visiting the websites, the links my coursemates suggest, I am myself eager to use only tehcnology enhanced lesson plans with my students. The great amount of sourse and step- by - step lesson plans with variety of tasks and activities would make my teaching more motivating, live and not least important up-to-date.
Another thing worth to mention is the posting and professional discussion that is held in our interactive classroom. It is so vivid how all coursemates are trying to share everything they find useful and applicable, providing their reflections, explanation and answering questions. This is a very good professional  virtual environment that stimulates thinking and analyzing skills being a cruicial component of every "lesson".

For me it is really helpful to read and think about other participants' posts, seeing what works with their students and what objectives they  write for the web pages.

Though  now I am on holiday and do not have to teach classes, I got an assignement from my faculty to write lesson plans for the next year. This week we received the task to write technology enhanced lesson plan. I think such experience will only affect positively my professional development adding more possibilitied and elarge scope of knowledge. This is where I am now at the moment. I hope my students next year will feel the difference.

Each time growing and learning something new!

Week 3: Reflection on web searching

Week number 3, despite my favourite 3 number, was a bit difficult.
Though for my teaching I have to saerch for the information every day. During these 3 weeks I understood how little did I know about the advantages of CALL and good use of internet resources.
All provided sites contain such a great amount of information, that anyone could be lost in the sea of these resources.

I found my colleagues' post really stimualting  and try to keep up with the discussion on nicenet.
I feel that there is so much to learn within this period of time. Many ideas should find their reflection here