Tonight I didn’t have the
I-net connection due to unforeseen circumstances. I felt so lonely and lost. I
do know how much these three months mean for me. I will miss these days
although the program added me a lot of work ahead! It seems this is the last post with
reflections on this blog. It would be nice if our Wiki site and the blogs were accessible
after the program. I am sure that most of us would visit them now and then and
leave some reflections, share new idea, invite colleagues to their on line
events or suggest a collaborative project. I am not sure about the program plan
as to the site and our links; I suppose it could be a nice idea to be supported.
The Alumni net at least of our course could have the place to meet in this world.
I would love to send
special warm gratitude to Donna, who is always very attentive, flexible,
professional and wise. I realize that in the course developing there may have
been other specialists who supported us during the program, we met great guests
with their developments, but Donna was the core of the course. I wish her even
better and most successful groups to create and follow in the future. Dear
Donna, your work is very important as you are an example of a successful
project manager! Thanks.
I hope to meet the
colleagues, hopefully on the same pages. I am open to all the idea to be realized
collaboratively.
e-Teaching_Ukraine
Friday, December 2, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Week 9
With the program course
comming to the end new horizons seem to be closer. As I read through the posts
of the colleagues they share their plans as to the dissemination of the
knoledge after the course ended. This Friday I participated in the meeting of
the Connecting Classrooms school coordinators (Ukraine) in Kiev. I suggested
that a seminar for 5-10 schools from different parts of Ukraine will be
conducted in February-March, 2012 with the presentation of the e-Teaching
program and some training workshops. I hope that this seminar will open the
teachers new ways of using technology for their classroom teaching and will
inspire them to participate in webinar trainin sessions. In March
TESOL-Ukraine Annual conference will take place in Kamenet Podilsk State University
and I am going to prepare a workshop for this event. Another article about the
technology in the English language classroom I will send for the Ostroh Academy
conference in April. If you add that I am in the process of the
developing of the distant course for the correspondance course university
students you can guess that I have much in store for this new coming
year.
I have a strong feeling of community with the course participants and hope we shall contact each other from time to time or will conduct a project which may become international. At least some ideas we have descussed already with Rebecca, others supported the idea of Alumni net.
I have a strong feeling of community with the course participants and hope we shall contact each other from time to time or will conduct a project which may become international. At least some ideas we have descussed already with Rebecca, others supported the idea of Alumni net.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
WEEK 8 ANVILL
This week was marvelously interesting and
full of excitement. I called it ANVIL as all my thoughts and ideas are around
it! Besides intensive reading suggested,
the week introduced us to ANVILL and to on
line event which I missed to my great frustration. Nevertheless, Webinars
(recorded) are of much help and I enjoyed them equally for getting to know
about ANVILL better and for some training with the tools. ANVILL Faculty Workshop offers a great variety of tools like
Voicethread - a relatively new tool for voice and video annotations, ANVILL's Voiceboards, which allows a group of
people to comment (in audio or video) about a certain topic.
The demo lessons (in the Basic Tools
folder) are designed to showcase some of the possibilities of ANVILL. Sample
Lessons are a rich resource for the teachers to think of own lessons on the platform.
Mostly I like “2009 Inaugural Activities”- a smart and deliberately worked out example with
interesting exercises spiced with humour, and great choice of tools to perform
the tasks.
I finished my Survey for the Healthy Food Lesson “Diet & Exercise” and set the time for it to be sent
to my students with an appropriate message. Here is a link to the survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx
I reviewed the
project Reports of my colleagues Rebecca and Elena which was easy to do using
the Checklist for Peer Review. At the same time I am very thankful for my
colleagues’ comments on my Draft Report and I am going to finish it next week.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Week 7
I would call
this week “Prepare the next generation for success”. The material suggested is
very easy to be understood and applied. It is very close to my perceptions in
teaching and the aims I try to get. As always reading gave me much satisfaction
and inspired new ideas. I have made much resource searching and came across great
e-teaching/learning virtual communities. I like the approaches offered at the
sites of Adobe Connect for e-Learning, I tried new tools suggested there. I
opened much interesting while reading about controlled or managed crowdsourcing
(as opposed to Wikipedia’s
completely open model) http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2011/11/the-future-of-e-learning-is-crowdsourcing
. It is actually very much in line with the way in which online courses should
be created.
This week brought a lot to read from other
participants’ posts- an invaluable resource of creativity and fresh ideas! I am
lagging behind with my project writing due to my ten days’ trip but I hope to
keep deadlines. I am happy to have Rebecca and Elena as a group and hope they
will give their helping hand in brushing up the project.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Week 6 Using PowerPoint in the Classroom
PowerPoint’s designed as a presentation tool and great for e-learning. I struggled
to get past the PowerPoint look because I usually used the templates. Essentially the tools create
multimedia content regardless of how they’re designed. The key is to understand
what the tools can produce and then figure out different ways to use
them. This helped me
get more value out of my
applications. For example, with an application like Quizmaker I focus on the quizzing
because that’s what it’s designed to do. But when I want to build “regular” e-learning, then I have to use something else. Browsing for more possibilities I
found that I can do a lot more than
quizzes like interactive branched-scenarios which is very interesting and new. I tried to use PowerPoint to edit my
graphics, create illustrations, videos, and Flash movies. With QuickWrite I can reduce the typing time
several times and increase the writing accuracy. The program predicts the word you are typing,
using a predefined spelling
vocabulary. QuickWrite will provide writing assistance in almost any
application whenever you start typing - just a few compatible programs are
messaging, web browsing, calendar, phone book, notes and many other. I need more practicing with all this.
The key is to understand the tools and what you get. The
day-to-day users are the ones who will come up with the different ways to use
the tools. I made up a
very nice Master
Class in Cooking Ukrainian Dishes Slideshow Slideshow: TripAdvisor™ TripWow which I enjoy a lot! As to the Power Point-
I have to change my Microsoft Office to 2007 or 2010 to create an interactive quiz in
Powerpoint which uses some Visual Basic .
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Week 5 Creative and Practical.
The week suggested much to think about and
try my hand at. It was a bit not as tense as previous weeks. I perceive it is so
on two reasons: I got used to intensive reading and became more skilled in
fulfilling practical tasks, secondly- this week offered exploring the fields familiar
and close to my understanding. Thus, I’ve read the material, created the Rubric
( which I enjoy a lot!), I have sketched my first WebQuest http://www.zunal.com/webquest.php?w=119625
“Healthy Food Project”. Also it became
the time to use my knowledge more consciously –I have met my students from the
university and we started fulfilling the WebQuest tasks from “To Kill a Mockingbird”
http://www.zunal.com/author.php?w=111979
as it happened to be up to the point in accordance with our university course program. The WebQuest
was created by three Australian teachers
Sue Fearnley, Usha Chambers and Danielle
Macpherson, a sophisticated and clever piece of a creative work. At last I
browsed through the pages and lists of the WebQuests with clear vision of the
tool- very effective for the work in the classroom and beyond, helping students
find ways. PBL is what I have been doing in my classroom for at least 10 last years. Though,
it is no news for me I found very well structured articles to logically organize
my work and pay more attention to some characteristics I’ve neglected on this
or the other reason. Some statements sound not very fair to me in the articles presented
by Survival Tips for New Teachers on the NCLRC web site (http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/whatteach/survival.htm
). While speaking about the content
they
claim that working through the curriculum should be a process of discovery for
the students, but not for the instructor. I always open new pages together with
my students if even the lesson is well prepared and worked out. The vision of
those pages may be different for me and them, but students always make the
teacher learn and feel amazed. My Delicious page is full of links and needs to
be ordered, hopefully soon. I adore reading the posts on the mates’ blogs - tons
of hints, creativity and fresh thoughts. Rashid’s Reflections Through Comic
Strips are just awesome!
Saturday, October 22, 2011
WEEK 4 Reflections on the Endeavour.
This week brought lots of joys and pleasure
from the work done. I have read all the articles suggested on Reading/writing skill-building websites,
practiced in preparing a technology-enhanced lesson plan and realized it
conducting a lesson in my Form 10 groups. I find it very handy to use ABCD objective
for planning my lessons and use the Lesson Plan with Technology Template for
writing my Lessons plans. On the web sites suggested for browsing there are
many excellent collections of content-rich sites on the Internet. I've included
my favorites to my Delicious page which I enjoy so much! I am sure all the pages
can be used by my students who want to learn about a particular topic. I shared
them with my colleagues and pre-teachers from the university. They all showed great interest to use Web
resources to supplement classroom lessons and were eager to see how to
integrate Web resources into their teaching. I got very useful hints and ideas
on teaching from the posts on Nicenet which I always read with interest. I
thank my e-Teaching colleagues for their generous reflections on the blogs. I
brought my knowledge to system having read the articles about using CALL in writing and reading activities. My
students’ groups’ blogs become the place for Real writing interaction: the problem might be for
students without computers to have the letter typed, but we
solved the problem by
arranging the computer lab for self-access after classes and by having some more computer-advanced students
help the less skilled, in this way adding the collaborative element. I expect that comments and letters
sent to my students may lead to close cooperation and real friendship,
and certainly they increase students' cultural awareness and teach them how to
appreciate different cultures.
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