Week 10 We May Meet the Other Day...

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.

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.

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

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.

 

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.

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 .

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!

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.

Week 3 A Rewarding Work.

This week brought me much pleasure with reading and web searching. I am happy to “ tame” my Delicious page and organize the link ( not so well as I would love, but I am on the way). I agree with Garri that NiceNet discussions are becoming more rich and resourceful, with in-depth ideas shared by many of us. I enjoyed the discussion posts and saved a lot of useful links of great web resources many of which I may not ever come across. I analyzed more closely my project plan thanks to reading Final Reports of the former program participants. I am happy blogging and have nice hints from others. Dragana shared SEETA web which I was able to visit as a guest and glanced at some pages for visitors. I loved watching  Daisy and Drago, a short cartoon which was created and dubbed by  six year old children.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6109028310424842448   It’s amazing how creative the teachers is and how well the children’s voices are recorded! A good example for small children in teaching them pronunciation! and creativity. I would be happy to learn this technology, maybe I will one day. I came across a very nice set of videos More Travel Videos and think about drama activities for my 10 form students “ Pack a small suitcase efficiently so that you make the most of your carry-on luggage's capacities”, “Know Airline Restrictions Before You Pack a Small Suitcase”. Teaching materials: using literature in the EFL/ ESL classroom  (SEETA web site) offer a deeper understanding of a country, view a literary text as a product and the cultural model. Very often literature is treated as a source of information about the target culture. It is the most traditional approach, often used in university courses on literature. The cultural model will examine the social, political and historical background to a text, literary movements and genres. There are nice answers to some questions facing the teachers: Is this piece of literature something that could be relevant to the learners? Preparing to read  some activities include : have students read each other the poem aloud at the same time, checking for each other’s pronunciation and rhythm. Ask students to write or discuss the possible story behind the poem. Who was it for? What led to the writing of this poem? Ask students to improvise a role play between two characters in the book, etc.

It was not easy to cope with all tasks planned for us for this week but the work is rewarding.

Week 3 Does it Matter How Well We Pronounce the Sounds?

If we keep in mind the development of writing we never should neglect pronunciation of the words. It’s a common knowledge phenomenon that many of the learners misspell the words as they write them the way they hear or pronounce them.  Very often my students ask me about the importance of pronunciation of the words the way the native speakers do. They recognize that mostly without living in a country where English is a mother tongue you may never talk like them. Of course you will always consider the peculiarities of pronunciation in the system of the mother tongues (some sounds may be absent in the sound system of the language), but the matter is that what we call “inner” skills while speaking are very important. “Inner” speaking implies the movements of the facial and mouth/throat muscles while speaking. If they are trained correctly it doesn’t matter much what quality of the sounds a person produces - it will be close to the pattern, recognizable and understandable. In this case the spelling will be better as well. In relation to articulation sounds and words in the target language video clips or animation of the speaker’s mouth in motion during the pronunciation of sounds and words are very effective as they visualize the process and the learner can easily follow the pattern. It would be nice to have a CALL  software as I’d prefer it to very good quality videos, one of them    (http://www.howcast.com/videos/487785-English-Pronunciation-Sh-vs-Ch-Sounds by Megan Brach in which people train pronunciation. Psychologically for adults in our country ethically it’s more preferable to follow the digitalized example than to watch the mouth of a person.

Week 2 Feeling More Confident

Two weeks past and I am amazed how much better I am able to organize my work in the class with blogging. My first steps I made last year and the idea seemed very vague and uncertain. This semester in two weeks with our program I have created my two blogs for school students and university correspondent course. They are not ideal (!), far from what I 'd love to have but at least I wrote the A BCD objective for each course, I stated the task and joined the students blogs in a net.

The starting point is here!

In two weeks my university students will come to their autumn session but we have started some blogging already. During our lessons I will be able to hear more from their experience with blog creating and web searching and will teach those who can’t join in on different reasons. I am happy I can do that now for them, as I am able to work with this technology myself.

Another great event related to what we are doing in our program and which  I’d love to share was the first Webinar within the course entitled Shaping the Way We Teach English offered by the Office of English Language Programs, U.S. Embassy, Ukraine. Exploiting Literature in Project Based Learning was the subject of the presentation for the worldwide teachers audience. I was so happy to see Garri, Bin Li on the website! It’s true that e-Teaching is forming a very friendly educational community and I feel I am the part of it. You can find nice tips on project based learning/teaching on the web site http://shapingenglish.ning.com

WizIQ  is of great interest for me and I hope we shall learn more related issues while in the program.

Week 2 Reflection on the Findings

This part of the week has brought many new findings and emotions. I tried several new tools for searching the information. Even more I got from reading the other participants’ experience share- that’s a great idea to have a Nicenet for this purpose. It would take me long enough to come to many of the mentioned in the posts results. Thanks to our discussion I can have them right now. So, I tried the recommended sites and techniques to improve my skills in search for the links I need. The other great thing during these days was to discover the ABCD method of writing objectives, which wasn’t new to me but it was nice to practice it again. It was very helpful to have the feedback from my students having filled out the Survey on independent learning styles. Especially I got interested in Bloom’s  digital taxonomy map. Being well acquainted with it before and having used it not once, I opened it anew as applied to digital. New terminology made me search for the definitions and examples. On analyzing some of them and having read more on http://www.techlearning.com/article/blooms-taxonomy-blooms-digitally/44988

I have now more clear understanding of differences which should be considered while teaching writing in blogs. New tools bring fresh understanding of the approaches  to be used and the peculiarities of the style and  e- written language itself.

I am sure the rest of the week will be in no way less interesting and fruitful.

New Experience and Old Lacks

These first days of the project are very meaningful for me. Struggling with my lack of skills in operating the blog I haven't given up. Previously, I would just quit if I couldn't download the comment or add a new post. This time inspired by my new colleagues, I went on  with some progress.

I have used blogs with my students for the Country Study projects. Most successful were creating of the  Travel Agencies. This year I hope to go on with a new group. I can't say I use it very effectively. What I feel as a drawback- poor moderation of the blogs as they were not united in one net. This year I would love to improve it with more of my  learning on the matter.  Secondly, there was little response and feedback from the school-mates to the blog- actually, no blogging in this sense. This I will try to avoid through teaching students writing the comments.

I have two different groups of students: school children who are the school leavers aged 16-17 and the University students taking correspondence course, aged 21- 26. With this project I keep in mind to find out the following:

• how much  technology might be able to help with self directed learning, which is important for both groups;
• how technology can help me as a teacher in preparing interesting lessons and motivating students for sustainable self directed learning;
• how to make school subject meaningful and relevant to the lives of young people- engaged learning;
• strengths and weaknesses of different possible solutions, using some of techniques and tools in the class in the process of actively engaging pupils/students in their learning;

Week 1

First Steps in Blogging.

I created my first blog long ago but never used it. Now the time has come to change the attitudes. My students work with blogs which I asked them to create, I enjoyed theirs- now I will try to have fun with mine.

This week I started with intensive readings on the suggested issues. But as soon as I came to the link I found another one which seemed even more useful and interesting.

http://edublogs.org/2011/09/07/edublogs-update-manage-multiple-blogs-with-a-more-powerful-my-blogs-page I will use at my next lesson to start creating blogs with my students for the lessons and hope it will be more structured work  than it happened before.

YouTube treated me as always to much new ideas. This time Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

Sir Ken Robinson states that creativity in education is as important as literacy and we should treat it with the same status. He argues that we are killing children's brilliant creative capacities in the most arrogant way, presuming to know what is best for them for when they enter the workforce in a future that we can scarcely imagine. I find it especially true regarding the time we live in and the future facing today’s students. I agree with Sir Ken Robinson that intelligence is diverse, dynamic, that is highly interactive, and we should educate the students of Digital culture considering both the quality of the education and HOW they are taught. I am doing my first steps to make my teaching more systematic with the technologies.

I visit many blogs now and then but feel always reluctant to leave a comment. Great feedback and tips I read on  http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/2011/02/22/student-blogging-activity-3-beginner-teaching-quality-commenting  to start thinking of it differently.  I agree with one of the bloggers that a good comment is often times another idea. Teaching students to write a nice comment will be one of my next tasks.