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.