Week 10 - Every end is a token of a beginning

What topics were most successful? Most useful for you?
I enjoyed topics about interactive power point and one computer classroom as I am going to read my first lectures next semester and that is why  it was very useful for me. I think also topics about web search was very valuable in terms that it widened my ideas on how you conduct a search and made me think about improving students' research. I am an academic advisor for students writing their bachelor's diploma and I do feel they lack skills to conduct relevant academic search.
I also liked topics about rubrics, webquests and online tasks. In rubrics I finally started using it in my classes (thanks to Donna, cause I don't know when else I would have got down to it!). Online tasks - I am into it and I used a lot before the course and I will continue exploring but it's so enormous that you can hardly ever  reach the point when all is known to you.

Which tools will you use in your classes? Which, if any, do you think were not relevant to what you do or will do?

 I am using blogs, wiki, esl-lab, elllo.org, esl-video, wallwisher, online exercises, interactive power point, breaking news english, moodle regularly, voxopop, voicethread, wordle occasionally. I will add to it Nicenet, hopefully jupitergrades.

What other tools might we have covered or would you suggest that we could have looked at?
I would add jupitergrades, wallwisher, voicethread, puzzlemaker, wordle, penzu.

I hope my last post does not look like a dry report or survey but I am really in a hurry as my kids need to go to bed pretty soon :) That's how I did almost all the assignments - in a hurry, close to deadline, waking up early in the morning or staying up late at night. But I do not regret. I got a lot from this course - I managed to try, to reflect, to explore, to share, to collaborate, to develop. And this is not the end. This is just a beginning of a more knowledgeable tech-savvy teaching practice. After all, every end is a token of beginning.

Week 9 - close to final

I've been working hard on my project plan as everybody this week and I am glad I've managed to do it on time. Deadlines are the hallmark of the American system of education for me because in Russia "deadline is not the line that you cross but the line that you go along".
I worked on my webquest to guide students through their project for UK Studies and developed it from sctratch. It still requires polishing and thinking over but all the main points are included. You can see it here.
I think that I can use it not only for my distance course but within regular course as well.
Also I reflected on  multiple intelligence concept and decided to go ahead and foster adressing different learning styles in my lessons. I noticed that when I used songs students got more engaged and the remember the material better because songs have rythm that sticks. Once we conducted a technology enhanced lesson in the boarding-school for orphans and I invited some of my students as volunteers. We used a computer lab in the school and every child had his/her own computer to work on. We used some songs and vocabulary games from British Council (you can find them here) and after the lesson my students told me they can't help humming the simple song we used everywhere (I can run, I can jump and run and I'm having lots of fun, I can run, Can you?). That's just illustrates that songs can stick in our mind and help remember simple grammar rules.
So I decided to find some songs to teach grammar to address musical learners. This semester I am teaching grammar to 1st-year students and we have LOTS of material to cover in one semester - all the nominal parts of speech and all the verb forms.Another big problem is that we haven't had an entrance exam in English this year and the students' level of English varies greatly from elementary to upper-intermediate in one group.
Influenced by this week's readings, I tried to find the videos or songs I can use to liven up my lessons and after some time I found out that I am listening to Present Perfect examples in songs and enjoying myself. I couldn't help singing along! Hope my students will do the same.
By the way, I saved some of the links to grammar songs on my wiki, so feel free to use them.

Week 8 - Project plan: nicenet vs. blogger

This week was very intense in terms of project work and online activities. I really enjoyed working with my partner Nodira and found out that we have much in common. The setting is a bit similar in our project plans as well. We both want to fascilitate autonomous learning between the class meetings, me with Nicenet and my partner - with blogger. The site she created is structured and logical and suits her goals best. This made me reflect on the nicenet compared to blogger as I am going to use nicenet to achieve a similar goal.
The goal is to provide space for discussions and keep track of students' progress to make sure they study the material regularly. I would like students to do the tasks regularly, read and comment on each other's posts and develop a project at the end. Taking it into consideration, I decided to use nicenet. Here I tried to sum up the pros and cons of both nicenet (N) and blogger (B).

1) Platform for organized discussions.
Both N & B. In N all participants can make a post and comment  on each others' posts. Multiple discussion threads are handled easily. In B if you are the only author, students can leave only comments.Is it possible to comment on the comment?
2) Safety considerations. Both require sign-in.
3) Possiblity to embed video / audio. N doesn't have it. What about pictures? Somebody put pictures on N, but I didn't figure out how.
4) Possibility to insert a direct link into the post. Yes for B, no for N.N has separate page for links.
5) Template. N gives you a simple and convenient template:

Home

Conferencing

Link Sharing

Documents

Class Schedule

Class Members

In B you create it yourself.

6) Settings and design. More variety with B. But N is for managing classes, simple design eliminates extra distractors.  

What is your opinion? What are advantages and disadvantages of these tools?

Week 7 - autonous teacher=autonomous learners

Indeed, the readings of the week made me think about how autonomous I am in my teaching with so many constraints and how autonomous I want to be. Not many teachers in my country would be a success without following strict guidelines or covering the material in the textbook. But I believe even within curriculum constraints a teacher should bring something new and entertaining to class and the curriculum states the topics and grammar phenomena we are to teach but not the methods we choose.
I can give you several examples from my own teaching practice.
When we learned household chores (curriculum requirement), I  gave my students a song dictation to write that I found at http://www.etseverywhere.com/category/vocabulary-list-songs. The list was the following: Take out the trash, feed the cats, mow the lawn, clean up that mess, make your bed, wash your hands, pick up your toys, iron your shirt, sweep the floor, brush your teeth, walk the dog. It is called "The Nagging Song" Students loved it!
Or when we covered names of materials, flowers I prepared PP presentation first to learn, then to check the material. So even within the curriculum constraints we can be creative.
I also encourage everybody to use technology when available because it is a real breakthrough and a great tool to encrease teacher and learner autonomy. For those who can read in Russian, here a  link to my  book with simple instructions "how-to". I also like Nik Peachey's book here http://www.scribd.com/doc/19576895/Web-20-Tools-for-Teachers. It helped me a lot to encrease my expertise in Web tools.
 


 

Week 6 - planning to implement a change

I would like to contemplate on my project plan as the time to submit our project proposals is approaching.

My project plan is for students of the distance learning course in UK Country Studies. I am going to have 2 hours of seminars in winter and 4 hours in summer. So the course task and assignments should be electronically done throughout the whole semester.   I will have 3 groups, 9-8 students in each group. These are first-year students of the distance course, but usually most of them work in schools as full-time English teachers. 

The student-oriented issues are lack of group work and class discussions (due to the insufficient time) as well as project development skills

The possible solution is Nicenet as it will help to expand discussions (or actually introduce them into a course). It will also help to solve teacher-oriented issue, that is keeping track of students' progress to make sure they study the material regularly.

This week I actually planned  the change. I created a class on Nicenet called UK studies and divided the material I am going to cover in the course. I also planned assessment for the course. There are 3 major topics: 1) At the map of the UK 2) Population of the UK 3) British society. I will assign readings and every month students will be responsible for reading 1 unit, posting 2-3 posts + 1 comment,  and doing a task. And the 4th month will be devoted to preparing individual projects and doing tests in Moodle.

The final grade will be determined by:

• final oral report with practical linguistic task - 20%
• individual project - 10%
• unit 1 readings, posts & comments - 10%
• unit 2 readings, posts & comments - 10%
• unit 3 readings, posts & comments - 10%
• task 1 (travel itinerary in individual blogs) - 10 %
• task 2 (national song, poem, or fairy-tale interpretation) - 10%
• task 3 (writing task: commenting on proverbs and explaining idioms through national character) - 10%
• tests in Moodle - 10%

I might also need another technological solution, that is learner's blogs, but I am still hesitant about it because itineraries can possibly be published on nicenet as well.
This grading system will help me to focus on creative and critical thinking skills which I will strive to develop in my students as most of them are practicing teachers and those are crucial for teacher's effectiveness.
The next step to develop my project is to post questions on nicenet for monthly discussion, develop tests in Moodle and create a Webquest or wikipage or blog page with task description and exmaples.

Gosh, now I have a clear plan I am sure I will be able to implement without overloading students but at the same time creating a practically oriented learning environment.

Implementing technology in my setting

This week is very intense for me but I really enjoyed fulfilling the tasks. I am going to use rubrics straight away to assess opinion essays of my second year students. Indeed, they are my fruitful ground for implementing and trying different Web tools. I started to use BreakingNewsEnglish with them, teacher's blog, wiki, voxopop, voicethread, worlde, esl-video, students' reading logs. They are mostlt computer literate and it helps a lot.

Webquests and rubrics are the next exciting thing I am going to try.  When exploring different webquests I found out many that are close to the topics we are studying, for example School trip to London or Grand Canyon tour.
When I come across some interesting link that is relevant to our curriculum I save it with the help of wiki, so that I have a mini course as an addtition to traditional textbooks. You can see it here http://tspu.wikispaces.com/teachtechlinks.
The project that has to be half ready (it's week five, guys!) is still note very clear because in my case it's going to be a plan and students I will encounter next semester might be very different from what I expect now. Still I feel it is necessary to introduce more technology into distance learning courses and change the whole perception and traditional norms foor such students. What I mean by saying this is that students have very few hours right before their exam session in winter and in summer and most teachers limit to teaching only the few hours planned. I would like the course to be more practical and useful allowing students to develop professional and general competences we write so much about in our university nowadays.

Teaching reading and writing with the Web

This week was full of discoveries. The article "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction" by
Jarek Krajka (http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html) gave me some ideas on how to teach newspaper part of my classes. The problem is that our program is based on the textbook of 1989 where the emphasis is upon the upbringing of a Soviet person (and there is no Soviet Union for 10 years!).
That is why I was particularly interested in part # 9 "Newspaper report" as I am trying to update the program for my newspaper reading classes. The activities could develop critical thinking skills and help students undestand the newspaper vocabulary and style better.For example,I can use both tabloid and quality papers, which is rather important. Activities mentioned in the article ("analysing the style, language and the way of presentation of the topic in tabloid and quality British newspapers, writing about the same event in both tabloid (subjective, sensational) and quality (objective) fashion, making a tabloid story a quality story and vice versa") could help students really see the difference between different kinds of newspapers and learn first hand.
As for the other article about Extensive reading, it is consice and clear and gives ideas on how to organize and benefit from the book selection process. I think I would try to use some of the ideas next term with my new students. I started to use reading logs for extensive reading project this semester, and I reallly like it. I believe students benefit from it much more than from traditional form of check which was a report and vocabulary list, sometimes an oral PP presentation. And this kind of activity develops reading and writing skills greatly. The author of the article about extensive reading mentioned online poll. We tried this using tricider.com (http://tricider.com/en/brainstorming/84ot), which allows you not only to vote for and against but to put forward arguments as well. My idea was to set up a sort of consulting students' community where students advice others what to read.
I also liked several websites that I explored  this week, particularly Adult learning activities (http://www.cdlponline.org/) , which I come across surfing the links on ESL Independent Study Lab by Michael Krauss (http://www.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html).   This web site is esay to use, logically organized and has different activities based on reading / listening material. The topics would be interetsting to adult learners. Some texts are available for listening as well.
To sum up, I woud quote words by R.L.Stevenson: "The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should be as happy as kings". It is so true for exploring online resources for teaching English.