Week 10 Wrap-up

Now it has officially come to an end. At this point, I’d like to extend my  heartfelt thanks to my instructor Sean for his hard work and his professional guidance throughout the course. I’d also like to thank all my classmates for their inspiring and thought-provoking exchanges of ideas and perspectives. I have learned a lot from them.

As Sean once said, now I am leaving, but I am leaving feeling that my pocket is full of tools and techniques that can be used for future teaching. Delicious has become the first website I open when I want to surf the Internet. I have learned to make my PowerPoint slides more engaging. I have tried to conduct my first WebQuest inquiry with my students. And because of Sean, now I am thinking about something bolder and edgier, something like getting the classroom flipped. 

It has been a great experience to be part of this program, but I don’t think I have learned enough. This course has presented us with many good resources which I haven’t fully explored due to the tight weekly schedule. Actually there is a lot of work for me to do and a lot more to learn afterwards. If possible, I hope I could take part in other similar programs or even go to the United States for further study. As for a teacher who has not been trained in a teacher’s school, such opportunities are way to valuable for me. 

Week 9 Learning Styles and Technology

The most important task this week is the final project report. My partner Rudi has given me some very good suggestions and I revised my report with his help. I’d like to thank Rudi for being constantly encouraging and supportive. Another thing for me to do is to explore how to cater to learning styles/multiple intelligences through technology. I read Richard Felder’s Learning Styles and Strategies and visited http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic68.htm and learned about different tech tools that support multiple intelligences. The next thing for me to do then is to think about how could I use the tools and techniques we’ve learned from the course to address different learning styles. But obviously it is not an easy job to accommodate different learning styles in large classes with or without technology. This is where Sean intervened and introduced me with some thing new—the flipped classroom. Therefore I move on to explore what is a flipped classroom and share what I read about flipped classroom on Nicenet.

What is good about this course is that we always get the chance to learn something new. Although I still have a lot to learn about flipped learning, and so as to all the other topics we have covered throughout the course, as Sean had put it, at the ninth week into the course, I feel like I am now walking away with my pockets full of ways to enhance my teaching environments. I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to Sean, for his constant guidance and help, and for all my colleagues from whom I have learned a lot. Thank you all!  

Week 8 Teacher Resources Online

I did a lot of things this week. First half of the week was devoted to the work of the first draft of the project report. After it was done, I began exploring different tools for building class sites or making online and offline exercises. Then I followed Jeff Magoto’s introduction and explored the free Course Management System ANVILL. It is completely new to me and I like the idea of media-rich discussion tool which can generate an authentic communicative language learning context for learners. But it is a pity that I don’t have the condition to apply this tool with my students now. I am thinking if I could run it on a smart phone maybe I can use it with my students. Another important thing for me to do this week was the peer review. My partner was Mr. Rudi Hartono from Faculty of Languages and Arts, Semarang State University, Indonesia. I have read Mr. Rudi’s report once and finished parts of the checklist. But I am still planning to go over the report again. Mr. Rudi has done a wonderful job about his report, but there are still some things I am not very clear about. For example, in the background section, we are supposed to talk about the course goals. But are the course goals the goals for the course you currently teach or the goals for the design of your project? I think it is better that we two could have a discussion about the details and then we can make better improvements of our projects report. 

Week 7 Learner Autonomy, Mobile, & One Computer

This week I read Dimitrios Thanasoulas and David Little’s articles about learner autonomy. Reading these two articles helps me understand what is learner autonomy, although people may define the term differently, and how could teachers help students achieve learner autonomy. As to me, to achieve learner autonomy is simply as teach the students to learn how to learn by themselves. As applied in teaching, I think the first thing for teachers to do is to change their traditional role to a facilitator for the students and their learning process. Then, I moved on to explore how to promote learner autonomy in one-computer classroom and on mobile devices. After reading about some activities and strategies on mobile devices and one-computer classroom, I came up with an activity which I thought could promote learner autonomy and posted it on Nicenet. What’s more, I learn to put up a post on Padlet by watching a 3 minutes tutorial on Learnig and Teaching with the Web (http://titova.ffl.msu.ru/tools-for-teachers-february-2012.html). It is simple but interesting. I like Wallwisher very much and now am still thinking about how to apply it in my teaching.

Besides all these work, I still focus on carrying out my project. This week, I firstly presented my WebQuest to my students and officially asking them to work on it. Then I found that it was somewhat difficult for my students to follow up as the reading materials I gave them were authentic, which were different from what they used to read, therefore I made some changes by mainly narrowing down the reading scope for them. I know my students are actively involved in the project and I can’t wait to see what they can present me next week! 

Week 6 Engaging Students

This week’s main focus was on how to engage students especially in large classes with the help of technology. And I find the most effective way for me to manage large classes and enhance students learning experience is to use an interactive PowerPoint. I explored several articles (Adding Interaction to Your PowerPoint Presentation, Adding Multimedia to PowerPoint, Presenting with PowerPoint) related to the topic and learned many practical skills of making PowerPoint more interactive. Then I created a PowerPoint slide incorporated interactive elements like sound files, images and quick-thinks and uploaded it to the class Wiki.

Another important thing for me to do is to begin implementing the technology-related change in my class. After the study of the previous week, I have decided to create a WebQuest for my final project. The content of the WebQuest is based on one of the Chapters in our course book I am teaching this semester. I am very glad that Sean had approved my idea about this WebQuest and he also gave me some suggestions on helping my students make their own WebQuests. But as a beginner of WebQuest, I think that is too ambitious for me. So my present plan is to make my own WebQuest and walk my students through it. With the combination of PBL and WebQuest, I could make a change to our traditional way of teacher-centered teaching style and students would genuinely experience autonomous learning under the guidance of the teacher.

I devoted a lot of time designing the WebQuest as it would be the key for my final project. I did come across difficulties while making it but I managed. Here is the URL for my WebQuest AIDS ABC on Zunal.com: http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=221506. I am going to present the WebQuest to my students and ask them to work on it next week. We will find out how the students would respond to it very soon.  

Week 5 Rubrics, Assessments, and PBL

This week, we are required to think about a possible solution to the problems we have with our students. As I understand that my students my have motivation problems, I believe that a technology-enhanced learning process may rouse my students’ interests in learning English. So I selected and shared the following links with my students in our listening course this week:

Mike the Writing Tutor

http://www.rong-chang.com/tutor.htm

Phonetics

http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/#

Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab

http://www.esl-lab.com

Children’s Storybooks Online

http://www.magickeys.com/books/

Children’s Digital Library

http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/SearchWorld?area=1&type=image&ilang=English

The purpose is to find out what may possibly grab the students’ attention and get them motivated in learning. So I didn’t emphasize any of the links but just asked my students to explore according to their own wish. Guess which one of them does my students like most? Mr. Mike! Some of my students even spent a whole class of 40 min to chat with Mike, generating information in English which could usually cost them for days to produce, written or oral.

I am very happy with the finding but also troubled by it. I am happy because I think I find a good tool to help my students express themselves. They have completely no pressure chatting with Mike, and it seems that Mike can always inspire them to talk. What troubles me is that I don’t know how could I incorporate the website into my teaching. Students may feel interested because this is a complete new experience for them, but if I don’t work out a good plan to apply the site it will not be long for my students to lose interest. I myself also have no experience of using this kind of tool before, so if anyone could give me any tip on that, I would be very grateful.

Week 4 Reading, Writing, and Vocabulary Skills

I enjoyed reading materials of this week as I am very interested in how could technology help us improve students’reading and writing skills. I am convinced that online materials can be extremely useful helping students to read extensively, and I also learned about how could I integrate these learning materials into my class. Now I want to say something about another article that I read this week: Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction by Jarek Krajka.

This article explores how could Internet be used as a teaching aid to help students improve their writing skills. The author has analyzed 11 different writing genres as examples to show the readers how could Internet be incorporated into different kinds of writing practice. On the whole Krajka emphasizes on three basic elements: websites, e-mail and web publishing. I am impressed by how creatively Krajka uses the website for students to collect information which they would later apply in their writing. I find the websites he recommends are abundant in resources for both teachers and students. As for e-mail and web publishing, I kind of find it may be a little bit outdated. I think e-mail can only be used as a tool for students to submit their writings. Of course teachers can correct these writings online and send them back to students, however I don’t think this has made a great difference to the traditional way of collecting homework and giving feedback. This article was written more than ten years ago, up to now, we have already got more advanced tools like Wiki to help monitor students writing process, to give feedback, and students can work collaboratively to complete a writing assignment online. As for web publishing, it is a good post-writing activity, but I don’t think teachers needs to spend time creating web pages for every classes of theirs. We can borrow platforms like Nicenet or Blackboard for students to use. It will save a lot of trouble and time. Anyway, these are just my personal thoughts.