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!