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.