Week- 10

Finally, we are at the end of our online thread. This great experience is impressively sealed in my memory. This course convinces me that the Internet accessing definitely motivates our students to be autonomous learners. However, this should be under teacher guides.   From the starting point to the end of this course, I have learned many things useful for my educational career and I’m ready to transfer them to students and teachers.

I consider all of what I have learned from this course meaningful source for teachers of English. Therefore, if teachers applied the source to their teaching, I believe, students would pay more attention to language learning.

Without Oregon university support, I would have been a teacher with traditional teaching and would not have realized how technology encourages language teaching. I would like to thank Jodi and Sherie, our supervisor for your understanding various distant learners and hard work; our guest moderators, for sharing ideas and encouraging comments on our posts; and my classmates for great sharing and accompanying me to stand at this point. If possible, I would like all of teachers of English in my country experience such valuable experience.  

Best wishes to you all

Arifeen

Week-9: Multiple Intelligence

This week, after submitting the final project I felt greatly relieved. But it’s reminding me that the course is coming to an end by the next week. The fusion of ideas of teachers from different parts of the world will turn into a sweet memory soon. But the lessons we all learnt will keep alive among us if we try to implement changes in our teaching with the help of these online techniques. I think the blogs and delicious sites will be floating in the web for all of us where we can continue our discussions over and over again.
This week I have gone through some articles on Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences. They have shown that teachers should consider students’ multiple intelligences and accordingly adjust their teaching styles. The learning styles of different learners are different due to their multiple intelligences and we as teachers must be careful to take individual learning style into account before applying technology in teaching them. There is much to learn from these articles. I will carefully go through each and every article that I have found this week. Terry O'Connor’s article on “Using Learning Styles to Adapt Technology for Higher Education” has changed my outlook about my learners. I never thought much of students’ learning styles and multiple intelligences but from now on I’ll take these issues more carefully.
I would like to extend my sincere thanks and greetings to my instructor Jodi and Sherie including all my dear fellow course mates. I will miss you all so much.

Week 8: Teacher Resources Online

This week, I extremely appreciate the overwhelming websites suggested.  I would like to express my great thank to our guest moderator this week, Jeff Magoto, Director of the University of Oregon's Yamada Language Center who introduces ANVILL (https://anvill.uoregon.edu/anvill2/) which broadens my language perspectives including assessment tool, voiceboard and so on. Apart from the astonishment, I also gain much more benefits such as making exercises to use online or offline on a computer or to print out; making exercises online to use online; or how to create Nicenet and Blog class.

Shortly, if websites suggested this week were disseminated to teachers of English, I believe, not only would students give more attention to language learning, teachers would be proud that they could produce their instructional material which serve lessons they teach and student needs.

Week 7: Learner Autonomy and the One-computer Classroom

This week our focal issues fall on ‘Learner Autonomy and the One-computer Classroom’ which have been discussed widely among our group. The issues assigned every week are definitely valuable for us, teachers of English or those who teach other languages. Our students should be encouraged to be autonomous learners because our world has been changing with information technologies. They should be exposed to the information themselves under their teacher guidance.

Thanasoulas’ article provided me detailed information concerning ‘Learner Autonomy’ with regard to the definition of ‘Learner Autonomy’, as Thanasoulas (http://iteslj.org/Articles/Thanasoulas-Autonomy.html) stated, the relevant literature is riddled with innumerable definitions of autonomy, I do agree with Holec’s definition (1981, 1983, cited in Thanasoulas) that 'the ability to take charge of one's learning' and ‘the learner's willingness and capacity to control or oversee her own learning’. If I were asked to define the term I might do it shortly as ‘learning to learn’. This is in line with Holec’ s suggestion in that autonomy is a process, not a product. Whit this regard, I think it should be ongoing or lifelong process.

Some part of the article provides me with new perspective ,that is, constructivism view positing that knowledge cannot be taught but only learned because knowledge is something 'built up by the learner' (Candy, 1991, cited in Thanasoulas) . Therefore, to encourage our students gain more knowledge or experience, learner autonomy must be promoted. One-computer Classroom is the other interesting and practical issue. Strategies and applications for the One-computer Classroom are suggested.

To sum up, I can say that by week 7, I feel more confident in implementing technology in class because I know the methodology and different ways and techniques that go with it. Also, weekly readings, tasks, experience sharing and discussions are helping a lot!

Project task: Initial stage

This week, I’ve started introducing my students to the technology involving changes. In week 5, one possible solution for many of the problems was described and when it was shared to my students they liked the idea of sending soft copies of their assignments through emails as this will save their paper and printing cost and also their time to meet me personally and I’ve started receiving their assignments since it should be submitted before the midterm examination starts which is scheduled to start from the next month.

This is the initial stage, I advised them to create their blog and share the URLs with each other including me.

Week 6: Another great week

This week assignment makes me realize how technology is important in large classes. We are introduced two topics- Creating Student-centered Classes and Interactive PowerPoint (PPT). From Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw’s article: Teaching Large Classes II – Enhancing Learning by Engaging Students (http://umbc.uoregon.edu/eteacher/webskills/material/engaging_students_handout.pdf), I have learned many things such as in-class exercise techniques, how to form a group for out-of-class assignments, and miscellaneous ideas useful for teaching practice. 

Regarding PPT, I have never used it in my teaching so I can gain applicable benefits from this week task through top 10 Slide Tips - basic information about making a better presentation (http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/slides.html), YouTube video showing how to create interactive PowerPoint: Making a Jeopardy game and Using PowerPoint to Make an Interactive Story (http://www.microsoft.com/education/story.mspx). It truly was a fruitful week.

Week-5, Made us Worthy

I enjoyed myself a lot while reading the required articles for this week especially about the PBL and the web-quests. PBL approach is designed to a more autonomous learning directed by more responsible students. It's not an easy task to design projects and incorporate them in the curricula in a way that match the required topics and objectives. But it's definitely worthy trying this shift in the whole spectrum of the teaching curricula.

I tried the extra credit activity, not because of the "extra”, but I took it as a challenge to give it a try to Zunal. The site is user-friendly and provides simple guidelines to help you create your own webquest from ready-made webquests or from scratch. Setting up the configuration is not at all difficult. What took me some time was to describe a real world task that could be appealing and fun to my students. The evaluation came easily as I had already created a rubric!