Week 1 Getting started

I have been very excited all the week working on the course. It's a totally new experience for me, and I am liking it! I's been nice to hear from you, my fellow-participants, at nicenet theads and your blogs, and I am sure I will learn a lot from you.

As you can see it's already my second post with this blog. The first one is a round-up of my education, which you may want to read. I created it for my students as a model for them to write about theirs. I got acquainted with blogging when I participated in the computer technology teacher development summer institute last year, so I decided to try it with the students. Most of them seemed to enjoy it very much, especially the comments section. I insisted that each student herself (all female group) should "secure" that her blog is commented. This was a good experience for them to write what not only the teacher was going to read. To secure the comments from their main reader - groupmates - they had to make their writing catchning and interesting for them. So, blogging is a good way of written (public) communication between students, which is in terms of 4-skill approach is both writing and reading. They coped very well with the technical side of the blog, I gave no pacrticular instructions, just "go to blogger.com". They all like very much a "technical challenge".

Now I am as a student have to keep my own blog, about which I am very excited. I promise I will do my best to follow your blogs too and comment if I have something to say. I wish all of you luck. We are already lucky to take this course.

And as for my name. There has already been some confusion, in Russian/Ukrainian my name is spelt "Яна", which reads /jana/ in English, which was officially transliterated as "Iana" into my foreign passport, which I have to use in all formal documents, but which no native or non-native speaker can even pronounce and which looks like "Lana" in some fonts when you type. So, I usually prefer "Yana" spelling option. That's it.

Yana (with Y)