Week 10 Wrap up

The most useful topics of the course were ABCD objective model and learning styles. The first one helps to focus on the most essential goal of the class, another one is helpful when you want to know your students better or help your students to get to know themselves if they have problems in learning. I also extremely enjoyed discussing search engines, PBL, grading rubrics and engaging students.

I’m already using Nicenet, blogs, grading rubrics, WebQuests, PowerPoint, one computer classroom (on the basic level), and online tools to generate exercises. In the future I intend to use Google sites/docs and ANVILL. It’s hard to say what tools are not relevant, because when you are teaching , you need to possess a wide range of tools, you may not use all of them at the same time, some of them become relevant at different at different time.

In the course, we  might have also covered how to work with (edit mostly) movies, but this is my cup of tea, not sure anybody else might be interested in it as much as myself. It might be also useful to work with Google sities not only as readers/users, but also creators/maintainers. In my summer teacher training institute we also worked with podcast, it might have been good for me to refresh my knowledge, but I am sure I can do it on my own when needed.

My thanks to Robert and all other people who made it possible, it has been an outstanding opportunity to explore the web through web, to get to know great people, great ideas. It was great.

Week 9 Technology in Regular Practice

This week all my classes enjoyed the benefits of technology. The 1^st year English students toyed enthusiastically with the word search on household chores. The 2^nd year English students were sent on a WebQuest for compiling a holiday brochure, I am looking forward towards their presentations. The 4^th year students have had two Nicenet assignments so far, they liked it very much, mentioning its advantages in comparison with blogs. My Business English class enjoyed the wonders of my PowerPoint presentation on marketing mix. I gave them the text to read which covers the almost the same information as my presentation, and they said that the presentation was much better because it highlighted the most important points and it was generally very much interactive with QuithThinks almost at each slide.

I am very much pleased with what I have learned at the course. It has made my classes brighter and more memorable for the students; it has beaten routine out of them. Using a variety of technology “things” allows me to surprise my students. I hold it a very important factor, it keeps learners interested and motivated. And, I do not fear installing a projector any more, this is a big step forward for me.