Week 10: The Dessert

I want to use this last opportunity while everyone is here to share with you some links that I've  found recently:

1)

Global governance monitoring

 http://www.cfr.org/global-governance/global-governance-monitor/p18985#/Oceans/Overview%20Video/

A good resource to raise social awareness of the students

There are terrific videos, interactive maps, names of International documents, etc.

2)

I would  like to refer you to Hind's blog, where she has posted her animation created with the help of 

goanimate.com, a site that allows to make video/animation online

Looking at the link is not inspiring, watching Hind's animation is. Go for it!

See you all at Facebook!

 

Week 10: The King Has Died. Long Live The King!

It's symbolic that the close of the course coincided with the end of the winter and the beginning of the new life cycle. My sadness, which filled the yawning gap left in place of Final Report writing, gave way to proactive thoughts regarding the implementation of what we've learned. I have already received three invitations to run seminars and one invitation to design a course on Web-Bases resources. I am going to write at least two papers. There are many smaller things on the list. So, no time to look back, we have to look forward. Such is life: the end of one thing is the beginning of another.

Still, while we are within our course, I will focus on your experiences and the course outcome. To say that it was successful is to say nothing. To enumerate the good things about the course will take pages and pages.
I will mention the most instrumental items, such as all the things which are intended to easy administering the studies, such as JupiterGrades, class wiki, rubric, delicious, learning styles tests, LoTi survey (the principle how the resource is built). I might have left out something, but even what I have mentioned can revolutionize the way our teachers work. In the past I wasn't even looking for them, as I didn't think about this application of technology at all ;-)

Another important block is tools to create learning materials. Even is there were nothing but WebQuest, the course would be successful. But there were a lot more superb resources!

And the third, no less important thing was the opportunity to communicate and learn from outstanding. committed colleagues. It's amazing how much some people knew even before the course. It's amazing to see how quickly they learn and how organized they are, fulfilling all the assignments well in advance before they are due. So, as a by-product of this course the improved time management skills can be mentioned.

Work of the Project deserves a special praise. On the one hand, it gently pushed us to the idea that our studies have to trigger a change. Writing the project was a highly useful experience. It was a challenge to bring the message across, and answering questions of my peers I learned, I think, to be more concise and precise.
On the other hand, doing the Project under the umbrella of this course will help me to scale it up. If  I came up with my own initiative to run a Reflective Learning Project,  the administration might turn their deaf ear, as it happened a number of times. But if  I say that it is a Project designed within a course from the University of Oregon and I am obliged to implement it - they will listen ;-)

The Project is evolving well, by the way. Here is the latest post ( I quote it as it is, without corrections):

"I've done exercises on articles that you advised me. And It really works!One test I wrote on 93% and the other with the grade 100. I've made some mistakes in other exercises, but I hope to get rid of them. Hope that the rules I've learnt will stay in my mind for a long time and I won't forget it. Thanks for these tips!"

That's  the most important thing - the students started making progress!


Last but not least, it was highly pleasant to interact with you, my dear friends and with our teachers Jodi and Sherie, who demonstrated their best professional and interpersonal skills. My special thanks go to you.

On Nicenet I mentioned that I am  going to carry on with my On-Line Project. Yuliya asked me what it is about, but I didn't think it was appropriate to override the course and talk about it there.

Next week, our course over, I will open the box and let you see the lamb. Those, who are interested, you are welcome.

Have a nice rest, enjoy spring and stay in touch.

With love,

Val

Week 9: We Did It! :-) and :-(

So, the Project Report is done. The feeling of achievement is present, which means that the job was done well. Today two more students have joined my Reflective Learning Project, and two students, who have not reported progress yet said that they are doing the exercises recommended, which means that the Project was not only for the Report - it is working and it is needed.

However, the submission of the report was accompanied with a feeling of frustration. "0 Days Left" on our wiki was causing embarrassment and the feeling that something was going wrong. I am happy that today it's again a number with quantity, and it will keep growing to infinity, as, I hope our friendship.

This week was marked with Report Writing. Having written what I believed was a fairly good draft, I though I would be able to complete and submit it on March 8. However,  the process of polishing took three times more time than I planned... 

 I hate perfectionism. It kills time, it leaves you with the feeling of dissatisfaction. Still, I couldn't stop. I was reading and editing, reading and editing, reading and editing until the last hour before the deadline. And only when there was no time left, the pieces of the jig-saw puzzle fit and the picture became visible (I hope).

The background thought in the process of editing was, "Why, why, why it is impossible to say what you want to say? How, how, how do others manage to paint a picture with a few strokes of words?" It's a sickening feeling, you know, it won't let you live in peace.

However, the torture of writing ended, the report went online, and now there is EMPTINESS. Yes, I know that the course has not finished yet, that there is one week ahead, and a WebQuest I planned to compose, and the discussion on Nicenet is going on. But...

It's very sad.  I know that I will be missing my tutors Jodi and Sherie, my friends, my daily tasks, my daily surprised and Wow!s at discovering new tools and resources. I am really grateful to my reading partners Hassan and Kouassi for their valuable comments on my first draft and to Hassan for his support in the process of editing the Final Report. His expanded comments and crucial questions allowed me to see the gaps and to better understand the structure of both the Project and the Report.

A log of unfulfilled other tasks is waiting for me, which means that my life won't be as in the process of doing this course. Life goes on and we can't get stuck. The challenge now will be to apply everything we've learned to improve our teaching, decrease our workload, make our students happier and better prepared to live in the information society. I will keep this blog and will inform all my friend of what is being done, and I will keep reading my friends' blogs too.

Dear Ladies, Happy 8th of March!

Dear Colleagues,

March 8th is International Women's Day. It has been a big holiday in the Soviet Union, and now remains a public holiday and big day for the entire country.
Today, March 7, on the last working day before the holiday, one could see dressed up women with flowers all over the city. A nice day, indeed ;-) Men are doing their best to make us happy. I want to share this festive atmosphere with you, since this day is an international holiday.

Some   greeting cards for you: the one dating back to the 1970s  (warm memories and a light smile)

and a recent one.

You can see the change in the image and the interpretation of the holiday. The difference would be still more striking, if you look at what Google brings up.

Time goes on, life brings change, 

but women were, are and will remain 

the source of love, inspiration and creativity. 

Happy 8th of March 

and may you be happy every day of your life 

as much as we are these days.

Week 8: Which Way to Go?

Another week is coming to a close, which is sad. I've got so used to this daily (nightly ;-) writing, that it feels strange when I don't do it.
In the course of the week I have been planning what to write in my blog, and I have had for great ideas, but as the focus has been shifting from one to another exciting things, the ideas got lost. I wanted to share my ideas of the on-line teaching tools I have tried, such as ANVILL, crosswrod puzzles and other handout making tools - but I have already written about these extensively on Nicenet.net.

Another set of topics was associated with the projects I was writing and reading, such as the readiness of the learner to accommodate the change; appropriateness of the use of technology (a case described by someone, when there was a black out and the students could not use Skype, they carried on in a back to back conversation. And I wanted to ask a question: is it expedient to use Skype when the students are in the same room? Kids are so IT literate today that soon we will have to teach them Face-to-face communication literacy. This is already done in NYC by some museums, who teach kids HOW TO PLAY OUTDOORS!!!

Etc. etc.

Now, after a cup of coffee, I decided to focus on just one idea, and save others for later.
This idea is reflected in the  title of this post: Which way to go?
We have been introduced to so many powerful tools - what will be next. What to pick up, what to forget, when and how to implement all the activities?
I have noticed that many participants decided to open blogs, sites or other publishing media. It looks like a great idea, but let me share my five year experience of running a site, a blog and a thread at a forum.
It looks like fun at the beginning, but soon you will see that it takes up a lot of your time. You can limit yourself to fairly drab solutions, but then ask yourself a question - who would be interested?
Look at this:
- in most cases the administration is not going to care (unless you are doing this course as part of your job assignment and are expected to implement what you have learned)
- students tend to look for easier life, and if your on-line stuff is not competitive, you are going to feel their reluctance; it is still more probable because the administration in many cases won't introduce any changes in the assessment to make students do what you want to do
- your job most likely go unpaid, so you will be investing your time and effort - what will you get in return?
After five years of running my own project I have to answer these questions. I ask them to you now, to save you these five years.

Another issue here is the platform. Using free Google site seems to be a nice option. It provides  you with tools and construction materials, but...
Google is a big guy, we, millions of its users, are invisible for him. We are like ants playing with an elephant. The elephant does not mean to hurt us, but when he moves, some of us can fall under his feet and die. Now, at the beginning, when you do not have a lot of content, you might not feel that.
But I experienced the aftermath of big guys' plays. I used to have my site registered with a local hoster, who, however, used to rent servers overseas. Some time about the government demanded that all Belarusian resources should be physically located on the territory of the country. So, the hoster had to transfer my site to another server. In the process 80 of pagers were damaged. To make things worth, I discovered the damage too late, when the backups were replaced with new ones. I still have the source data, but where to get time to restore so many pages?

But I am lucky because it was only half of the challenge. Those, who were registered with foreign hosters had to break the agreements and to switch to local ones. Let me drop the implications.

What I am trying to say is running professional sites/blogs is not fun. I recommend that before you get down to this, you check all the legal, business and administrative issues. Another question to consider is how much your materials would be different from what we have on the market. Still another one would be how to handle the traffic. Still another would be the security. These were the questions I asked at the beginning of the course, and they, being crucial in the long-run, remain unanswered.

I invite everybody, who is interested, to come back here to discuss them later, when you have more time and experience in running your web-sites and blogs.

Another Idea of a Lesson

Having posted my reflections, I can't help sharing another idea with you. It  relates not to this week’s task but to developing grammar and speaking skills, but still...

As I was busy yesterday writing my tasks and some other papers, I didn’t have much time to prepare for my today’s Club. So, I decided to use the links I had saved to download a ready-to-use printable worksheet. It took me more time than in case I would be writing my own ;-), but, eventually I found something acceptable – a multi-purpose board game with verbs

As my young learners are studying Past Simple, I asked them to use the verbs on the board in the Past Simple to make a story. Before getting started with the game, each participant chose a character and introduced it to the group. Then, moving around the board, they had to use the verbs to add the next sentence to their story. The verbs often conflicted with the initial idea of the authors, so they had to change the plot several times and  eventually produced funny dynamic stories. 

For example, one girl wanted to tell a story about Cinderella, but she had the verbs: to go, to leave and to finish. Her story was like this: 

 "Cinderella went to the beach. She went for a swim and left her bag on the sun bed. Somebody took her bag. When she finished her swim, she was very sad."

My observation is that often students can’t make a story, because they lack ideas. This board game provided them with verbs, so they were able to generate ideas. The kids liked it so much that we decided to repeat it next Sunday.

I think this activity can be used with all ages at the basic and pre-intermediate levels. Enjoy.

Week 7: Busy and Rewarding

So, it’s Sunday night again. It’s sad to see that the number of the weeks on our course wiki is dwindling. On the one hand, of course, we are all getting worn out by the intensive reading, thinking and writing; one the other hand, it has already become an indispensable and enjoyable part of my life, and I even can’t imagine what I will do when the course is finished. Of course, I will go back and explore the issues I have saved for later study, but I will be missing the rhythm of our weekly assignments and deadlines, which have kept us moving ahead so far.

Week 7 has been still more exciting and provoking than the previous ones.  

Autonomous learning is the topic that has much more implications than those discussed. Actually, when one looks at it at the beginning, one sees it as a way out, as a promising solution to some really annoying disadvantages of the conventional education. Once you start practicing it, especially of you want it for real, if you really mean to foster the learner autonomy, you discover, that, yes, some old problems are solved, but there are new ones, of a different nature. Actually, few people realize, that fostering learner autonomy, we are turning the life upside down, back to front, inside out. We are letting the genie out of the bottle, and we won’t be able to get it back again. Splitting away from the old system, we are losing the protection, the support, the stability of the paved road, and get onto a swampy field, where no one bears responsibility for your success. These two lines have much more implications than the reasonable discussion within the course could accommodate, and I am ready to carry on, if someone is interested. I even feel that I will write a couple of posts, even if no one declares his/her interest, because these issues have to be voiced.

One Computer Classroom has become another highlight of the course. It was highly rewarding to read both the discussion and the practical tasks. I read all posts, but there was no chance to give feedback to all of them. I replied either to the posts where I had a question, or which somehow provoked me into writing. I do not want my friends, whose posts didn’t get my feedback  to think that their lesson plan didn’t get my attention. It did, and I use this blog opportunity to thank every participant, as well as our teachers, Sherie, Jodi and Sean for your valuable comments.

I have posted some links to the historic real life samples of my one computer classroom classes. Trying to learn some new techniques, I designed and posted two more lesson plans: Literature Books Characters Database and Tanagrams, and I will report how they went in a thee-week time, because we have to finish what we have been doing.

Week 7 brought us to the final stage of the Project. It’s sad to realize that we have come to the beginning of the end – the draft project report is due by Wednesday. It took some time to find a partner for the peer review, but our group completed the task the first. The remaining part of the week was left for my project implementation.

I will remind in a nutshell that my project is to introduce reflective learning by means of creating a special  space on my website for my full-time university students. The things I have done so far:

- described the target group

- identified the problem

- found a technological vehicle to bring about the change

- negotiated the project with the students

- showed the students how to use the site

- discussed the first posts with the students

- developed the rubric

- explained the students how to use the rubric

- wrote a couple of replied to the questions asked by the students

- marked the students posts and returned them to the students to make corrections in their posts

- discussed the students’ engagement in the project in class three times

My feeling is that the project is evolving well and will keep going after our course is finished.

You are welcome to come to observe it online either here:

http://www.writespeakenglish.com/ICANclub//index.php

(please, find the 4th orange bar from the top entitled “Reflective Learning”)

 or here:

http://www.writespeakenglish.com/ICANclub//index.php?PHPSESSID=7abd7aee9cfc8db200f61e4f9364733b&action=recent

(the recent posts, which can belong to different threads, but it’s the shortest way to find the posts in question too)

I am running this project as an open teaching project, so everyone, both you and your students, are welcome to join. My students say that they liked it and find it rewarding. I hope we will both succeed.