Week6. Reflections

“PowerPoint doesn’t kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table.”

Peter Norvig, Google Director of Research

Power Point Presentation is a powerful tool! It can instruct, teach, inspire, amuse, but it can be  dangerously misused, and then it becomes boring! Can we find Power Point guilty? Definitely not! Why do we blame a tool in our mistakes? Besides, there is an awesome  alternative as Prezzi!

I have been using Power Point for almost a decade, but I have found out interesting things from the articles advised by our instructor Courtney. 

In the article Presenting With PowerPoint it is pointed out that presenters (teachers/students) should be looking at the audience 99% of the presentation, but how many of us do it! 

In the article Top Ten Slide Tips the author stresses the importance of creating simple PPts. The best slides may have no text at all. It is required to limit the number of transitions and animations. The photos and pictures should be of high quality. It good to have a visual theme and avoid using PP templates, thus every PP should be unique. There is no need to use complicated charts, use a table. It is necessary to take into consideration the light in the room, because the colors and fonts of our presentation depend on the light as well.  All these useful tips can be found in the article Top Ten Slide Tips.

I strongly recommend the article 

Teaching Naked: Why Removing Technology from your Classroom Will Improve Student Learning ,  as "The goal ... is to use technology to free yourself from the need to "cover" the content in the classroom". It goes without saying, technology will be the key component of education in future, but it is necessary to review the methods of using technology inside the class and to use technology more outside of the classroom activities. For example, I feel safe when I get emails with instructions and reminders from Courtney. I know that she will be there, on the other side of the computer to answer my questions and to give me advice when I have some difficulties. She has saved me many times! Another idea of using quizzes before the class sounds to me great. The advantage is obvious: not more unprepared students! Isn't it a dream of every teacher? This method is very good for me, because we have only one computer class, and very often it is busy. Whereas my students have internet access at home, so why not to do some assignments outside the class?! I think implementing technology outside of the class is a new step in education!

Finally several words about the implementation of the technology-related change this week.

1. I have published my WebQuest To Blog! I decided that it will be a good way for my students to find out about advantages of blogging. As an outcome of the research the students are to make a Power Point Presentation.

2. My students and I have created our class blog and we have already written introductions to present ourselves. Next week I will post the link of our class blogs. You will be able to visit them and may be share the links with your students, thus we can start an international collaboration by the means of blogging! The purpose of our class blogs is to have an international audience for our writings.

3. My next step is to make a presentation about plagiarism. You can see the video in my post Week5. Reflections. As usually Courtney filled in the gap between theory and real life by sharing this video. After that I will officially use the plagiarism checker smallseotools.com.

4. My next step is to use Prezzi. This tool is amazing. I am sure my students will like it! 

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Ina

Week 5: Reflections

"A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web."

webquest.org

My webskills grow like muscles!

First of all, I found out about alternative assessment, a very useful discovery! I would like to share with everyone interested in this topic the articles recommended to my e-class by our instructor Courtney  Assessing Learning, Alternative Assessment and Practical Ideas on Alternative Assessment, a very successful duet of theory and practice. However, if you open Rubistar, a wonderful teacher assisting tool that helps to create rubrics, I assure you will fall in love with it! I created my first rubric “Story Writing : The Story of an Hour” and you can see it here.

The last point of our discussion was PBL. In this respect I can say that  Less Teaching and More Learning by Susan Gaer is wonderful. The projects that she has mentioned in this article are very appealing to me. However there is another part of the coin, as Courtney has mentioned in her post, sometimes not all the members are involved equally in the project. Therefore, we have to pay attention to crucial elements of project-based learning. The project must be directed to the population, students must see its value, and there must be flexible timelines. PBL is motivating as it appeals to students' creativity and self-expression, and implies a lot of independent learning. PBL is very motivating!

My next step was to concentrate on a technology–related change that will be helpful in struggling with the core issue I decided to focus on - plagiarism. I googled for some plagiarism detectors and found something interesting for myself. Smallseotools.com is a good starting point! I will definitely use it, but not before I come with a presentation about plagiarism. Thanks again to Courtney! Sometimes I wonder how she manages to do all the things! I think that she will teach us this skill as well!
                                          Courtney, thank you for the video!

Finally I did some extra-task. I created my first WebQuest that is aimed at introducing my students to blogging. To Blog! is  my first WebQuest. I need to work on it more, as in my understanding WebQuest is a kind of a project, or better saying it can be a good backbone not only for lesson planning but also for PBL.

Week 5 is over! See you Week6!

Ina

Week 4. Reflections

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Ray Bradbury

The fourth week is almost over. As usually we have studied interesting articles and discussed new topics on nicenet.

The first post was dedicated to reading and writing skills. Courtney as usually successfully instructed our e-class. We were delighted to have Deborah Healey with us, a very experienced professional. I understood that as soon as I visited Deborah Healey's Attic, a very romantic name, isn’t it? Deborah has stored a lot of interesting things there. I was impressed by Women Teaching Women English, a very good perspective! Who is to think about women’s education if not a woman!

I enjoyed reading the article Courtney placed on our website, but I would like to pay attention to Mei-Ya Liang's article Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL , as I liked online extensive reading lesson that he describes in it. I want to try online extensive reading with my students.

The second discussion was dedicated to student-oriented and teacher-oriented issues. After reading the posts of my colleagues from Pakistan and India I don’t dare to complain about technology issue. The topic that preoccupies me most of all is plagiarism. I shall focus on it!

The third was technology-enhanced lesson plan. It was a challenge for me, I jumped from one idea to another, but finally I decided to share with my colleagues the things I do with my sophomores. I was lucky to receive Jasmina’s and Sankarakumar’s pieces of advice and I managed to make some corrections.

I am happy to have not only brilliant, professional colleagues, but also new friends!

See you week 5!

Ina

Week 3. Reflections

"... phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language."

Roman Jakobson

The time flies away, but not in vain. I like our course “Building Teaching Skills through the Interactive Web” with every week more and more. The third week is almost over. It was very productive for me, because I learned about Delicious.com. The idea is simple but it is brilliant. I have already introduced some of my favorite websites and invite everyone to visit and use the resources I find inspiring https://delicious.com/innusea/.

The other assignment of the week was the discussion on topic Building Aural/oral Skills. I thought I know a lot about this topic, having 10 years of professional experience but the article by M.G.Busa New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation  made me change my view on teaching phonetics in general and have a look at this discipline from a technical perspective. I found the answer to the question if we can measure the correctness of our accent or not. The answer is yes, just use Spoken Dialogue Systems, and many other tools/programs and you will get the feedback. Isn’t it great?

Finally I read the report written by Aleyda Linares from the National Pedagogic University from Honduras. Although I saw that some of my colleagues chose Aleyda as well, I was curious to analyze her report because we have many things in common. I wanted to know what to expect from the project, how to work more productively, what I should pay attention to. After having it read I found some details that I had missed during the previous two weeks. It was of great help!

See you week 4!

Ina

Week 2. Reflections

“Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.”

 Peter F. Drucker

The second week is almost over. I have one night and one day to post my reflections.

This week I found out about new effective search engines, such as I Seek Education, Social Issues, Twurdy, Noodle, Jurn, Academicinfo, Intute, and many others, thanks to our instructor, Courtney, and to my colleagues. So I came to the conclusion that Google, Yahoo, and Yandex are not the only one in the universe, not a bad discovery! I have shared this news with my students. I didn’t expect to surprise them, but I did!

The second thing I studied was the ABCD – method, from now on I will use it to write the objectives. I was delighted to find out that Bloom’s Taxonomy was revised in 2001, and now it is digital. Analyzing our course from Bloom’s Taxonomy perspective I see that our individual work implies “Googling”, which will be a science in future according to the article  "The Future of Search", I liked it, a very optimistic article. I hope that we will be doing Advanced and Boolean Searching, the understanding at the higher level. Starting with our second week I can put tags/links. This is an important achievement for me, because I always thought tagging can be done only by professional programmers, thanks God I was mistaken. Besides we continue blogging our reflections weekly!

We also got ready to start our final project by describing our class. Many participants of our course described the general educational system of their country. It was a good idea. I decided to present my students the way I felt it was better. I hope my colleagues liked it.

Finally I’d like to share with you something I use with my students. I love discussing local, national, and international news at the beginning of our lessons. The website I always advise first of all is simpleenglishnews.com I ask them to get ready at home and retell a piece of news from this site in the class. They can listen to the record of news in English as many times as they need, new words are explained below the text. Thus they listen to a native speaker, enrich their vocabulary with new words and present the news in the class. After listening to each other’s news they have to say what they found out from their group mates. So they repeat the most interesting news. This exercise improves students’ listening and speaking skills. By the way, I found out that there is such a newspaper in the USA.

The second week was very productive. Looking forward to starting the third!

Ina 

Moving Forward!

Johann Wolfgang Goethe said “He, who moves not forward, goes backward”. Wonderful words which reflect our reality. Nowadays technology devices as laptops, online video, podcasting, digital cameras are finding a stable place in classrooms. 

Let’s be objective and analyze what is used, what can be used, how to use technology devices in a modern classroom in order to capture and maintain students’ attention, present materials, fulfil activities in the classroom, and get the feedback from students.

I like using the website agendaweb.org. It has a very clear structure, it is divided into levels (from elementary to advance), it contains grammar, podcasts, reading, and listening divisions. Enjoy working with it!

Week 1. Reflections

I am unwritten

Can't read my mind, I'm undefined

I'm just beginning

The pen's in my hand...

             by Natasha Bedingfield

A new chapter of my life starts with this blog, my first blog. The change is in the air. Although “I’m undefined, I’m just beginning”, however this is the first step, but it is so vitally important, because after it comes the second and the third, thereby I will be able to “walk” the Global Network, blog, communicate and share my ideas with the whole world.

I would like to greet every e-learner from my online class, Courtney Cunningham, our fabulous instructor, and the whole team from the American English Institute, and I would like to thank once again the University of Oregon for this wonderful opportunity to participate in the course “Building Teaching Skills through the Interactive Web”.

Important events always coincide in my life. Our course started on October 1^st, the same date was the birthday of the university I work. The Moldova State University was founded 66 years ago! The MSU is a classic type university which gives qualitative education and trains highly skilled specialists. My congratulations to the administration, the academic staff and the students of our university! usm.md

We became bloggers but we are still teachers. Another important event is the International Teacher’s Day that is celebrated today on October 5^th! This is our holiday! Congratulations to everyone!

But back to work! Blogging is new for me, but I am ready to study and investigate the opportunities it gives to improve my web skills. I am ready to start!

Happy blogging to everyone!

Ina Volosciuc

P.S. So many events at once. I like it!