Week 10 Reflection

The End of Our Technology Journey

Successful topics

Most of the topics we covered during the webskills course are very useful and help us as well as our students' autonomy and skills enhancements such as:

·         ABCD objectives,

·         Blogging,

·         Most efficient search engines,

·         Shared ideas for listening, speaking, pronunciation, reading and writing,

·         Practical Delicious page

·         Tips for setting a project in a project-based learning activity

·         Practical Ideas on Alternative Assessment

·         Learner Autonomy

·         multiple intelligences

·         Technology integration

Useful tools

Unlike my colleagues in this course, some tools cannot be used with my students because of connectivity issues in their area, for examples: Blogs, Pedlet and WebQuest. However, some of them work best for me as I could provide many educational tools to classroom or LRC (Learning Resource Center) such as: Rubrics, Interactive PowerPoint, Flash cards, board games, tests or quizzes.  

If I haven’t faced a problem accessing internet at my school, I thought of many possible solutions to enhance students' skills and autonomy. Gradually, we will work online and at school, we will hold a discussion of their perspectives of online activities.

As for future suggestions, there is none since I learnt from you things I have never heard about. Therefore, I don't have other tools rather than what this course suggested to me and my colleagues.

To sum up, this online course (Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web (Web Skills) was a great course which I update my knowledge of the latest technological tools used in education. Many thanks to those who support help and monitor our work during 10 weeks: Russell and Robert. Thanks to my colleagues and their brilliant ideas and shared experience. I hope it is not the last time we work together. 

Best of Luck all, 

Iman, Oman

Week 9 Reflection

Need to integrate varying methods

Through this week I was reading through some suggested articles about 9 learning styles and intelligences our students have.

What I like most in his article "Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences" is how each style is described with best tasks and jobs work with them. I think this gives me clearer images of how to do tasks considering the most common intelligence my students have.

However, through years of experience, I noticed that most of students have 3 common learning styles: spatial, verbal and body movements. Those different styles can be met by using some tools we learned in this webskills course.

As an example of activities considering language and words (listening and reading) are:

-          http://legacy.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html

-          http://www.npr.org/

-          http://www.elllo.org/

For body movements, there are some websites which helps make some board games and flash cards that could consider this stream of students such as:

http://www.lakeshorelearning.com/general_content/free_resources/teachers_corner/flashcard/flashcardmaker.jsp

Final project

I could say it is a thrilling week because we submitted the last version of our project report. My revision was based on comments I was given by my partners: Makram and Hanan. I hope that I did well by elaborating my project idea, tools, procedure and finding I got so far. 

Best, 

Iman, Oman

Week 8 Reflection

Week 8 Reflection

This was the busiest week for me since I have a lot work to do: prepare activities for Sunday (Civil Defense Day), usual school work, and preparation for Traffic Week.  You can see how much loaded work I have. I hope that our tutors in this course put this into consideration during this week. Please!

Resources for creating a class site or making online exercises

Creating interactive sites with my current situations will not be an applicable idea as my students are suffering from Internet access problems. However, while I was browsing the suggested sites relating to online exercises, I was thinking of making a workshop of those sites to introduce them to my colleagues as soon as possible (hopefully during this week)  because I found them easy to use and they are really saving my time as well.

I have already made two exercises: puzzle worksheet and vocabulary flash cards: (http://www.lakeshorelearning.com/general_content/free_resources/teachers_corner/wordsearch/wordSearch.jsp) (http://www.lakeshorelearning.com/general_content/free_resources/teachers_corner/flashcard/flashcardmaker.jsp) respectively.

There is also a brilliant website called American English for fun downloadable board games: (http://americanenglish.state.gov/resources/activate-board-games). I found a board game which I downloaded it for the modals of possibility (What you might find). And of course there are other interesting games. Therefore, I must let my colleagues know about such websites.

Hope you all the best in you final project report.

Best,

Iman, Oman

Week 7 Reflection

Week 7 reflection

This week is about learning autonomy which my project is about. Through reading the suggested articles, I come through some benefits of some crucial learning strategies and conditions could make our students more autonomous. These strategies are: Cognitive and Metacognitive. Also, attitudes and motivation plays a role in autonomy progress. There are two other ways to guide learners via self-reports and Diaries and Evaluation Sheets as elaborated in "What is Learner Autonomy and How Can It Be Fostered?" article by Dimitrios Thanasoulas. Those are the main points I come up with by reading.

AE American English App.

Given recourses of this week has also focused on two methods could help learners be autonomous.   I downloaded AE American English(http://m.binu.com/ae/ #sthash.lOyy4RhS.dpuf). It is really a great phone resource where the student can use wherever and whenever they want to learn English. However, you should have internet access to the internet while using it. It includes the following:

"·  E-books: graded readers for learners, resources for teachers, and the Worldreader library

·  Audiobooks: available to download by chapter 

·  Music: positive messages through hip hop, jazz, children’s songs, traditional songs, and more

·  “Trace Word Soup”: a fun vocabulary game already played over 4 million times around the world

·  Voice of America news feeds for English learners

·  Quizzes and study tools

·  A variety of language, news, social media content, and more-" See more at: http://americanenglish.state.gov/resources/american-english-mobile-app

This is very useful also for me and you as teachers as contents to use in the classroom.

Best,

Iman, Oman

Week 6 Reflection

Effective teaching techniques:

Through this week, I came across several methods (which get from the suggested articles) a teacher could use to create an interactive classroom especially in large classes as in lectures. It is true that I have small group of students in my classes; however, these techniques would work even better in my classes. There should be time for individual, group work and think, pair & share exercises. Presenting after the exercise ought to increase the interactivity in the class. Moreover, using interactive PowerPoint shows has great impact on students' motivation and engagement in class. Besides its use as break routine, interactive with its all elements (blank page, great deal of media, think, pair & share exercises), interactive PPT presentation involves students actively and interestingly in displayed lesson or task. 

Project step#5: implementing the potential solutions:

Looking back at my essential concern, you will notice that my students lack autonomy. I planned to give them gradual steps so that they can start depending on themselves to find suitable websites could help enhance their weakness in a skill they chose. I printed out a prepared task and handed it to my students where they have to think of a certain skill which they would like to enhance. I structured the domain of search on three important websites I found useful because the more option I give, the more confession my students will encounter to select. These are the suggested sources:

- Learn English/British Council (http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/)

- ESL independent study lab (http://legacy.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html)

- Elllo website ( http://www.elllo.org)  

My students are required to explore the previous activity resources  and choose the one they think would aid their objective to be met.

This task should be done as homework. Next day, discussed my students about the skill they prefer to work on and everyone gave her the reasons behind their choice. Two of them want to enhance their reading and comprehension skill so that they do better in their final examinations, whereas, other two were concerning about their amount of vocabulary they need to use properly in writing and to express themselves while speaking as well. Another one I helped her to choose one skill among two so she settled on fortifying her pronunciation since she has a serious problem in pronouncing words appropriately. Enhancing grammar is choosing by the last two of my students.

Having put in mind what specific skill are aiming to focus on, all the 7 students, unfortunately, haven’t had the opportunity yet to explore any of the sites. They have been trying for a week but in vain. There was a serious problem in connectivity. My students managed to access the front page of each websites; however, they cannot go further. I gave them two days to try and the last two day I attended a one-day workshop on "Jolly Phonics" and the last day of the week I took the IELTS Test which was out of my town.

When I came today, I found the same problem of connectivity is still the obstacle in my planning which I didn't expect. I searched for this unusual problem which wasn't an issue before the second semester! I found that the communication company is trying to activate "3G" in the surrounded area. It sounds thrilling a bit, but being unable to predict when to finish this maintenance makes me in harry to work on "Plan B".   I am downloading some activities according to the skills my students will be working on and I will put the file on the LRC (Learning Resource Center) and the Computer Lab. I shall confess here that it takes me time to do it but I have to do something till the connectivity issue is solved.

Plan B:

I can assign one of my periods a week for students to visit the LRC or computer lab so my students will have the opportunity to do at least one or two activities weekly. They will also have the chance to carry the files home so they can manage their time to practice some of the activities. As assessing their progress they will be giving sheets of paper organized into columns where students will keep records on the following: skill, the title of the activity, resource, score and comments on the activity.

This is what I experienced so far. I kindly accept any suggestions, so colleagues and tutors waiting to see your comments.

Best,

Iman, Oman

Week 5 Reflection

Thrilling Journey!

By reading articles about  Project-based learning (PBL), I learnt something very crucial to put into consideration when presenting a project to students. There should be specific guidance both teachers and students follow systematically to gain satisfied results. Since my project problem is about students' autonomy, I came through the point where insisted on the importance of being balanced in your control as a teacher and in providing room for students to build autonomy. 

   

It is my first time to create rubrics. Once you signed up to the suggested website http://rubistar.4teachers.org/, everything would be easy because it is a tool helps you create rubrics with some options in both categories, content and you could change (to suit your curriculum requirement and learner's level) , edit and add to your rubrics later on. I will definitely use it to create other rubrics for my classes.

For WebQuest, as I read about it, is a team website through which a group could work on a project. Unfortunately, there is a problem occurred while I register on "Zunal ". Therefore, I tried "QuestGarden" which is a bit difficult for me. I am still struggling to create a WebQuet. I will share it once I do it successfully.  

As for step 4 of my project, I focused my attention on one single issue: how to incorporate technology to help my students become more autonomous rather than depending entirely on their teacher and textbook as their main resource of learning English language. This have to be done gradually since my students are accustomed to relaying on their teacher most of the time. The suggested websites discussed in this course such as - Learn English/British Council (http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/),ESL independent study lab (http://legacy.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html) and Elllo website ( http://www.elllo.org) can be the foundation stone to start with. I have already asked them to think about a skill they would like to enhance and then explore the 3 websites to choose the best for them. Tomorrow, we will have a discussion about their skills and the most preferable site for them.  

Cheers, 
Iman, Oman

Week 4 Reflection

Week 4 Reflection

As weeks passed, it becomes a great habit that we should be familiarized with something new, useful and applicable.

For reading, vocabulary and writing skills, I read an article "Weaving the Web into an EAP Reading Program" done by  Bonnie Ellinger, Simone Sandler, Debbie Chayen, Keren Goldfrad, and Jackie Yarosky (Israel) in which they show how they experienced using the internet to enhance students' reading skills. They stated that there should be flexibility in selecting topics which should interest students as well as well-planning of the materials used. As for me, searching for a suitable and interest-provoking website was a bit selective. The one I prefer using for reading and vocabulary materials is Adult learning Activities website (http://www.cdlponline.org/). Besides its interesting topics, what I like about it is that it can be easily used by my learners. Only choose their topic and reading title, then they are smoothly directed to have some vocabulary games activity which focuses on learning new vocabulary items, their pronunciation, spelling and how they are used in the contexts. As for reading, they are leaded to do two activities: comprehension and a question asking for students' opinion and personal reasons.

To be honest writing is a long learning progress which has to be monitored regularly because for my http://www.rong-chang.com/tutor.htm#) might encourage my learner focus on spelling because the questions and words should be typed correctly so that the robot Mike can understand what they are asking for.

students writing sentences can be done well. However, joining sentences to form a paragraph or an essay is much challenging. They focus their attention to write as much sentences as they can regardless spelling and punctuation. I could find a website as an encouraging tool for beginners. 

Moreover, through this week we came across a fundamental step to begin a lesson using technology. To experience a technology-enhanced Lesson Plan, I downloaded some samples from suggested websites (http://www.bcps.org/apps/CBTIA/). It was useful to see how to technology was integrated in a lesson. However, the lesson plan wasn't different from the non-technology lesson plans that we are currently doing. There are only three differences: lesson plan layout, integrating technology and allocating time for each step of lesson procedure. This photo is used in my country. And the URL link to my technology-enhanced lesson is:

(https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qXFPrwLEaPPMhEg3JdCOV_CF1mrumvl707xZ70a32Ww/edit?usp=sharing)

As for our project task this week, we are recommended to focus on main issue concerning us and the technology might help us overcoming it. Circumstances of my school location are exceptional compared to the schools in towns. In towns, teachers have access to internet, but we haven't. There are no other learning resources in my school area. Under such situation, my students, therefore, become independent and relying on me and the textbook as the main resource to acquire their English language. In their age they should be more independent and build self-study attitude in their learning progress. Thank Allah, there is something I can build my project. My 7 learners in grade 11 can access the Internet at home which makes it a bit relieving for me to use technology to help my students build self-autonomy in their learning progress. They should be more responsible to learn not only during the school hours but also outside via different resources.

Waiting for another fruitful week!

Sincerely,

Iman, Oman  

Week 3 Reflection

Week 3 Reflection

Here we are with the 3^rd week already done!

Like the previous 2 weeks, there was something to be reflecting on. I read some articles and one of them is Teaching Pronunciation to Adult English Language Teachers by Kirsten Schaetzel & Ee Ling Low . In this article there are some factors could affect our students from gaining a native-like pronunciation. However, a teacher could students by giving them activities and exercises could them a lot. One of the most website which I would direct my students to is Elllo. This website can be both used by students to practice by themselves or by teachers to prepare their lessons. This website consists of authentic listening activities for 7 different levels: starting from low-beginners to advanced. Each listen includes videos and audio files along with their scripts, target vocabulary (with a spoken text in which the target word is used) and some questions (spoken also). This website can enhance both speaking  and listening skills(pronunciation aspects: intonation,  word stress, connected speech…etc. ). Another authentic listening website is NPR.org (National Public Radio). A teacher can make use of is by providing students with listening activities like news, music and arts. It can be used by students as well to develop their listening skills at home.

For our fortune, above websites and more others (which we think are crucial) can be bookmarked and have access to easily from any computer. This could be through Delicious page we created this week. I can also look at my colleagues' favorite websites and add them to my Delicious page. 

By giving us past sample projects, now I have a clear picture of the process we are supposed to work through to finish ours. I analyzed Final Project Report for Teens done by Camelia Pagila, School with Classes I-VIII, Academician Marin Voiculescu, Giurgiu, Romania. I did choose her project report to analyze because it is for school students (especially teens) which is similar to my context ( I teach teenagers too). Her project was focusing on incorporating technology for all learning style where all students can learn through his way of learning. She used several websites and technological tools to help gain her course goal.  The project was organized very well to gradually lead students to do their tasks smoothly both in-class and off-class time! I noticed also that the teacher planny is detailed in a way could help readers follow its tasks and activities of each unit easily. A fruitful project should be done by me and my colleagues by the end of this course. I hope we could plan ones which are helpful for our students to be learnt in an interesting technological frame!  

Best of luck for all,

Iman, Oman

Week 2 Reflection

Week 2 Reflection

What a challenging and intensive week we had compared to the 1st week!

Web Search
Starting with the web search! It is a thrilling experience. I have to confess it is the first time I go through various search engines. I haven't had an idea about Noodle Tools. I was stick to limited ones: Google, Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus (My favorite online dictionary) and YouTube. As requested, I tried other engines. I personally think the best of all is iSeek Education. Mainly, it is for education field. I surfed it once as an attempt but then, I use it most of the time to search for more information related to "ABCD" method for writing more applicable and measurable objectives. It provided me with several PDF and DOC files. This engine can widely narrow your search domains.  However, my colleagues' choices vary. Some prefer Bing.com and others Ask.com which I found helpful for my students as well. I will suggest it for my students and my colleagues as well.
Besides the web engines, there are some tips for how to search in more advance way (I wasn't aware of!). This is even more fundamental base you should have to start an effective search!

ABCD Method of writing objectives
Concerning ABCD style, it took me awhile reading in-depth about it and how to implement it to my objectives. I may not master it; my objectives started to be more measurable and observable to some extent, though. I learnt that I have to specify each part of this method: audience, behavior, condition and degree. As I mentioned in the ABCD method discussion thread, having  clear objectives aids to keep your lesson smooth and direct to accomplish the target learning outcomes, by using the most suitable and convenient tools, tasks or teaching materials.

I decide to implement the ABCD method in writing my second semester objectives.

Describing a class
It is the first step of our project! I tried to mention in details anything related to my  learners: population, proficiency level (pre-intermediate) and their mother tongue. Then, I shared the setting of my school and students' classroom. After that, I elaborated the technology available in the school and the future plan to provide another (hopefully, so soon). However, there is no connectivity in our school. What is so interesting in the discussion thread is that you get to know about other schools from over the world! Some are highly equipped  with tech. and others lack tech. We should be thankful anyway for what we have.

Here are some photos of where I currently teach. 

 

This is my school (Wadi Al-Heyoul School for basic education 1-12)

I took the last two photos from the 2nd floor.

Best regards,
Iman, Oman

Week 1 Reflection

To learn new thing, whatever it is, you will find it a bit challenging and difficult to deal with at the first place. This is what I think happened to most of us, if not all! For me, introducing ourselves to each other and getting to know more about one another (country, career and expertise) has created a friendly and comfortable environment. Though, we cannot meet face-to-face, I feel that the starting week has already given us a plenty of time to be friends rather than just colleagues. And I am definite that it would be hard to say "Goodbye" at the end of this course!

No doubt, e-mailing us to direct new users gradually (step by step) of what to do was certainly crucial for me. It made my life easy. To be honest, at the very beginning, I encountered difficulty to log in to the websites (Nicenet & U.Oregon Blackboard). I thought I have one user name for both websites. I entered my user name with spacing, but back to instructions and re-read them again helped me recognize the problem. Why do you think I mentioned this problem? Well, because a part of the obstacle was because I skipped some of the instructions at fist, thinking that I am able to do my tasks easily. Yet, I was mistaken! I wasted time struggling in attempt to access the websites. As a result, reading the given instructions carefully is always helpful especially for new users as they (I mean the instructions) are done for a purpose, directing users to the right destination more easily and quickly. So, it would be unfair not to mention the clear instructions given to us by our supportive tutors: Russell and Robert. Many thanks to them!

When it comes to discussion board on Nicenet, I find them good tool to raise innovative ideas, boost critical thinking and share profound insights, thoughts and expertise. As we know working in a team has much to add to our knowledge and understanding than working as individuals.

Bolgs! It is the first time I created my own blog. I've heard about it but I didn't know that we could make use of it in teaching. I would like to implement it in my classes because student will better learn if they reflect on their learning progress. It helps develop self-evaluation since my students would share their feedback of what they learn throughout each unit, for example. Moreover, for those who suffer shyness during the class, they might develop self-confidence as they can express their opinions and thoughtful comments to their classmates' blogs. I will talk about its benefits later during the course to reflect more on how useful I may find it!

At last I would like to say that I am thankful to be one member of this group sharing the same sort of learning progress.

Welcome

Welcome all!

This is the first time ever  to have a blog. I am so keen to begin posting and sharing my weekly reflections through this platform. I would be so pleased if you comment on my posts because I am certain your feedback is my way to improve and build healthy web skills. Therefore, you are all kindly invited to visit and reflect on what I could call  'my thoughts home'.

Cheers,
Iman, form Oman