Adieu!

It is the final week. The last blog post of the course.

I look back and I see a different teacher in me.
I look back and I feel very satisfied
I look back and I feel sad too.

From this week onwards there will be no midnight frenzies of reading several articles or deciding which one to read first.
But from this week onwards, there will be no comments and discussions to look forward to too.

I will miss that for sure.

I will also miss the expectations I had opening my inbox on Tuesday mornings in Sri Lankan time.

The journey started from ‘delicious’ and we had a nice time with PBL, WebQuests, Blogging, ANVIL, HotPotatoes etc.
If you ask me which one is my favorite and the most useful, it is difficult to give a specific answer. Well, I explored all of them with a lot of curiosity and learnt a lot too. I like blogging and WebQuests and creating my first WebQuest was a wonderful and extremely interesting experience. I remember creating it one Sunday afternoon, without leaving my room for about two three hours.

Even though there was no physical presence in our classroom, I will always remember the ideas we shared, every time I use the tools I learnt from this class.

And thank you Robert, for the great job and for being a wonderful teacher though miles apart!
(sending hand written feedback, wow, the best idea ever, and can’t wait to see it!)

And thank you Dona, Jeff, Max and Tom for taking part in our discussions and for sharing a lot of information with us.

Last, but definitely not least, my classmates, what we learnt from each other was simply amazing and thank you for being wonderful classmates!

I hope we will keep in touch and perhaps meet too, one fine day, in this small world!!!

All the best to all of us!!!

Best
Umesha

A week of fever, final project and, carnival!!!

We are now in the 9th week of the course and I can’t believe that it went so fast. Looking back I can only be happy as I see a very different teacher in me now.

This week we learnt about learning styles and how technology can be used to facilitate different learning styles. Interestingly, the nature of technology is such it can be used to address several learning styles at once and as I feel, that is one of the best uses of technology in a classroom.

This week, we also got a wonderful opportunity to “meet” Max and Tom, Editors of the academic journal “English Teachers’ Forum”. We got to know a lot of information about publishing in FORUM as well as in other forums.

I was sick for a couple of days and then came the final project submission deadline and now I am writing a post for my blog after a nice and fun filled evening at a carnival. It was raining the whole afternoon, but me , my family, my husband and his mother, we all had a nice time. We ate a lot of food, drank coke in the freezing rain and then ate ice cream on the way and watched a musical show, in the middle of a ground and yes it was raining.

I feel wonderful ! (I touch wood and gold!!!)

However, I have to end the post in a sad note.

Next week is week 10. The last week

Hectic Eight!

It’s been a pretty hectic week, quite like we all expected. We submitted our draft reports to our peers. I am working with Shihanath and Naqib.

And this week was also about new online tools. We were introduced to Jeff Magoto, the director of the Yamada Language Center at the University of Oregon and his project ANVILL. ANVILL is a great platform for ESL practitioners as it gives you tools to practice all four skills. There are voice boards, chat forums and audio and video upload facilities and a lot more. You create a course in ANVILL and your problems about getting your students practice all four skills is solved for good.

This week I created a website. Yes a website; for my course “English Program for the Non-academic Staff”. I included class announcements and links to our blogs as well.

Talking about blogging, I created a class blog for the same course too. And I also learnt how to embed a video in the blog. (You will see that I have learnt it really well, just wait till you reach the end of this post!)

Amidst all this, I introduced blogging to the same course mentioned above. It went really well. Most of my students created their blogs and it is the links to their websites that I included in the class website. Google gave some of us a hard time as it was difficult for some to create gmail accounts but we helped each other and it went really well.

It’s been a tough week but now looking back I feel I have learnt and achieved a lot.

Week 09 will be all about final project submission and before that I think we all deserve a good rest!

And here is my treat! Enjoy!

It’s week seven and time sure flies!!!

This week was spent leisurely. At least comparatively leisurely. I went on a trip to Embilipitiya, about 400 km trip along the southern coastline of the country. Bathed in the sea and in a famous tank called “Chandrika Wewa” and ate a lot of new food specific to that part of the country.

It was fun and I have included some photos from the trip in the blog.
I started the week off by putting an early comment to the blog, minutes before we left home, early in the morning.


This week was about learner autonomy and one computer classroom. We learnt about theories related to learner autonomy and we created one computer activities.
We also found project partners and I am working with Shihanath and Naquib. Our project plan is due to our partners on the 23rd Feb and that means next week is going to be hectic.

Week six is my week

I am sure all my friends in this class now know me as “Umesha, the one who is worried about her large class.”

And yes they have a reason to think so.

I am worried or is it “ I was worried” about my large class.

I like this week because this week we learnt and talked about problems I face as a teacher of a very large class. I learnt a lot. Not just from this week, but from the whole course, but this week I could very easily relate to the topics discussed.
Discussion and reading material related to interactive PowerPoint and issues in large classes not only taught me a lot of new things but also made me see that I am already using some of the techniques.

I made an interactive PowerPoint presentation and I have already thought of teaching my students about making interactive PowerPoint presentations.

And then we had a guest this week. Donna joined our discussions from day one and she really made our discussions going by bringing in new points and perspectives.

Above all, her presence this week gave me a new idea for my final project and I am going to write to Robert about it tomorrow.

Thank you Donna for all your comments and for being our guest this week.

This class can really motivate us!!!

The Week of 'Quests'

The interesting thing about week 05 is that I enjoyed reading about and experimenting on the content.

PBL is great and the reading material given gave a lot of insight and ideas about carrying out projects.

For me the most interesting thing is the WebQuest. I created my very first WebQuest on presentation skills and I can’t wait to use it in my class.
Here is the link to my WebQuest

What I am worried about is the project task and finding proper solutions to the problems I have in my class. I think the two solutions I mentioned in the discussion are ok but I have a feeling that I can come up with a better one by the end of the course.

I feel tired after week o5 as I did the extra task as well, but I am satisfied too.
It is amazing to see how much we don’t know and how wonderful it feels to know that we now know things we never even dreamed of knowing.

Let me be frank- part II

I am not happy because I am very busy. Ever since I started this course, my work load increases by the minute and makes me ridiculously busy.
This week, I saw the discussion board with some good 70 posts on reading, writing, and vocab and another 30 odd on the class project. I want to read all of them. Every single one of them.

Time, I need more time.

Sigh!

Week 4-Technology enhanced lesson plans and so much to learn

Week 4, as usual, made me realize how blind I have been. In every university I have taught so far, there were many computer labs and I taught in the class NEXT to the computer lab. And the labs were free!!!!!!!!!

I have even used a lab for teaching when all the classrooms in the English Unit were taken. How come I didn’t see the computers in the lab?

“Aiyo!” – A Sinhalese expression to say “ Oh shit”.

I prepared my very first technology enhanced lesson plan and it was great. I used the website http://www.manythings.org and Robert gave some really useful comments.
The readings for this week were great and I found time to read two extra articles as well. Use of technology can be a real solution to most of the problems we face as teachers. That’s what I learnt this week.

The project task- we don’t see it, but Robert is taking us through the formal steps of a research and these days we are doing the literature survey and identifying the SRP (Specific Research Problem).

Let me be frank!!!

The best thing about this course is, every week we are introduced to a new aspect of using technology in ESL teaching and then as you engage in the course work, you spend the whole week thinking about those wonderful times you are going to have implementing them in your class and seeing you and your students move forward!!!

The ultimate dream of any teacher!!!!

Thank you Robert and thank you E-teacher scholarship program!

Computer Assisted Language Learning

And I am back!!!!

Education should go on par with changing times and as I see it CALL is one way of molding teaching methodologies to suit the needs of modern times while making the best of technology available to facilitate learning.

Use of computers on one hand joins education with a ubiquitous technology in society while making learning close to the students of the modern world. It is true that computers incorporated with learning makes learning easier and it makes it easier and more productive to the teacher as well.

But as I feel, the best thing about CALL is the motivation it gives to students. The impact and influence of technology, especially computers, is so strong that students have come to believe that anything detached from technology is boring.

But CALL gives students this “techi” feeling and yes, it is a wonderful booster of enthusiasm!!!!