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.