Week 10 : Reflections

Hello friends,

The time to say goodbye has finally come. I feel sad as well as delighted. I am sad because I will not be ‘meeting’ you all in the virtual world that often. I am delighted because I could complete the course and learn so much. I feel so very much enriched and enlightened at the end.  

I have some plans regarding using the knowledge gained here for practical purposes. Though with the infrastructure that we have right now in our college I will not be able to use blogs, webquests, class sites, Nicenet, and surveys for academic purpose. But I can surely rely on Noodletools, Wallwisher, Prezi, Interactive PowerPoint, Rubistar, Hot Potatoes, Easy test Maker,   and Crossword Puzzlemakers to provide me with offline and online help in teaching.

I feel so privileged to be a part of the global learning community. One additional benefit of the course is that I improved my knowledge about some countries that I knew very little about. Being associated with such a talented group of people from around the globe has been a rewarding experience. I sincerely hope that we will interact and exchange ideas in future.

                                                     

Good Bye to All of You My virtual Friends!

Do keep in touch.

Vinita

Week 9: Reflections

Hello friends,

It is so disheartening to think that the course is nearing its end. There will be no more discussions with virtual classmates and no deadlines to be met. For last two months it kept me overly engaged with readings, discussions, web resources and a host of other things that I learnt so devoutly. It breaks my heart to even think about the void that will be created after the completion of this course. Also the fantastic group of people that I got so much to learn with will be scattered to follow their own paths.

 I was very apprehensive about my own abilities and because of so many prior engagements on the personal and professional front. But now I am extremely happy that I could complete the course and learn so much in such a short span of time. I have been using internet for largely personal purposes for last ten years or so. I was also aware of its usefulness in my profession. But I never realized that there could be so many wonderful tools available on the net to make my job easier. The best part of this learning process is that I never felt that I was actually studying something. It was all so engaging and interesting that the burden attached to the term 'studying' was never felt.

The course began with Noodletools that opened my eyes to the world of search engines. For me the best find is JURN as it has helped me in finding some useful articles for my research.

Technology enhanced lesson plans, project based learning, rubrics and alternative assessments, learner autonomy are some of the topics that I had known little about. Now I  am confident about them and can discuss them in detail on any forum. This confidence is an additional benefit of this course.

Rubistar is something that I can very easily introduce to my students. I wish I could also say the same about Webquests, Nicenet and other online resources and tools. I have found a friend in Wallwisher. I can use it in my classes as I  have also shown in my project plan .

But  the revelation of the course is reflective blogging. I am on Blogger since 2008 and I never knew what to do with this blog. This course has opened my eyes to the potential usefulness of blogging. This blog is a suitable platform to express my ideas and communicate meaningfully with like-minded people. I often find it difficult to express myself in too many words. But blogging for last two months has taken away that hesitation  and now I try to be as elaborate as I reasonably can.

This post will be incomplete without my 'Thank You' note for Courtney. She has been so patient with me. Since this is my first online course, I was really confused about so many things in the beginning. I would approach her with very small problems and she would very patiently resolve them. Her patience is a lesson in itself. Besides, she has to be commended for the way she planned the course with easier things in the beginning leading gradually to more complex set of information and tools. Thanks a Lot Courtney for being an excellent teacher.

Keep Learning and Keep Smiling!

Vinita. 

Week 8: Reflections

Hello friends,

Another great week coming to a close. This week has opened my eyes to yet another set of very useful online tools. Hot Potatoes is the best help for me as it also offers offline help that I can save and use later in my classes. I did not know that creating a nicenet classroom was that easy. I have used SurveyMonkey for creating online survey for a training course. Google Forms is also easy and user friendly.

 I hate repeating it time and again, but I just cannot escape the feeling of being at a loss since I am not able to use all these tools in my settings. The government is spending a lot of money on providing better infrastructure and better technical aids to its teachers, but it will take some time before these efforts payoff.  But I have a strong belief that whatever we learn in life is never wasted. So, if not now, may be some time in future when I am posted at a technologically well-equipped college, I'll be able to use all this. Till then I can go on using teaching tools for creating interesting lessons. 

I enjoyed writing the project plan. It was a learning experience as it reminded me of the efforts that go into making good, informative lessons. I wish to use this platform to thank Jasmina for providing her useful insight and thoughtful suggestions for making the plan better.

Happy learning!

Vinita

Wallwisher One-computer classroom Activity

Hello friends,




As Nicenet is down, I share my activity for one-computer classroom here on my blog.

This activity is for 1st year students of B. A. The class is of around 50 students. The class is divided into groups of four. The class is learning Simple past tense and this activity is for assessing what they have learnt.

1) The teacher comes prepared with a Wallwisher wall with different unrelated pictures on it. She explains to the class that they have to look at the pictures carefully and have to construct a short, meaningful story having a proper beginning, middle, and end. It should comprise of not more than 20 sentences structured mainly according to the given tense structure.

2) The class is given half an hour time. All the groups prepare their stories.

3) One of the students from the group rearranges the pictures according to the sequence of events in their story. Another student presents the story before the class. Alternatively, they can enact the story if they like.

4) For peer review of the group, they are given a rubric to assess all the groups. For individual assessment, teacher provides three sheets of checklist to all the group members where they assess the contribution of remaining three group members in the task.


I have created a rubric and a checklist for this task, but for some reasons beyond my comprehension I am not able to paste them in the table format on the blog page.

I hope this activity will be able to achieve the desired goal. Kindly share your comments on it.

Vinita.

Week 7: Reflections

Hello friends,



This week has once touched upon a very important aspect of communicative language teaching - learner autonomy. Autonomy may mean different things to different people as is clear in the article by Dimitrios Thanasoulas, but one thing is common at the core of the concept of learner autonomy – independence on the part of the learner. But Samuel P-H Sheu has pointed out “that learning autonomy of learner or teacher depends more on the teaching system as a whole rather than on an individual teaching situation…”. Moreover, the ‘interconnectedness’ of teacher-learner autonomy as discussed in the conversation between Richard Smith and Andy Barfield is something that bothers the teachers here in India also. When the teachers do not enjoy autonomy and work under great restrictions and pressures, learner autonomy is a tall order to achieve.



In India, learner autonomy is still an alien concept as our education system, be it primary school, high school or college education, is still very conservative so far as teaching methods are concerned. Barring some metropolitan centers, we largely depend on the teacher being the ‘sage on the stage’ philosophy. Things have started changing, but we still have a long way to go.



Readings on One-computer Classroom are a treasure house for teachers like me who are teaching in technologically deprived situations. Though things are changing now and we hope the scenario will be better within a couple of years, still using one computer in a classroom becomes challenging. A lot of preparation goes into making the lesson worthwhile. But we cannot sit idle cursing the unfavorable conditions. We have to keep trying until things become better.

Wallwisher is something that I did not know about.

Learning and Teaching With the Web and 19 Interesting Ways to Use Wall Wisher

provide useful tips for using Wallwisher in the one-computer classroom. I’ll surely use tips for teaching Grammar that I learnt at Sean Banville's Blog.





Deborah Healey’s Tech Tips proved very useful as it illustrates ways of using the two most commonly used softwares to be used more effectively in the classroom, namely Microsoft Word and Power Point.

Deadline for submitting final projects is fast approaching. I know everybody is working hard to make their projects successful. Goodluck to all of you!



Happy learning!



Vinita.

Week 6: Reflections

Hello friends,

This has been a very engaging week in the course. All the readings are very useful.

Large classes are a reality in India. Government run colleges are more crowded than private colleges because of lower fees, and because Government colleges are located in the interior areas also where no private colleges are available. The insights that I gained from the readings of the week on Managing Large Classes are going to make my task  a lot easier. Though I cannot use many technical tools, I can surely go for group activities and engagement triggers to keep my students interested and motivated.

Interactive PowerPoint is something entirely new for me. I have tried my hands at making one, but I know that there are many flaws in the lesson plan. I promise to improve with a little bit of practice.

As for the Project Task: Implement the Change, I am not teaching right now. The issue that I prepared myself to work on is improving grammar of the class chosen. The students that I will be dealing with have passed their high school examination in English grammar. So we can be sure that they are aware of the basic rules of grammar. Still their performance is not up to the mark, and the reason can be assigned to one very important factor – their lack of exposure to real life use of their knowledge of grammatical structures.

Since I will be meeting my students only twice a week, I’ll need to think of some activities that they will be able to perform after the class. I wish I could use blogs or JiTT as my after-the-class-assignments. But alas! For want of good infrastructure. I plan to use dialogue journals instead. This will give the Ss an opportunity of writing for a purpose. I plan to make the Ss write according to the topic that I will cover in the class. For example, if I discuss active and passive voice in the class, they will be required to write the major part of their journals using that structure.

Besides, I will use different simulation tasks where they will be required to talk, read, listen, or write in the targeted language. I discussed using mobile phones in my Nicenet discussion thread. These simulation tasks might be about bargaining with the shopkeeper, discussing some college issues with the principal, discussing some domestic problem with a friend, writing letter to the municipal authorities regarding some problem of the city etc., watching a film and telling about it to a friend, spot the difference activities, information gaps, crossword puzzles etc. The activity to be chosen will be such that will facilitate the use of  the topic being dealt with in the class.

As I will meet my Ss only twice a week, I plan to devote the first period to explaining and discussing the chosen topic using interactive power point. The second period will focus on the tasks to be performed on the basis of the knowledge gained during the previous lesson. Some after-the-class task will also be given to keep the students engaged for the week.

Assessment will also depend on the type of task being carried out. For group tasks checklist will be appropriate, while for individual tasks, rubrics will be more useful.

This is a broad idea of what I plan to do with my students under the project.

This week we are celebrating the festival of lights in India called Diwali or Deepawali. I wish all my virtual friends a very Happy and Prosperous Life on this special Occasion!

Regards,

Vinita

Week 5: Reflections

Hello friends!

It’s a great pleasure to be interacting with you all once again after last week’s absence. There were personal issues so urgent and demanding that I could not complete my course tasks.

As for week 5, it has been very useful and informative. PBL, alternative assessment, rubrics, webquests – so many new things explored and learnt. The discovery of the week is undoubtedly Rubistar. I had no idea that creating a rubric could be so easy and fast.  Though alternative assessment is something that is not used in our university officially, but I am sure that even if it is used by the teacher for evaluating the learners’ understanding of a given topic, it is worth using.

For the first time, I created a Webquest  - The Art Gallery. I found it quite interesting. This is a good tool for communication between a teacher and students. After reading the webquest about the task or project, the students know what to expect in the class, how to carry out the task, and what the  teacher expects of them. It saves a lot of time, both of the teacher and the students. My webquest focuses on integration of language instruction and literature. This is an issue that is very close to my heart. During my interactions with my various classes, I have found out that a good number of students opt for English Literature because they believe that studying literature would improve their proficiency in English language which does not happen as they are busy paraphrasing the texts all the time. They do not get any exposure to language use in the real world. They end up scoring badly in exams and also lose the battle on the language front. So, I always try to incorporate  elements and/or practices of language teaching with my literature lessons so that they gain some exposure to language practice.

Project based learning is not very popular with our education system. It is only for last couple of years that it has been included in the curriculum of Central Board of Secondary Education,India. I think not many universities in India have opted for PBL as a method of teaching. Marks and grades are given according to the traditional examination pattern. I share Ashish’s concerns regarding the response of higher authorities to AA and PBL. 

But this is something that is beyond my control. My classroom  is the only place where I can control things.So all I can do is that I can make my students work on small projects based on individual topics being done in the class. I can use rubrics and AA to judge their performance there and give them feedback for improvement. I still have to think of better ways of motivating them to complete the projects as the motivation of marks or better grades is not there to help me out.

But I am not to be discouraged by these problems. Experience is the best teacher, as they say!

Happy learning!

Vinita