Reflections: Week 2

Hello everyone,

        As the second week of our course is drawing to a close, I look back at it with a sense of amazement and achievement. Our Instructor introduced a whole new world of search engines to me and brought me out of the limited sphere of Google, Youtube, and Yahoo. I never knew that we have search engines for such a great variety of specific tasks – from finding photographs (Flickr) to scholarly articles (JURN, Directory of Open Access Journals), from finding government information (Foreign Governments (Intl. Documents Coll., Northwestern U)) to finding information related to fine art (Artcyclopedia), from finding arguments for and against  debate topics (Glean Comparison Search)to finding basic information in encyclopedia(Columbia Encyclopedia), from finding extensive information about a country(CIA World Factbook) to finding historical information (Digital History) – oh! What an exhaustive list! I have already started using them and have found some relevant material for my research.

        As for the ABCD objectives, I have known about them for a while now and have been using them for some of my classes. The best thing about this style of writing objectives is that they make us be extremely specific about what we wish to achieve through that particular lesson. The measurability of objectives makes our assessment process easier and much more accurate.

        The final Project Plan that I am trying to put together is still in a nascent stage. I am still not clear about the class that I would like to do the project with. For now, I have thought of making the plan for my General English students who study English as a compulsory subject for B.A. Part 1 course. They have to just pass the exam as the marks for this paper are not included in the final grades. Obviously, the motivation of the students to learn is low. They just want to study enough that will enable them to get minimum pass marks. Teaching them, and cultivating in them an urge to actually learn is a challenging task. I am sure, technological novelty in the classroom will evoke some interest in them to learn for life, and not for marks.

        Their course includes basic topics of grammar such as tenses, active and passive voice, direct and indirect narration, basic phonetics, word stress, and basic comprehension and composition skills. I plan to focus my attention on grammatical part of the course. If you have some suggestions, please feel free to share.

        The other classes that I am teaching are – poetry and drama to the students of all the three years of B.A. course. I very often include certain tasks that focus on language rather than literature even in my literature classes. I might think of something for these students as well. Will decide in a couple of days. 

Happy learning to all my coursemates.

Vinita