Week 7

Wow! It has been a great week. First, I discovered many ideas for using one computer in a classroom, such as a strategy when a computer is used as one of the "stations" described by Glori Chaika in her article "How to Thrive - Not Just Survive - in a One-Computer Classroom". She gives some useful tips how to organize students' work posting a schedule, drawing Popsicle sticks and establishing color-coded groups. Also I liked Robert's idea with recording students' voices for practicing pronunciation and speaking. What impressed me most was a wallwisher. I find it a very attractive and convenient tool for creative group work. Besides class projects, a wallwisher can be used for many purposes, for example, as a class greeting card with wishes, music, pictures for someone who has a birthday or celebrates some special event. I added an URL about learner autonomy to our class wallwisher and was able to get some good ideas, schemes, articles shared by the other participants. I was even encouraged to create my own wallwisher for my 6th graders where I'm going to place their stories and organize a contest on the best story. I have already  placed one story of the girl who has sent me her story first. You can see it here:  http://padlet.com/wall/t79i90xyaq.

This week we have made an important step towards our final project report - we have found partners for peer reading. I'm going to cooperate with Young&Yummy Yubaraj. I'm sure it will be very productive cooperation. I hope we'll be able to exchange some useful advice on our projects and improve our work.   There must be something 'delicious' in Yubaraj's project :)

And, last but not least. I have launched my project. Hooray! On Monday I introduced the project to my students. We looked through the pages of the Web Quest http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=183877 where they got the task, asked questions about the process and evaluation rubric. It was new for them. They were excited and worried a bit at the same time. More excited than worried, of course. On Thursday when we had a class in the language lab students created their class blogs and google accounts. I am teaching three classes of Grade 9, each class created their own blog and chose their blog moderator who knows the password and who can make changes in the blog. I know the password, too. We wrote two posts: one post about extreme sports which is part of the webquest and students have to write their comments by Sunday midnight. Another post is "Ideas for the blog" where students can share their ideas how to make the blog more interesting and effective. They can start new posts according to their interests, for example, about music and discuss them.  I see that it works! Some students have already written their comments, the blog moderators have changed the layout, added pictures, videos, posts. Tomorrow we are going to discuss the topic of extreme sports in the lesson. I hope that blog discussion will help them to organize their thoughts, to pick some ideas from others and be more confident speakers. I'm looking forward to getting first results. But actually, I have already got my first result: this project has raised my students' interest and now they are speaking English in a real life situation. I believe this blog will help them to express and realize themselves and it will live long.

You can see the blogs here:
http://englishfun9b.blogspot.com/
practicemakesperfect9v.blogspot.com/
http://englishandinternetform9a.blogspot.com/

Project Task #5

The final task this week was Project Task #5 - to start implementing technology-related change in my lessons.  As my final project I decided to create a web quest which will help students develop their listening skills. I have made the web quest "Health and sport" on www.zunal.com  - http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=183877. It took a lot of time to organise my thoughts and materials, so I'm going to introduce my web quest to students tomorrow. I have also created Rubrics which is new both for me and my students. It will help students to evaluate themselves and show them the criteria of their mark. I think it will be very useful for them to predict their results and to improve their performance. Moreover, it will help me to assess their work more objectively. 

I'm planning to carry out the project for three weeks. Each week students watch the recommended videos on a subtopic, then they have to comment on their class blog and discuss the topic in class. Their posts on the class blog will help them prepare for class discussions, to organize their thoughts and make them feel more confident. In his comment on my project Robert gave me a great idea for the final product for my students. And I would like to use it. As the final project students will make video interviews with imaginary sports stars about sport and healthy lifestyle and upload them on www.schoolyoutube.com. I think it will be both educational and fun for them.

So, my next step is to launch the web quest and create the class blog. I'm going to do it tomorrow in class as I'm teaching in the classroom with the Internet access. I aslo need to edit and compleet some parts of the web quests such as conclusion and teacher page. I'm looking forward to implementing this new technology in my lessons. Hope students will appreciate my efforts.

Week 6

In my view, this week has been more intensive than the previous ones. I have learnt many new things for teaching large classes and engaging students into the teaching process. For example, Interactive Power Point Presentation. I used to make PPT for my lessons but I never used hyperlinks and other interactive elements. It took me some time to work out how to implement them, but in the end, I managed to do it. The URL is http://www.slideshare.net/tatsianaseurukova/australia-quiz2.

Another way to make students more engaged is using a discussion board which can serve as a trampoline for their oral discussion in class. For example, Nicenet - a simple LMS or "Learning Management System." Two more complicated LMS are Blackboard and Moodle. All of them put a student in the centre of the teaching process. 

I also discovered another interesting teaching method  - Flipping classroom.  (http://www.techsmith.com/flipped-classroom.html.) The idea is that students learn new material at home, working on the Internet and then having practice in class. In my opinion, it is worth using for developing reading, listening and speaking skills when students read or listen some material at home and then discuss it in class. As for introducing new grammar and vocabulary, I would prefer a traditional classroom where a teacher can see students' eyes, answer their questions and prevent misunderstanding and mispronunciation of the new language that can happen while learning it on their own at home. 

Tatsiana

Week 5

I can't believe that half  the course is behind. Time flies... But very effectively!
This week was devoted to Project Based Learning and alternative assessment. I used PBL partly in my teaching before, but I have learnt a lot of new things. For example, I got really excited by WebQuests. I find them motivating and challenging. Students get directions and then they choose follow these directions at their own pace, trying to solve some problem and fulfill the task.

WebQuests impressed me so much, that I decided to make a WebQuest as my final project. The aim of my project is to help students develop their listening skills. In this quest students will have to do different tasks based on authentic listening materials. They will get links to interviews, news, stories, videos, etc. On each stage students will a listening-comprehension task which will lead to a classroom discussion as a post-listening activity. As their final project, they will need to use the information they got at all the stages and their own experience and create something like a short movie.

The new thing I got to know this week was Rubrics. Rubrics can help students to understand how their work will be evaluated and how they can achieve the highest result. They can evaluate themselves and each other as well. I created my Rubric using http://rubistar.4teachers.org/. It was not very hard. First I looked through various existing rubrics, then I used a template, choose the categories which I find appropriate for evaluating listening and speaking and changed some of the offered criteria. I'm glad I will be able to use rubrics in my WebQuest. It will be new for me and my students and I think rubrics will help them to perform more effectively and it will be easier for themselves and for me to assess their projects.

An adventure is ahead!

Week 4

This week has brought new knowledge, new ideas and practical advice. It started with reading as usual. I find the articles "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction" by Jarek Krajka and "Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books" by Mei-Ya Liang very useful. The authors share some great ideas how to use technology for developing reading and writing skills and remind us to incorporate on-line lessons in the Curriculum.

Then I spent quite a lot of time searching for the sites which help build writing and reading skills. As I am teaching teenagers, I tried to find the sites suitable for their needs, age and interests. It wasn't easy because most sites were either for kids or for adults. I stopped at two sites: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com

and http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org. Both sites offer a variety of texts for reading with pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading activities, questions for discussion and writing tasks. The latter site also provides listening activities, video, games, exam parctice and a magazine for teens. I haven't had enough time to visit the sites offered by the other participants but I'm going to do it soon.

Next, I created a technology-enhanced lesson plan. In my lesson I used the site www.esl-lab.com. It was new for me as I had never used the Internet in class. Writing the plan helped me to analyse the actvities offered and understand how to deal with them. I chose the conversation "Exercise program" as these days the topic of my lessons is "Healthy lifestyle" and I intended to incorporate it in the curriculum. I was also able to create a google doc of my lesson which is very convenient for getting feedback, so I just posted the link to my google doc in Nicenet forum.

Another task was to describe the class I'm teaching, the problems it's experiencing and think how technology can help to solve these problems.  I find listening comprehension and pronunciation are the most problematic issue as we have lack of listening materials in our course books. Russian intonation affects their English speaking production. I started thinking how technology can help to deal with this problem. At the beginning of the course I was excited by the idea of creating a class blog, but now I understand this will help to improve my students' reading and writing skills, which is very useful, of course. But now I'm thinking on how I can use this blog or maybe find another technology to develop their listening skills. I would like to do a project which will expose authentic listening materials to students and will develop their listening skills as well as pronunciation. I'm thinking about a long term project for my students which could make them listen to authentic materials in class and at home in order to carry out this project step by step. 

I'm looking forward to Week 5 as I will have to decide on what technology to choose for my final project in order to solve the class problems .