Week 8

Another very intensive week is coming to an end.

At first, I had to write a draft version of my final project report and send it to my partner, Yubaraj. Actually, it was quite time consuming in spite of the fact that we had been led to it step by step for several weeks. I used some final projects of past years' participants as an example and I tried to answer the questions stated in the project report template. I realised it was not complete when I finished, but I was lacking in time. I uploaded my draft version on our class wiki in my team's work place.

Then I read my partner's draft report, downloaded the checklist for peer review template and wrote my review with some comments and advice. I hope they will be useful for Yubaraj. While I was checking his draft report, I was able to look critically at my own report and I worked out what I needed to do to improve it. Now I'm looking forward to getting my partner's comments to have the whole picture.

This week has made another discovery for me - ANVILL. This virtual language lab is a real wonder. It gives a lot of opportunities for developing listening, speaking, writing skills, for practising pronunciation and reading aloud. At first, it looked a bit complicated but then, with the help of Jeff Magoto, this week's guest, and his clear explanations and demonstrations I managed to work out how to use ANVILL. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to join the webinar about ANVILL but I'm going to watch its recording soon. 

Another task was to create an online course site or an exercise to use online or offline. I decided to try to use ANVILL and create my video course. In my ANVILL course students have to do the three tasks: to watch the episode, to do the quiz and to record a short summary with the help of Voiceboards. I was amazed by the way it worked.You can make either video or audio recording. It allows having the recordings and the quiz results of all the students doing the course. It's a very convenient, easy to use and effective language toolbox. Students can do the tasks at home at their own speed and the teacher has the opportunity to listen to each student. In the future, I am going  to add more lessons to the course. You can see my video course here: https://anvill.uoregon.edu/anvill2/node/43344

Also I used the Hot Potatoes software and created a crossword on the topic "Family" for my Grade 9 students and uploaded it on the Internet.  I have been using Hot Potatoes for a year but I have never uploaded my documents on the net. I usually made HTML documents to use in our language laboratory for practising new vocabulary and grammar, reading comprehension or for testing. It's a very convenient tool which allows you to make exercises based on the material you are teaching. You can see it here: http://uk3.hotpotatoes.net/ex/98589/PUAZATBQ.php

And, of course, I continued my work on implementing new technologies in my lessons. I have made several changes in the project after getting the first results. I hope this project will help students to improve their language skills and encourage their autonomy.