Week 10. Food for thought...

Well, 10 week course is approaching its logical end. I can't say that it was easy as it requires enough time and when you are working your usual hours and even more it's a bit challenging to find enough time to complete all assignments consciously. Although I didn't read all the articles I added course assignments' page to my Delicious page, so I'll be able to look through some articles when I need it. 

As for most successful topics I can't stress some of them as in every topic I found ideas which are new, interesting and practical for me as I work with different groups, levels, programs and languages, so this or that idea can be used with this or that course and it will be useful and will make course more efficient. 

There were a lot of new tools for me. Although I heard about them before I didn't use them and even didn't read or learn about them. "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn" (B. Franklin). I thing this quotation is the essence of this course. Nothing to take away, nothing to add. May be my more advanced colleagues will be more critical and constructive as some of them are real professional in a great variety of technology tools. And I'm happy to be with them in this course!

Thank you!

Best,

Olga

Week 9: Learning styles

We feel comfortable when we teach as we did it before. I met a teacher in France and he said - what can technology give to students that I can't give? In any way it's just a text, then why not to use usual printed texts? I tried to persuade that a teacher can use a great variety of technology tools to develop these or those skills, to make learning process more efficient but I failed.  The answer was - I prefer classical university teaching. 

To my mind the answer is that this model is teacher-centered - I can do it and I'll do it as I think appropriate. 

Learning and teaching should be a reciprocal process and student-centered because our aim is to help students and ourselves acquire new knowledge and skills which can lead to individual and collective development. 

One more argument is that students are different as people are different, they have their own learning styles and it doesn't depend on them. Sure they learn completing assignments which teachers give them. But how more effective and useful and interesting would this process be if we were not so teacher-based!?

Conclusion of this week is - assignment can one but its results can be presented differently. Just add one or two sentences to your assignment and teaching-learning process will change to be more innovative, capturing and effective!

Week 8: Peer review

It is a good idea to make a draft of the final project first. As it takes enough time but all our previous tasks are destined to help us. I mean that preparing the draft I used assignments accomplished for the previous weeks. They have been done and some time with some other assignments have passed. So we've got new knowledge and new experience and it didn't take long to add some changes. 

It' s a good idea but I think it can be used for all courses. For example, our students starting the 3d foreign language have 360 class hours a year. And at they end of this first year they are to show their pronunciation skills, listening and comprehension skills, grammar and reading skill, and, of course, speaking skills. What could it be a final project here? I suppose something can be found but here I'd prefer traditional teaching although I admit that some aspects can result in a final project.

And the idea of peer review always works well. You have a chance to look at your peer's draft critically and while doing that you become more critical to your own draft. While reading peer's draft you think: Aha, in my draft I could do so or so to make it more efficient or clear! And when you get checklist prepared by your peer you continue his/her ideas and aspire to improve and make your project perfect. Although it's not possible we always should aspire for it.

I would offer my students before presenting their PowerPoint presentation or reports to give them to their peers to be reviewed. Sure rubric for such review should be created together with students. I think doing so students become more conscious, more critical and more efficient.

Learner autonomy

One more week has passed and brought food for thought.

There were two subjects for discussion this week.

One of them - mobile devices and one-computer class. A lot of new information and it's not surprising as technology develops rapidly and new Apps and devices and ideas how to use these devices appear.

The most capturing question for me was the question concerning learner autonomy. After reading some articles, searching different sites the question is still open for me - how to enhance learner autonomy? I'm sure it's not the question of technology because we can create an avalanche of tasks when students are to work independently, online, using mobile devices, etc. but I think it will be just formal, I would say, technical or spacial autonomy. And how to help them or in many cases make them responsible and conscious about their learning process ts the question. Sure it need time and effort and wish and some personal qualities. It's not a very rare case when a student for whom English is not a  "must have" can complete all the assignments but he will do it superficially just to get his grade and forget about English for ages. Is it possible to enhance his responsibility for learning?

I haven't found the answer ti this question this week but I discovered one more new and very useful thing Padlet (http://padlet.com/wall/WebskillsF2013 the Padlet of this course can be found here).

And here I have the question again - if I were a really autonomous learner I would learn new methods of foreign language teaching every day or week to improve myself. But due to some reasons I don't do it and does it mean that I haven't attained the necessary level of learner autonomy?

Week 6: Interactive PowerPoint

Well, this week was challenging...

Firstly, I'll describe the situation. As I wrote in Introduction discussion I teach English and French and I'm Russian. For three years I've been participating in the project of our university and Universite de Haute Alsace (France) - Russian teachers teach students of the French university Russian Language and Culture. 

That's why for this period of time I teach Russian in French. And one of our classes is dedicated to Russian literature.  As I have problems with Internet connection at the residence I combined some French texts with English ones in the PowerPoint presentation to let me colleagues see the idea of the presentation and try different options. I won't use this variant during me class -I'll use French one.

What I discovered?

Quite many things. Although some of them were known for me and I use some of them but in a little bit different way. For example, at the beginning of the lecture it's always good to brainstorm a little bit and find out what students already know and so introduce them in the subject. The idea of Think-Pair-Share is a way to make this introduction and engage students in more conscious learning.

The next thing is the fact that PowerPoint presentation is not just a number of slides which follow one another. It's possible to add hyperlinks to other slides or to exterior resources (texts, video, audio). I even didn't think about it before! What a great possibility for distant courses.

I liked the idea of Interpreted lecture - it keeps students in suspense in a way.

ConcepTest and Quick Write are equivalent to the summary of the class when students are to reproduce the main aspects of the material explained.

But I guess the main idea is not to do what I mentioned above but to know that we shouldn't limit ourselves when we reach something, I mean myself when I used PowerPoint presentation just as a visual support consisting of some texts and pictures. 

Go ahead! That what I told myself this week.

  

Week 5. PBL, alternative assessment, etc.

This week's assignments made me think about different things.

First of all I made sure again that PBL can be used in all spheres, all topics and all levels. Even if you teach phonology, grammar or semiotics you can do it. It needs more time, more efforts, more ideas, abandoning your usual and habitual way of teaching but it's worth doing. In some aspects we can teach passing on from one project to another, in others - once a course. But it will make teaching and learning more practical, it'll develop students skills which will be helpful for them in their future (teamwork, brainstorming, information search, critical thinking, preparing the speech, etc.) and it'll develop their individuality.

The second thing is alternative assessment or rubrics. It's a good idea as it gives students more understanding of what they are to do and how the results ll be evaluated, it teaches them to keep ethic norms while evaluating their peers, it shows them what aspects or traits they should pay attention to, it teaches them to be more objective and many other things. But here it should be mentioned that not all the tasks can be evaluated, for some tasks in the course of intercultural communication (sure we can assess here some formal things but the course itself is not destined for it).

I'm waiting for the next week and new discoveries!

Week 4: lesson plan and a question

This week we've had several tasks. Firstly we got some information about reading/writing skills. I discovered some sites which can be interesting and useful - all of us read  texts with students and now we have an idea about resources available and tasks offered in the sites or created on our own.

The second task was to create a technology-enhanced lesson plan. As in group which I describe there are only two students it's not a ptoblem to find computers for everyone. But some of my colleagues teach classes of 50 and more students (just imagine a class with 50 computers, it's unreal because it woud be so huge). Moreover there is only one computer for a department, not even a class... And even if there were computers or students would do their tasks at home how much time it would take the teacher just to glance at all the assignments.

Then I liked the third task when we were to think about our own students first and one or two their problems. And then the idea couldn't stop and we tried to predict, to find a tool how to cope with this issue. I guess we'll do it next week.

And one more thing. I like the ABCD model but I have a question. Why should we define the D (degree)? It's impossible to attain 100% accuracy for all students but they are supposed to attain at least 60 or, in some cases, 70% accuracy to learn new material, to cope with it. In this case - what for is it necessary to state this percentage it it's more than 60 and less than 100?

Week 3: Orall skills and Delicious page

Every week we have two deadlines - mid-Wednesday and  Sunday. The first part of the week is for reading course materials, completing assignments and participating in discussion thread. So the second part of the week gives us possibility to continue our "investigation" or to think over the results we got.

This week I learned two things.

First is a possibility to have access to necessary resources from any computer. Being at home or at work or participating in some seminar or courses you can find your favourte sites which you use or used at any time and you don't need remember its name, address, etc. I appreciate this possibility very much as sometimes I prepare for my classes at home, sometimes at work. It the Discussion thread I compared it with Dropbox or Google drive. As for students it can be useful for them, for example, for my master’s students while doing their research – in their delicious page they can create the list with sites for their research and they’ll have access to these sites and to this list from libraries, from home, cafes, from everywhere and at any time.

The second thing I learned is podcast. Some my colleagues told a lot about it because they have their research in the domain of podcasts and students’ autonomy. They even showed its options but John Gay said: “Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand”. That’s the true. Due to our assignment I had to do it and finally I know what it is, how to work with it and where it can be used.

Let’s see. Some assignments suggest students to prepare a speech or report and in the class it’s impossible to listen and discuss all the reports. Podcasts give possibility to discuss all the reports: some of tem will be delivered and discussed in the class and others – on-line. Next time students who reported in the class will do it on-line and vice versa.

A lot of variants can be used and their number is infinite.

Week 2: ABCD Objectives

Many years ago I got Foreign Language Teacher education. We were how to state objectives, how to structure the lesson, how to use appropriate methods, etc. After graduating from the university I have been teaching for 15 years already and rather often attend courses practical teachers. But only this week  I found out an interesting thing - while defining the objectives of the lesson, while teaching I don't think about to what extent students are supposed to assimilate new knowledge or skill. Because there is always the idea of 100% accuracy although the real results show up not so brilliant.

I think next week I'll try to state more precise objectives which won't be "global" but step-by-step. May be we won't achieve impressing results but they will be more real, more practical.

The second thing I've learned this week - variety of search engines each of which has its rubrics and it gives more possibilities to find what we are interesed in. Sure there are some of them which can be found useless for us or not interesting and it should be so. In any case we should know what we need and where and how we can find it or try to find it.

Week 1

It's my first experience to create a blog. Sure I know what it is, what it is for but in everyday live ICT take so much time. From one hand it's great - we can get any information we need at any time, we can communicate with people who are far away, we can search for books, articles and carry out a kind of research and so on. But! All these technologies devour our time, time that we can share with our dearest, with our friends, with our students. It's a well known fact that nowadays children prefer to communicate with their peers, classmates, friends via Internet. And sometimes they forget how to play together, what to say to each other when they meet each other, how to make a "real discovery" when you go to a library or an archive or just to your granny to ask her "What does this word meen? I have never heard it".

You may think that I'm a bit retrograde. May be. But I would prefer to spend more time with my family and with our friends. And in this case I think that ICT can help us to become more independent of ICT. It may sound funny.

But! This week with the help of this course I got a chance to "meet" a lot of people from so many parts of the world. It's the first achievement of this week.

The second one - thanks to Sean and this course I learned ground rules for discussion which can be used everywhere - in class and extracurricular activities, in communication with the surrounding world and with yourself.

The third one - the conclusion that it's good to know fron the very beggining what you are supposed to do, what results you are bound at, and what criteria will be used to estimate waht you've done.

The fourth- I have been ill for several days with high temperature and all the consequences but ICT gave me possibility not to be irresponsible - as soon I felt better I could do some tasks without leaving cozy home atmosphere.

How could I apply this new knowledge in my job???

I guess this knowledge can give more independence to my students and to myself, to free more time for real-time discussions (unprepared discussions) during class activities.

I should give more detailed perspectives to my students when beginning a new course.

Together with the students we should or we can state our Ground Rules for collaboration/cooperation.