Week 10 Reflection

Here, I feel sad and speechless but I would say every end is just a new beginning.

                 It is the end of the course but the beginning of change and new things in our beliefs, knowledge and practice. We are happy that we started to have some meta-cognition about the use of technology and the different ways it could be integrated in language teaching and learning.

                 This week's discussion was about advice we could give to future participants, I would briefly say motivation is the first key to success and change, persistence and trial as having something finished or done is better than perfect. Seeking perfection will always keep us in the phase of thinking, dreaming and planning and we will never move to action; however, to evaluate something or our abilities to implement it or its effects, we must start action. Many of us claim about the conditions and circumstances in our institutions but we should bear in mind that no learning setting is perfect.

          I would also say to those who are interested to join the course, the course is a great chance to learn new techniques and new ideas to implement technology and also a great chance to put this theory into practice. Our instructor Sean McClelland was amazing in every step of the course. His clear guidance and advice helped us a lot to go straight to our objectives and respond to course assignments. 

                 During the course, we learned various techniques and tools such designing blog, website, webquest, rubric, activity, powerpoint, Padlet, virutal class..... but if we think and reflect on our practice, we can say that we are still in the phase of awareness and we need time to move to the phase of planning and actions. For the sake of the course, we tried most of them but in reality we still need work on our understanding of these tools and their practice. Further, some work must be done by our institutions to integrate technology into the curriculum and maybe we will be some of the reasons of this change. For me personally, I will take the initiative to plan something for my department staff to get them familiar with all what we did here. 

               Another issue that we explored this week are the technology evaluation rubrics. I liked much the technology integration matrix  (http://fcit.usf.edu/matrix/adoption.php) which is characterized by levels of technology integration and characteristics of the learning environment. The rubric is well designed and indicators are well stated for the teacher, students and the setting. Having a look at the matrix and trying to evaluate my practice of technology, I found that I am in the adoption level but honestly I think I am still in the entry level in all aspects. 

             Finally, my project is corrected and I will have time to revise it. I was surprised to get a good score in the project but this motivating to revise this project and think of other plans of change. 

              
           Honestly, counting the gains of the course deserve from us ten weeks maybe or more to describe everything we did and everything we learned. I hope to have other chances to meet Sean and coursemates. Thanks you all for the enthusiasm you gave me. 




Ouarda (Algeria)
      

Week 9 reflection

A very strange week, all against me !! but finally done !!

This week I was lost between connection, exam correction and George absence but finally the work is done and I finished all tasks of the week.



This week's issue was learning styles and their implications for teaching. The main reading was an article entitled "learning styles and strategies" by Richard Fedler http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSdir/styles.htm. In this article, the author discusses the different types of learners and how learners of each type could help themselves. In this article, the author made us explore 4 pairs of learning styles which are active vs reflective, sensing vs intuitive, visual vs verbal and finally sequential vs global.

I also read about styles implication for teaching in Montgomery and Groat article ' students learning styles and their implication for teaching' where the authors discuss the reasons of incorporating learning styles in our teaching giving examples and evidence in each case. http://www.crlt.umich.edu/sites/default/files/resource_files/CRLT_no10.pdf

These articles and this week's discussion took me to another article about a serious issue which is whether learning styles are valid or not ? The article is entitled are learning styles invalid? http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/LS_Validity%28On-Course%29.pdf
Here the author raises the issue of whether students who have the same learning style has same reactions and same quality of work by  discussing this main question "Do students with different assessed learning styles respond differently to specific forms of instruction? Are the differences consistent with the learning styles model upon which the assessment was based? 

Another article  that I find worth reading and I highly recommend is Jenna P. Carpenter's iarticle entitled: "Using Learning Styles to Improve Student Learning " http://sections.maa.org/lams/proceedings/spring2004/JennaCarpenter.pdf

In this article learning styles are classified into 5 dimensions according to the learning process or learning purposes.

- processing (active/reflective)
- perception (sensory/ intuitive)
-input (visual/verbal)
- understanding (sequential/global)
- organization (inductive/deductive)





Another link that I really appreciated this week is the link to the quiz of what is your learning style? Trying the quiz made me discover myself as a new person because I discovered things that I have never thought about. Teachers can explore their learning styles and be aware of theirs before asking or trying to think about styles of their learners as well as they can make the quiz as a part of an online activity in a blog or web-quest or virtual class to explore types of learners he/she has. http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-learning-styles-quiz

Concerning the project, it passed all in bad circumstances. It was written in hurry, then no connection and finally no peer feedback but at the end, Annusha solved the problem and corrected it for me. The experience of the web-skills course has taught us lot not only web-skills but collaboration and interaction skills as well. My students are still revising their essays on Google docs, posting on the class Padlet and sending feedback to each other. As beginning and first experience for me and them, I can say that it is enough satisfactory and successful. I am still waiting to correct final results and see the difference and their improvement.

The best thing I gained from this course is an amazing teacher and nice classmates;

 

Warda, Algeria

Week 8 reflection

Finally the end of week 8.
Since we started the course, I have been thinking how to do with week 8 as I knew I would be traveling to UK and having lot of work there. I thought I will miss it but at least I could save some of it.

The first thing we discovered are some resources for teachers and some interesting sites to design activities and exams for students. Among the sites that I highly recommend: SMILE   http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/mimea/smile/v2/index.php and ANVILL  https://anvill.uoregon.edu/anvill2/.

The task of the week was to create or design a teacher resource ( activity, test or class) using the techniques we have discovered during the web-skills course. Personally, I started working on  a padlet and nicenet class for the participants of my project and a blog for students of first year. I am also waiting to finish my thesis and start seriously building a professional website to help upload all resources I have to my students and colleagues.

For the draft of the project I did it during a journey between Cardiff and London, so I was really tired and exhausted. But, I have succeeded somehow to fulfill it but still waiting to correct students essays and make my post test to be able to compare scores using SPSS to know how much the experiment was effective or not.

I am so sad that we have not had much time to discuss and learn from each other. This week for example, I was on travel, correcting exam papers, preparing new lectures for second semester..... A lot to do and a tired OUARDA. Another task is waiting for me is reading Jorge's report, I hope I can finish it by tomorrow.

I am looking forward to having some time to go back to the wiki and nicenet to read all my classmates posts and works. I hope we will have access after the course period. I don't know the norms but I hope we can.  

Week 7 Reflection

Dear all,

Time is running and we are approaching to the end. Honestly I don't like end days especially when it is about having knowledge, knowing people, having new contacts and relations.

The special touch of this week was having Rachel with us. I hoped to have more time with her but due to work and time, I could not realize that.

This week was about an issue which is related to every issue in  learning/teaching process: autonomy. The first question that was raised by Rachel is weather it is acquired or inborn ? I really enjoyed reading comments and views of some of my course mates and from every post I learned something new and interesting. As a conclusion, we reached that autonomy is  multifaceted and can never be treated separately. On one hand, learner autonomy is not the total neglect of teachers' control but it is learners' responsibility to take control over their learning but under teachers' guidance; so we can never deny the role of the teacher to make the wheal of learning move and to complete the cycle of learning as there is no motivation without teachers, no evaluation and sometimes more than that. However, learners' autonomy is based also on teachers' abilities and awareness which can be a part of teachers' autonomy. On the other side, autonomy is based on learners' motivation including all subsystems and aspects such as confidence, self actualization, self esteem.....Thus, we can not discuss autonomy without discussing the different factors (external and internal) that may affect learners' motivation. All the factors may interact either to develop autonomy or reduce it. Further, autonomy is also related learning strategies used by learners, where we find those who are aware, able to plan , manage their learning and make self-evaluation more autonomous than those who are not, which means those who are using meta-cognitive strategies are more successful in saving their time and energy to achieve their learning goals and objectives. Also, learners who know that language is for communication and tend to solve their communication problems using social/affective strategies are more successful especially in productive skills.


The other side of the week was working on my final project. As I mentioned in last week, I started my virtual class with a few students of third year to teach them how to write essays. George has chosen me to be his partner and I am so motivated to work together and exchange knowledge but I find him very active and sometimes I feel unable to reach him. He started sending me all what he is doing with his students and I am learning from him lot. Another extra benefit from the course is working with him.Concerning my project, my students finished all tasks (pre-tasks) of the experiment and they started writing their essays on google drive. My students really impressed me as I find them very motivated and doing well. They read the lessons, responded to my questions, filled in a survey, chose to work in pairs and finally joined google drive and created google docs and invited me to be their to give them feedback when writing their essays. I liked everything they are doing. I thought that I am changing only my ways and techniques of techniques but I think I started to change my beliefs as well and I am sure that changing beliefs is more effective then changing ways because beliefs will form our thoughts which will be translated in a form of actions as illustrated here (from http://www.mind-sets.com/html/mindset/beliefs.htm

 

It is said  What you believe determines the world you live in, and by changing one, you change the other. so we don't need only to have dreams and interest to change but we must have a change inside us and have positive beliefs about what we do and what we want.