WEEK 1

Week 1 reflection post

On 9^th February I was informed that I was a nominee for the Spring 2012 “Building Teaching Skills through the interactive web”. It was a great satisfaction.

During Week 0, Ms. Amy Warnock and Ms. Hillary O’Brien welcomed us and gave us important guidelines to start the course.

Week 1: Ms. Janine Sepulveda, our course instructor, welcomed us and declared the course officially open.

I visited the course website and explored it by following all the necessary steps to complete the assignments established for WEEK 1.

After reading the resources on the course website, I filled out the needs assessment survey saying how familiar I am with the technology-related issues, both in my personal use and the use at school. I also rated my students’ skills as far as their use of some Internet resources is concerned.

After joining Nicenet and registering for this course, I started exploring this collaborative communication tool. ICA (Internet Classroom Assistant) is a very interesting tool which allows us to send personal messages, participate in topic discussions, share documents, schedule activities, among many other features.

I use a similar tool at school: Moodle. Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) also involves collaboration in producing content, allows interaction and promotes a virtual learning environment. As I said before, I use this platform to communicate with my fellow teachers. I haven’t used it with the students yet. It involves creating email accounts for the students and we haven’t managed to accomplish that yet.

I introduced myself and shared some information about my personal and professional life. I collaborated in the Groud Rules discussion and referred to my previous knowledge about collaborating with other teachers in online courses. I also shared my opinion about the appropriate use of Internet resources.

I created my blog and I posted the URL on Nicenet. I also added its link to the class wiki. It was interesting to check all the blogs, but I didn’t have enough time to write comments on all of them. many participants show they are very skilled.

It was interesting to read A. Campbell article on “Weblogs for Use with ESL Classes”. These “online journals” allow us to reflect on what we have been learning. I think that in order to gain new skills of maintaining a blog, a teacher must be motivated and involved in the activities.

According to Campbell, a Tutor blog is run by the teacher and, apart from other purposes, gives syllabus information, introducing topic areas and “serves as a resource of links for self-study”. I think I can refer to my other blog as a “Tutor Blog”. I created it after taking an online course with Portuguese teachers. It is English. a communication tool (http://englishacommunicationtool.blogspot.pt). I created some materials which allow students to study alone such as online quizzes, audio files, video and links to other resources.

Creating a “Class blog” is an interesting idea. I see it as a possibility as far as I am concerned, but I think it is also a very demanding task for the teacher. The teacher must be certain that the activities are based on safe internet rules and ethics. The “class blog” is indeed a new strategy to use in the classroom. It will meet the students’ needs and interests and will motivate them.

In “Blogging for ETL” Graham Stanley shows “how a simple-based blog can be used t great effect” in English classes. Apart from referring to Campbell’s categorization of blogs, G. Stanley refers that teachers often combine different categories of blogs instead of using a single type of blog.

According to G. Stanley blogging is important because it gives the students the opportunity of having a different audience for their materials produced in class: the other teachers, their peers, even their parents can read their materials.

The fact that students can have a real audience for their work such as their parents is a good sign of strong partnership between school and parents. Parents must also be involved in these issues as most students a have access to the Internet in their homes. If teachers and parents work together, the use of web resources will improve the quality of teaching, the quality of students’ learning and the safety of the virtual learning environment.

I did an optional activity (Webskills Google map). I placed a marker next to the place where I live and I wrote a simple description. It was quite an ordeal as my internet connection failed and I wasn’t sure if the changes had been saved.

I participated in the week’s topics doing my best and trying to get to know the participants. I checked the participants’ blogs and posts. I started following some blogs and added my comments. It is quite a big and heterogeneous group of participants and I believe we will not annoy Larry Ferlazzo (he says “I sometimes get a little annoyed by education bloggers who gripe about teachers who won’t embrace technology.”) as we are all eager to learn.

The resources we had at our disposal were/are very interesting.  I read “ASSESSMENT GUIDES AND RUBRICS FOR LANGUAGE CLASSES” (L. Opp-Beckman-2009) and I want to learn more about choosing and using rubrics.

I like learning how to use different web tools. Two of those tools that caught my eye when I had a look at Larry Ferlazzo’s blog: Bubblr to create comic strips and Bookr to make a slide show. Larry Ferlazzo’s blog shows us many other tools to create online materials.

• I realized that learning about “writing behavior-based learning objectives, learning styles, learner autonomy, teaching large classes, the one-computer classroom, and a variety of assessment techniques” will give me the necessary tools to improve my teaching, motivate my students, and help them reflect upon my teaching and their learning.
•  I will be able to explore all the possibilities of the different search tools, websites and teacher resources when I develop reading activities for my students.