Week 10

This course gave me a unique opportunity to develop my skills of using technology in EFL classroom. The issues raised and discussed were rather interesting for me. As Jodi said in her comment to my blog post for Week 9, many things in the course are not earth-shaking, but for sure they are  redirecting (if I may call them so). They made me reinterpret and reconsider my teaching preferences and opened to me a new approach to teaching. In my work I feel double responsibility, because apart from teaching English to my students, through my teaching I also show them how they may teach their students (as they are future teachers).  I develop both their linguistic and teaching skills. The more proficient I am, the more proficient my students will be. Unfortunately, I haven’t tried much with them this semester, but I hope I’ll do my best next academic year. Frankly speaking, I can’t name the best tool I have mastered in the course or the most relevant to my class, because everything I have learned may be successfully applied depending on my lesson objective. My Delicious stacks contain so many links that it will need some time to organize them.  As the head teacher of the English Development Course I have discussed my studying with Web skills course with my colleagues and they want me to share my experience with them in a form of a workshop or a seminar. So I have some plans for summer. 

As for other tools to be discussed, I think may be it would be nice as an alternative to get acquainted with data driven activities for developing basic linguistic skills based on the use of corpus data. It’s my personal interest, but still maybe other teachers would like to know about this possibility to use technology in EFL class.

To sum up my impressions from the course, I will say that this course is inspiring, encouraging and efficient. It was a great pleasure to be a participant of this fantastic learning community!!!! Thanks everybody!!! I am convinced, that this is not the end but the beginning of a new teaching life equipped with innovative techniques!!!

Week 9

With the course nearing to the end and much work done I can definitely say that  I have learned many useful and interesting things concerning the use of web resources for EFL classroom and gained valuable experience in distance learning and intercultural communication. I have enriched my teaching skills with new techniques which I want to integrate into my course next academic year. In the final project I present an instructional module which I designed for my course of English Language Development where I tried my best to incorporate everything I learned during the course. I will confess,  that it took me much time and many late nights to design everything and still I am not very much satisfied with the results (because as I am not currently teaching I have doubts what will work with my students and what not). Everything I did for project was new for me. Maybe my project is not so sophisticated compared with  some projects of my classmates, but before the Web Skills course I knew nothing about the educational use of many technology advances, I didn’t use them in class and what I know and can  to do at the end  of the course, I consider to be my personal victory. My project is dedicated to the use of technology to develop critical thinking skills. I designed a class web site, a class blog and a class Nicenet and worked out the activities using the web resources (videos, crosswords, tests, rubrics) I was suggested with during the course. I hope everything will work perfectly well.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the instructors of the course, Jodi Weber and Celeste Scholz, for their constant support, encouragement and understanding. As well I am grateful to the administration of Oregon University for providing me with such a valuable opportunity to participate in this wonderful course, which has changed my attitude to Web recourses and introduced me into the world of intercultural communications. Thanks a lot!!!