What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

This week was one of the intense working week where both at work and for this online course I had to meet so many deadlines. Juggling between these two important tasks at times drains me out but for the sake of learning and personal development I took each lesson one step at a time.

 

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Thanks to Jeff Magoto (our guest moderator for this week) for the creative idea of starting ANVILL and informing us on how to-s and the successes usage of ANVILL as a tool for teaching language. Reading Jeff’s CV as being the director of the language centre in University of Oregon and other contributions he had made in the teaching line amazes me on what a teacher can do. It is personally an inspiration to me.

From his valuable knowledge we were also taught on how to use the Livechat, Quizzes and survey and the voiceboard plus other recording tools. The highlight of the lesson was the participation in a webinar which was informative and fun especially when interaction session started and there were echos. The webinar gave 3 things at one which tests learners multitasking skills to focus on the voiceboard, reply to chats and listen to questions from other people. It was fun and I would love to have one for my class next semester as I feel that students love online interaction as they are conscious about their speech and appearance plus they wont be bored doing one task at a time as the webinar gives allows you to chat, listen to the lecture and view other participants too. It matches well with its objective which is to focus on speaking and interaction. Thumbs up from me!

The next input was creating exercises or tools to facilitate teaching. There were many available tools for teaching and for development of class materials (that’s one of my favourite things to do before starting a class). I’ve used a few resources that were available on the list and I was familiar with moodle so I turned into making activities in class. The  wordsearch and crossword puzzle site definitely made my life easier by computerizing the words that I wanted only without having to provide the miscellaneous alphabets for the word search. I would bookmark all the other helpful resourceful tools that can be used in class for future references.

The peer review editing helped a lot though it gave me a big impact as I was told that the method did not correlate with the initial problem. I was a bit dumbstruck as I found it was acceptable it if it came in the discussion on nicenet during the week when we discussed the issue. Although method has been carried out I would modify that to become one of the limitations. The peer review did help a lot in terms of having another critical eye, many thanks to Hind and Yuliya for being there to guide me, although it’s painful at times you’ve got to hurt yourself to become better.

There are times where you fall behind because of the time crunch and times where you could perform well because you had time to analyze and review, I believe at moments like this where there’s immense pressure, I am hard on myself and emotions can sometimes kick in and interfere.

xx

Nur

I'm off to do some shopping for therapy. :) 

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