The Good in GOODbye

No matter how we’d yearn so that this experience will continue forever, the class will still come to its end. Forever is impossible and what will remain are just the archives (if we start compiling before it is terminated). Coming into this course with little knowledge on what to expect, I was excited as it was my first online learning class and I was ready to learn from our instructors. The challenges given moulded me to be more competent in technological aspects that were available but was never discovered. The nearest source would start by the search engines – shortcuts to PPT and even the bookmark system of Delicious. Deep down apart from the feature learnt, what taught me the most was the determination for everyone to learn by sharing and constantly reminding one another of the medium available online so that everyone can gain the advantage.

Selecting one interesting task was difficult for me as all were valuable (that’s the reason why all are bookmarked : ) ) The first few weeks of the task learnt about the ABCD objectives of English lessons. It kept us on track to the reason why we teach English in the first place. Gradually, the task progressed and placed us in gear as it opened our eyes to various sites for all the skills (Reading, Writing, Grammar, Listening, Speaking) to learn English language online. The tips on PPT and PBL projects including Webquests in order to integrate technology in class further challenged our creativity to use the softwares for our benefit in teaching. Then, towards the end of the course it was more focused on understanding our 'customers' -the students by learning about student centered learning, learner autonomy and their learning preferences. The flow of the course was well planned with the all the vital aspects in teaching and learning.

I will try to popularize blogging to my students and turn it into a learning habit among the masses and I’m also up to try the various lesson plans online and everything that has been taught. Not to forget ANVILL, webquest and other softwares that were introduced, it’ll take place depending on time. This is not the end, this is not the beginning either so we live by processing all the good things in different ways. Be good and goodness will come to you. The sole advice that I can give to future students is to be positive and have fun all the way.

Lastly to all my friends, although we are miles apart and we hardly know one another, our discipline and passion towards teaching has brought us together and I’m glad to be part of the clique and hope to share more with all of you in the future. Not to forget our dear instructors Jodi and Sherie for their hardwork in making this course interesting and your patience in dealing with us as students. You have inspired us a lot through this course and we’ll try to keep inspiring others.

Every single one of you have been so sweet.

This is definitely a bittersweet goodbye from me.

With love, 

Nur.

Goodbye for now. 

The biggest accomplishment

Picture via

So far meeting the deadline and being able to complete the report was yet the biggest accomplishment to date. Alas, everything on the report writing checklist was ticked and I felt ready enough to submit the project. There’s always a question that goes through my mind to whether it is perfect enough.



I focused a lot on the project as compared to the other tasks and now I’m going to continue reading other articles about learning styles and preferences. I just did the learning style quiz that was linked in Week 9’s list  http://www.open2.net/survey/learningstyles/ and Walla I’m a kinesthetic student. Now I know for a reason why I get bored easily during long lectures during my studies and why I am eager to finish class activities as kinesthetic students love movements and hands on task.

Will catch up with you guys later,
Nur  

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.

 

Picture via

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. :) 

Picture via

One Computer Classroom

Picture via

Similar to 1 Malaysia slogan of bringing in together different races in Malaysia, 1 computer classroom shares the same foundation too which is cooperation amongst students. Although it is likely to reflect on the sufficiency of budget for computers for schools, the 1 computer classroom will foster students to learn to learn in groups that will indirectly foster communication which is a healthy way to start of language learning.

As stated in the articles provided; teachers can use the computer as an administration tool, a flipchart or multimedia board and even softwares to be used for displaying texts/animation for the sake of presenting the information to the audience. There are numerous ways to functionally use a single computer in class and teachers should take the effort to be creative and implement the usage of using technology in class eventhough it might take more than the usual effort. If there are many things we can do with the computer, we can even do more with the availability of the Internet as students can surf to various language learning websites and watch videos pertaining to language learning (information will be endless once we’re connected on the www). In the midst of using the computer in classroom learning, we seldom forget to appreciate the small things such as the availability of a conducive classroom, power electricity, curtains which will help block in the lights, speakers and the most important item for display which is the LCD projector.

Lastly, lab ideas also triggered me to form a self access language lab in my department for the students to use in their free time (not classroom hours). I do think that a lab assistant or a part time instructor is needed to monitor the flow of the lab and also so that the students use it wisely. What I have in mind is to build a module of lesson plans using a maximum of 5 computers in the self access lab and once it is compiled, the students can go to the lab, choose a lesson of their preference and perform the activities on the own and report the results / display the project outcome to their class teacher. This is to ensure that students entering the self access lab will use it to its utmost potential and gain language learning benefits.  

Have a great weekend!

Nur

Starting The Project

This is my checklist for this week which I have managed to complete

1. Identify a class for this project
2. Assign them in groups. (3 students in 1 group). Since the girls out number the boys there will be 2 girls and 1 boy in each group.
3. I have given the students a guideline on how to set up their own blog. Groups/ any members of the group who already have an existing blog can continue to use their own blog for this project if they wish to do so.
4. Their first task is to write an argumentative essay in groups by Wednesday (22nd Feb) and publish it in their blog.
5. Students can work on their blog out of classroom time. 

That's all that I've done this week. I hope to see how they correct other group's essays next week.
xx
Nur

## I don't know what's wrong with my blogger site as there are problems in displaying the comments section. It will never display the comment sheet as it's on reload all the time. :((

From Zero Point to PowerPoint

I teach a small tutorial class of 25-30 students and there are no LCD projectors provided in these tutorial rooms. Because of the situation I hardly use any powerpoint presentations in class, I only use the powerpoint when I have to present information in meetings or for seminars.

Picture via

Looking at the notes and samples on how to create games and interactive so I am keen to start forming some games  for my students to try by using powerpoint slides. With the use of powerpoint I think that there are several aspects that should be taken in consideration

1.      ensure that the activity is preplanned carefully

2.      the set up of the slides must meet the objectives of the lesson

3.      the activities should be suitable for the students age & the number of students in the class (to grab attention)

4.      teachers should have an open and creative thinking to exploit powerpoint as a tutorial tool, exploration tool, application tool and communication tool too.

Among the advantages of using powerpoints are:

1.      teachers can widen the concept of learning

2.      teachers have the advantage to provide a learning situation that intrigues their creativity and interaction

3.      the usage of powerpoint can serve for different kinds of students with different learning styles.

I’m also trying to read more on how games like Jeopardy by using the powerpoint can relate to Skinner’s Operant Conditional Learning where it stressed on enforcement and extrinsic motivation where reward/praise is given systematically based on a correct answer and the process of answering the question is repeatable.

There is also a small relation to the process of retrieval of information which includes the input
(accepting input), storage and output and its correlation with students learning based on this model below

It is just a small idea and I’m still trying to link it together, it might be something or nothing at all.

Xx

Nur

(trying to think) 

Read about What Zero point is in Malaysia..

PBL Plus Tech

At par with the vast development of Internet, traditional classroom teaching and learning can be replaced with project based tasks. Highlights of PBL is the K-W-L chart (Tannenbaum, 1996) for a reflection of what I Know, What I want to know and What I’ve learned.

The strengths of PBL us based on the fact that it focuses on student’s individual growth instead of comparing them and evaluate students’ strengths on what they know rather than their weaknesses (Huerta-Macias, 1995 as cited in Tannenbaum, 1996).

This reveals that we are allowing students to shine based on their own ability and develop the motivation to work on the qualities to help them improve in the language proficiency through a progression of a timeframe.

In PBL, the teacher acts as a mentor and a facilitator in PBL instead of becoming a reference source. Thus the basic steps of KWL need to be reviewed and repeated for a number of times to enable teachers to reach the objective of learning. So the teacher needs to list and have checklists on what the students know, list out possibilities of solutions for students problems and what activities or actions relate to solve the problem and whether it can be implement within the timeframe of learning period.

In the end, both teachers and students need to put in the extra mile in teaching and learning to foster critical thinking for a PBL activity to become successful.

Teachers must be able to monitor progress, place a yardstick to how it can be conducted and evaluate performance of students’ work, without keeping pace of the project and having a checklist PBL will burden teachers to mark at the end of the course and evaluation  at that specific time only would defeat the purpose of progressive learning in PBL. So be more proactive in teaching for the wholesome benefit of the students. I hope we wont be needing  this. :)