Week Ten: Signing off

Dear All,

This suppose to be my last official blog entry for my course which started amid lots of expectation and excitement. In this intensive ten week not only have I got to know some brilliant teachers and wonderful people but also I worked quite rigorously for keeping up with all my course mates.

It would actually take me a whole week of non stop writing to chronicle my learning from this amazing course. So, I would actually write some of my best learning from this course.

I would like to start with the idea of blog for interaction with students. It seemed to me my greatest learning. Later I found that the blog can be used for extended self learning by exploring supplementary material by the instructor. It can also be used to learn about student's writing and their interest which can determine the course of the learning for the students to some extent.

Another biggest learning is to know about the things that I thought I knew quite well. For example, I hardly thought of power point as a powerful tool for interaction while teaching a item in the class. After learning a whole lot of techniques and tips about power point presentation I am sure to have a lot of interaction with my students even when I am 'lecturing' on some 'uncool' things especially in my writing class.

I would like to end it here as I plan to actually come back to this post and enrich it with my more discovery I had throughout the course
       

Week Nine: Relief and Sadness

Dear All,

Hope all of you are doing well. The expected moment for which we had a clock ticking in our mind as well as in the our class wiki came and went by. The long waited submission date which suddenly seemed to me galloped quite at the end is over. Passed quite a day, still vivid in my memory. Had a nagging headache, slept quite late in the previous night.

The ordeal of writing an extended piece always seemed to me a nightmare. But I think I should get used to it, after all it is the beginning. While drafting the project report I felt that some of my ideas are getting clumsily entangled in the 'endless' sentence(s) I was writing. Did not have enough time to revise, so I left it to my peer readers to go through the mess. I regret and apologize for the hard time I have given to my two wonderful classmates. I am sorry Arifeen and Mukhprat. Wondering myself why this realization came so late. I realize that I actually understood that extent of the pain my peer reader had to go through once I revisited my draft and tried to make sense out of it. Hope I could sufficiently clear the clatter in my final submission for my for my instructors so they can navigate with a little effort.

As it is supposed to be a reflection, so I think I should come out of my nonsensical blabbering and say in plain terms that I learned I lot literally a lot. Now I can empathize with my learners more once I remember how frustrating writing can be at times even after so years of academic training. I also learned to start a little earlier so that I do not have run at the end. I still have to learn how to separate myself from my writing and going through it at least one more time to have a fresh look. Above everything I have the epiphany that I should write frequently to come out of this dreadful feeling I have once I think of writing something substantial.

I vaguely remember my first meeting with Howard Gardner's brainchild multiple intelligence. It was probably introduced in one of the applied linguistic courses I took in my final years. Then I had the chance of knowing little more about it from a conference presentation where the two researchers showed how addressing different intelligence inside the classroom quite dramatically increase student's motivation. My last encounter with multiple intelligence took place in the 4th Teaching Learning Centre Workshop. In fact, it was the main attraction of a two hour session titled .I learned quite a lot not only theoretically but also practically by doing some very engaging activities. This time when saw the topic in the ninth week I realized that we would be knowing something new about it. My understanding about multiple intelligence become more solid after going though all the reading and reflecting about them. Now, I know that I can actually involve my students in different activities such as word games, puzzle, Webquest, presentation which will help them to learn differently.

I really feel sad that it is coming to an end. Even though my conscious mind says that you will not have to think of one more deadline but somewhere deep in my heart I feel the pain of loss of such great company.

Hope to keep in touch.

Biday(Goodbye)                 

Week Eight: Challenges and Overcoming the Challenges

Hello Everyone,

This week have been one of the most challenging weeks of my life. So I would just share some of my challenges.

To begin with, the week started with the looming shadow of the submission of project report and even though most of my classmates were really prepared to deal with this challenge I was a little bit lagging behind as I have mentioned in my project report draft because of unforeseen closure of my class for one week so I could not interact with them in that time. However I realized that the effort to work on the project task is going to be appreciated as our instructors have mentioned that we will have time to refine our draft.

Then came the challenge of waking till 12:00 in the midnight for attending the webinar session to hear and see my instructors and some of my colleagues. I would say it was really worth all the effort of staying up late and feeling little dizzy on the next day.

Finally, the exploration of the tools for creating a class site and making online exercise was quite exciting. It was quite simple to create a nicenet class. I now have the strong wish to create a Google site similar to our class site. Hope I have the time and energy to do it soon.
               

Week Seven: Learning and Reflection

Hello Everyone,

This week was a great challenge for me as finding a partner seemed really hard. Though, I eventually managed to join Arifeen's group I had a tough time before that. To give just a brief overview of my predicament, I would say my three previous attempt to find a partner was unsuccessful as almost all of them was already in contact with another person and formed their pair or group.

Another challenge was to think of ideas for my class blog. As it is the important element for my final project. Unfortunately I was already lagging behind with my project as I did not have any class with the group because of two holidays that impeded my communication with my students as we did not meet in the holidays. To my good luck I could hammer out some ideas and eventually put them in the blog and officially open the blog to my students.

My greatest learning from this week is never to lag behind when looking for a peer reader. I also learned that I can use my one computer classroom in many new ways; one of them is to use it for reading text through Powerpoint slides. One of the things that make me feel truly great to be in this course is how I have learned many new ways of looking at 'old' things.

   

      

Week Six: Learning and Reflection

Hi Everyone,

This week I had another 'expected' surprises as we learn about interactive Power Point presentation. I am calling it an expected surprise because I knew from the course content that we will do something on interactive Power Point but it still remained a surprise as I did not know what exactly we will be doing. It turned out to be a great surprise as the links and files shared by our instructors show us that there are a good number of ways I can play with power point to make it truly interactive. For example, I learned that I do not have to minimize my Power Point to bring my student's attention back to me, rather I can put some blank slides at the time I anticipate they will be doing activity or listening to my instruction. I also learned that I can take concept test to check my student's understanding of the ideas or writing organization that I so 'diligently' tried to clarify. This concept test is some thing that I badly need to apply in my teaching as I am increasingly finding out that my student's understanding of the ideas I tried to clarify is not clear enough to do the task as instructed even with 80% accuracy.

I would like to finish by by sharing one very basic thing that I learned a hour ago. I hope most of you knew that you can open multiple blogs using your same Gmail account. I did not knew that! So, there I was stuck in the dilemma whether to open a Wordpress or Blogger account because I did find the idea of opening another Gmail account very entertaining. As a result, I opened a Wordpress to start my class blog. Here I am quite dumbfounded after finding out that I could have easily opened a Blogger account using my same email address as it would have save me some trouble. Anyways, what do say about opening my class blog in Wordpress? Any suggestion and advice would be welcomed.

        

Week Five: Reflection

Hello Everyone,

Week five started with great enthusiasm for me as I was eagerly waiting for learning or refreshing my concepts of alternative assessment, rubric and project based learning. I was not disappointed at all as I did get to know a lot of new things about alternative assessment, project based learning and most importantly rubric.

My most engaging learning experience was to make a rubric. My first challenge was to navigate around Rubistar and after some time I got hold of it. Then came the real realization when I happened to see that the page would expire after 40 minutes if I don't save it within that time. The thing that I understood later is I could have saved the format at first and then fine tune all the details. But I guess that is the real way of  the world, we learn by making error or is that mistake. The process of making the rubric made me think about the class where I actually plan to share it. It has also made me go through terms and criterion again and again as I did not want my students to face any difficulty to understand the rubric. The other difficulty was to come up with the terms that all of you will understand. For example, I was quite hesitant about the term to use for main point as my past learning says every kind of details in a paragraph can be referred as supporting details. 

The other challenging task, not in terms time and effort rather in terms of decision making, was to decide about which blog service to choose i.e. blogger.com and wordpress.com for our class blog. I finally choose wordpress.com as I felt that my students would be discouraged by the fact that to create a blog in blogger.com they have a open a new gmail account.       

Regards

Farid/ Bangladesh

Week Four Reflection

This week has been a fascinating week for me. Learned a lot. My first learning is there are so many dedicated teachers out there that I just need to spent some time in searching and materials in hundreds and thousands of them will surface in front of my eyes. For example the Activities for ESL students has literally thousand of variety of activities and quizzes which will help my learners to consolidate their knowledge grammar and words.

The other very useful thing that I have got hold of is the sample lesson plan template shared by our instructors. This filling up of the plan with information has taught me that having a clear template for planning any lesson actually helps in unimaginable ways.

So I would like to show my deepest gratitude to the instructors and all the classmates for making a little more reflective in my teaching practice.