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.