Reflection Week 2

I learnt quite a few things during this week:
a) I thought that the Noodletools were a revelation. The way the entire search categories were neatly arranged and the ease of access that these tools provided are assets to any educator, I hope that this tool is used more and more so that people can move out of googling.
b) The other thing that I found extremely interesting was the ABCD model of learning objectives at the Penn State site. Though I have taught students for the last 15 years, I feel that as educators (at least in India), we take a lot of things for granted. For example, I have found only a few teachers who plan their sessions beforehand since many of them just walk into a class and 'deliver' a lecture. This assumption that students need to be filled in with knowledge can be very well-challenged if the ABCD model can be introduced in the classrooms. I am definitely going to try this out in one of the teacher-education sessions. To my mind, this has two advantages: it structures the thought process of the teacher, and the students know what they are supposed to do.
c) However, the best part of this week was the greater familarity with many of my webmates who generously commented on my posts. I must admit that I learnt a great deal from them. Especially, Celeste, Luis, Natalia, and Laura's posts were both thought provoking and illuminating though I learnt from all of them.
Hope to keep up the interaction in the coming weeks as well with the same intensity (though I know that it will be tough since my coursework starts next week).

Week I reflections

As already said in the initial post, I had a bit of a technical glitch. However, all is sorted. One of the beauties of web 2.0 is that things are much simpler than they used to be lets say about 5 years back. Things have become faster and easier and more convenient and more user-friendly(:

I think blogs can be useful for a teaching-learning situation in many ways. Here are a few:

a) It can provide an interactive platform between students and teachers and between peers

b) It allows students to work at their own pace and can grant relative autonomy.

c) It allows a private space to share thoughts without the interference of an all-seeing face-to-face teacher

d) Most importantly, I think, within the Indian context, it allows students to get 'published' without bothering too much about publication houses and their tantrums(:

e) In my context, it is particularly useful since it is a low-cost and low-resource tool that does not demand a massive bandwidth or high internet speeds; the user-friendliness is an added bonus especially for students who are not very tech-savvy.

Finally, here's a video that I enjoyed watching (only tangentially related to blogs) on web 2.0.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Cheers

Welcome to my blog

Sorry had quite a lot of trouble trying to open this blog! I already have a blog and the Google account that I use to sign in to it freaked out once I tried to open another one with the same sign in. However, the problem is solved and am all set to participate in the course discussions.