Week 6: Reflection

I think everything that I did during this week had relevance to my immediate context. The first thing that we did during this week was discuss issues of large classes and how technology can solve some of the problems that teachers typically face in large classes. It was good to know that conditions sort of are more or less the same across countries and the problems that Indian teachers face have resonances across continents. I think one needs to incorporate technology within the teacher education programmes more and more so that it trickled down as practice in the classromm. However, at the same time, I am aware, that sometimes teachers' attitudes may not align with their actual behaviour. This is especially true of Indian conditions when the initial enthusiasm and high of being a part of an exciting teacher-education programme gives way to going back to the traditional modes of teaching practices once they get back to their classrooms. A related problem is that the infrastructural support is so minimal that teachers who are willing to implement some technological change find it difficult to do so.

The next thing that I did was to create an interactive PowerPoint which I posted on the class wiki. This time I worked on a poem by Robert Frost 'The Road Not Taken' and created an interactive lesson so that the poem could be used for focusing on the language of the poem. I used videos, images, as well as quizzes as a part of the presentation. I could not include a Jeopardy Game this time but hope to do it in one of the Project tasks. However, thoroughly enjoyed the task. I think the discussion on interactive PowerPoint since I learned so many things from my colleagues. Have found a renewed interest in PowerPoint now:)

Looking forward to the next week though it is a busy week for me since we have seminar presentations for the course that I am teaching. Hope to be as active as I have been till now:)

Week 5: Reflection

Did quite a few things this week. On the discussion thread this week discussed about alternative assessment, WebQuest and PBL. In a sense, I felt that the three are related. While PBL can make learning more meaningful since it leads to learning by doing, the WebQuest carries within itself the possibilities of PBL since it ends in the learning of a particular learning item. It is in this context that I think alternative assessment comes in handy. Since PBL (or WebQuest) does not follow a traditional 'teaching' pattern, rubrics can come in handy to evaluate such tasks. This is not to say that traditional teaching should not use alternative assessment methods. They should all the more since it opens up possibilities of collaborative learning

It is in this context, I thought , that the articles 'Assessing Learning: Alternative Assessment" and Gaer's 'Less Teaching and More Learning' were interesting. Also looked at various WebQuests.

The most interesting part for me during the week was creating the rubric for writing research reports. Though we do use rubrics in the MA programme, they were not as detailed as the one I created for this course. I thought that the more detailed the rubric was, the more easy for us to evaluate. And since the individual profiles take care of a particular area, the students too find it easy to combine the different profiles in their writing. And of course, there is the collaborative aspect of it since the rubrics are shared with the students so the students know exactly what to expect if they want a particular grade.

Also thought of a technological solution to the problem of academic reading that I posted on Week 4. Thought of creating a website that could be linked to a blog and also integrating WebQuest so that my students can start reading research articles. I think it sounds a bit ambitious for now but hopefully in the coming weeks I will be able to prune it so that it becomes achievable for this course.

Busy week but interesting. Also did not help to have contracted a viral fever on Friday:) But looking forward to the next week.

Week 4: Reflection

This week has been equally 'dense', if not more, as the last week. As a part of this week's assignments, we read a few articles on reading, writing and vocabulary skills. I read the articles by Krajka and Liang. I especially liked the way Krajka combines online and offline tasks in his article since within the Indian context I thought this is pretty relevant where online dependency can lead to chaos. Liang's useful tips on how to use e-books in the classroom, I think were very interesting. I especially liked the way she structures the tasks to create an interactive classroom atmosphere.

The next thing that I worked on was the technology-enhanced lesson plan which was on using blog for enhancing writing skills. I think I have been a tad ambitious here (as Donna's comment mentioned). However, writing is a serious problem in India and as the newer students pour in, I think it is getting more and more difficult. I think we need to rethink our concept of 'writing' as such in a more and more digitized world. Most of the time, for example, I find students 'texting' than writing. Do we need to redefine writing altogether? And what felicity do my students have in 'texting'- they can type out a whole thesis in 140 characters within 2 minutes flat(: But ask them to write a 150-word write-up, they will take days if not weeks :) I thought maybe harnessing the skills that they have in technology might help in transferring those skills to more academic sort of writing.

I also described my class and discussed the issue of academic reading in my class which I thought was related to the issue of academic writing that I did for the technology lesson. This is hopefully the area that I am going to develop the class project on:)

Has been a busy week but enjoyed every bit of it.

Looking forward to the the next one.

Week 3: Reflection

First of all, I am late for this one. Has been a pretty hectic week. The classes that I teach have begun and it was difficult to keep up with all the work(: But I enjoyed every minute of it. The things that I learnt during this week were not only interesting but also opened new ways of using the web for pedagogic purposes. The week started with a discussion on Nicenet about two of the three articles on using technology with students for listening and speaking skills. I read Miller and Busa's articles and commented on them. I thought that some of the general arguments that Miller and Busa make for using technology (listening for Miller and speech analysis software for Busa) were perceptive but both the articles, I thought, were a bit culturally loaded in favour of a certain cultural variety of English. I also thought that when it comes to the teaching of pronunciation, the ideas of 'acceptability' and 'intelligibility' are so varied in their definitions that teaching of pronunciation needs to take that into account in the Indian context. I also had a very fruitful exchange of ideas with Natalya and Celeste on the use of a certain variety of pronunciation.

The second task that I did was comment on one of the project reports that were posted on the class website. For my comment I chose the project of Prem Bahadur Phyak of Tribhuvan University, Nepal. I thought that the project was well designed and the best thing that I liked about the project was the achievability of the project as well as the systematic implementation of it in a low-resource classroom. This project also gave me enough ideas to formulate my project for this course and, I think, that this activity was quite useful.

The third task that I did was bookmark the links on my Delicious pages. I thought that Delicious is a wonderful tool for keeping an organised catalogue of websites that I use regularly. Though I had used Diigo before (which is quite good as well), I think Delicious is very handy too in terms of organisation.

The week, therefore has been pretty fruitful and exciting and am looking forward to the fourth one now. And as usual, the conversations with colleagues, that have increased manifold are an added bonus(: