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.