Week 10: 'The final countdown' Reflection:)

Hello all,
I have really mixed feeling about this one. The course was a great learning experience for me. One, I learnt about a large number of tools that I have not used before (though had heard of them) and therefore can use them later. Tools like ANVILL, Nicenet, WebQuest, or even PowerPoint (how to use it interactively) would be invaluable for me for my teaching and professional activities. In that sense, the course equipped me with a lot of ideas for using the web creatively. Two, I also revised a large number of tools that I knew of and had used before - HotPotatoes, Google Sites,Social Bookmarking to take a few examples. I think some of the skills of using these tools had atrophied a bit and the course provided me with the spark needed to go back to them. Three, I also read a lot as a part of the course and updated my learning base by referring to the latest in language learning technology and I am sure that this is going to help me further in my professional development. Four, the discussions on Nicenet were engaging and the sharing of ideas and issues made it more engrossing for me. I can now think of a varied number of teaching and learning contexts across the world. It also made me feel that as teachers we more or less share the same predicament whether it be Portugal or Romania or Azerbaijan or Korea or Spain or the US and the issues that we have are common at times though the differing contexts may throw up different challenges at times. And it is precisely because of this that I have a 'mixed' feeling.

I am really going to miss the discussions that we had on Nicenet and the fact that this is the last week and the intensity and regularity of all that is going to go away is bothering me. I think the best thing that I learnt from the course was the ability to listen to a varied number of socio-cultural voices from across the globe:)

I don't think that any of the topics were redundant for me. As I had already mentioned that I am quite a voracious reader (if I have nothing to read or can't lay my hands on a book or something then I read the newspaper wrappers that are found abundantly when you buy something in India), I enjoyed every bit of it. I never ever felt that something is not relevant to my context as it is my firm belief that nothing is really relevant to your particular context until and unless you tweak and transform the idea to suit it to your context:) So, in that sense,, everything that I did during the course was relevant.

I thought that one of the things that we could have done is using freeware that relates to podcast/vodcast (since we have been using it with our students and it is pretty successful since the students have access to a large number of audio/video recordings whenever they want to access it). Another thing that I thought of (and this maybe because that I am made a part of committees which evaluate multimedia materials willingly or unwillingly) is if we could have done something on developing a rubric or descriptor for evaluating multimedia materials. Though Ken Beatty in his book Teaching and Research CALL does have a rubric for this, it would have been fun if we had actually evaluated some multimedia materials available on the web and then discussed it on Nicenet keeping our context and teaching-learning situation in mind. But I guess, you can't do everything in a ten-week course which was so well organised and there was already so much happening for these ten weeks:)

Will miss you all but do meet me on Facebook and we will surely keep in touch. The world is truly a small place thanks to technology:)
Atanu