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(:

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.