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Week10: recollections!

I see myself in front of a transparent mirror; I realize that I am free now. I do remember every day in my e-course, with a recollection full of positive sparkling images of my presence with other colleagues. They were my new family in a world full of many discoveries. That world I was perhaps longing for somewhere in the past. I can understand now why I feel lost as a human being in the chronology of our e-course time with nothing in my head but what I produced with no one determinant final truth or meaning. I can understand now how much I will miss everyone!

Our e-course was that fertile space that joined different voices from all over the world. I especially enjoyed as everyone did Week 5 discussion on Assessment, rubrics and PBL. It was the most productive and fruitful week with 158 interesting messages posted showing different experiences and opinions with the presence of an expert Mr. Carl Falsgraf. Challenging questions that provoked all the participants rising their motivation to the peak!

I also enjoyed Week 8 Discussion on Teaching with Online Tools with 96 messages posted. Week 8 included a lot of practice on online exercise generators and class website editors mainly ANVILL. I felt that everyone could have participated more in that week but maybe because everyone was busy in the process of writing the project report? For me ANVILL was a very interesting tool to discover. I gave it a try and it seems that I was the only person to build my first demo lesson. It was really a wonderful tool that I will possibly use in the near future!

My suggestion: I think that relying more on practical activities can be more rewarding than just reading and discussing  linguistic theories given the fact that it seems that many teachers have the decent pedagogical tools before taking part in the course. Tutorials on how to use: zunal webquest, interactive PowerPoint, ANVILL and many more can be of great help!
What is left but special thanks to Mr.Robert Elliot and all the staff of the university of Oregon. Great thanks as well to the  experts we met during the course. Special gratitude is to the United States of America that offered us this opportunity to share with many teachers new and modern practices worthwhile to be adopted in our local schools. I will miss all these noble beings!

Week9, Post2: my future with ICT

 

Now that our e-class is driving to an end let me express how much I feel convinced that we can no longer retreat or surrender: CALL and ICT are a fate in our education we don’t have the choice to stop integrating them in our lessons nor do we have the right to deprive our learners from the decent use of such tools in their schools. Now that we started using internet we cannot withdraw it will follow us everywhere we go as a modern assistant that will revolutionize our schooling.

Computer mediated teaching has become a fact that we cannot play a blind eye to. Due to the fast pace of technological change, innovative teaching approaches and strategies should be developed in order to successfully integrate new technologies into language teaching. The day-today reality for teachers and learners is that technology presents some new opportunities and challenges. The pervasive effects of technology on language use outside the classroom affect learners' knowledge and expectations for technology use in the classroom.

I am expecting myself to carry on using these technological tools and I am looking forward to better equip myself and my students with the decent knowledge in ICT and CALL. Working on my resource website, creating more websites maybe and carry on mastering as much computer applications as I can! 

Week 9: The joy of cooperation!

 I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there's a pair of us?

Don't tell! They'd advertise – you know

How dreary – to be – somebody!

How public – like a frog –

To tell one's name - the livelong June –

To an admiring bog!

Emily Dickinson, 288.

This week I enjoyed working with my team partner “Zaineb” on improving sides of our project reports. I was engaged to share many details with my friend to such an extent that I have never said any word without feeling or seeing myself as well as my friend in it. I was faithful to my friend's cause though I am not directly involved in her project or even connected to what happened in my friend’s classroom  for I was absent in the building of her project. I am that simple teacher who is looking -like my friend- for freedom on the one hand, and the beauty of learning as a redeemer on the other.

Week 8: Project report first draft

 Eager to read about what other colleagues may write, I took the initiative to build the first team. Then I urged myself to write my first draft with no choice but to be addict to the letters I trace as if to give them from myself a breath and a meaning that may make them alive and full. I was writing while discovering my project growing gradually with a steady development. I only copy what I see from my personal perspective, faithful to the idea and to the feeling, faithful to all the fires that are and carry on to be shared among all the human beings, faithful to what I constructed with my young students that I feel very proud of.

 The process of writing my report made me learn many things and remember a lot of details. Now, it’s time to work with my partner and exchange ideas to improve what we produced. I decided to read my colleague's report and treat it as if it was mine. Time for real dialogue has started!

Week7: Being part of the network!

Hello everybody!

I was very busy this week: on the one hand like my colleagues I was doing the weekly assignments on nicenet and Robert’s wiki, on the other hand I was working on my project in terms of finding a partner, preparing the first draft of the final Project Report, improving my resource website and many other stuff…

I have read many articles on learner autonomy and gathered much information from theory into concrete practices I used to live with my young students at class. Shifting between theory and practice, between consumption and production but more to the point moving from reflection to creation that was the step I left myself with!

 I was surfing between what has become as regular activities nicenet, Robert’s wiki and the new partner signup corner, my snapgrades  and our start up website course, then working bit by bit on my project together with using other websites as references of study…I became an active participant member in the Network! The only thing I missed was my blog so here I am back though late to see what I have read, consumed, produced and achieved!

It’s very fantastic to participate in this course and I feel happy that I positively contribute!

Khaled hafdhi, Tunisia.

Week6: "interactive"PowerPoint

Hi!

   A whole week of real discovery and creation, I feel very entertained! I have read all the suggested articles and I was eager to read more so that I can achieve a better performance. Reading about how to make our PowerPoint slides very dynamic and interactive has made me think more about my audience making them part of what I can produce. The point is that our students must not only react to our slides but also interact with them. We -as teachers- have to feel the difficulties that learners face if they are not involved in our presentations. They can easily share the responsibility of learning if they are doing something with what we present. In my class many children can produce their own slides and if I assign them a free project they can create nice simple but very meaningful presentations. They can understand better if I actively engage them in a game or a quiz or even a reading comprehension activity provided that it will be interactive.

        Practice makes everything perfect! And this week was full with practice. It’s true that I have known how to use PowerPoint since ten years now but still the time of rediscovery, that pleasure to produce a purposeful task and share it with others. I feel a great relief when I finish constructing some full of life slides and the next day invite young learners discover them with me as if we were both the producers and consumers! I hope the same feeling is shared by us all because our students should exist in anything we produce for them!

Khaled Hafdhi, Tunisia.