Week 10 Reflection - The Course

It seems difficult to summarize what I have learnt in this course. Some of the tools were tricky, some of the tools were easy to make and use… I was thinking about them and the way they develop and come up… I realized that there’s no way back, the technology is there to a greater or lesser extent and we have an obligation to use it in our classes for several reasons. First, I believe we need to teach our students to use it for educational purposes. Second, we need to make them aware that the internet is not only about playing games or reading news, there is much more there that they can use it for (learning, professional development…)  Third, our students are already familiar with it to a certain extent. My students might be better than me in some respects, given that most of them will work with technology or developing it. This made me realize that we could work together – my students and I. We could discuss the tools and see how else they could be used in our teaching/learning context… why not? Collaboration is good. I have never pretended to be someone else with my students. They know that I am an English teacher and that I am doing my best to develop and follow trends in pedagogy and technology. I know that they are good at technology and together we can create class websites or blogs or nicenet or webquests… They can even start webquests for their friends to work on… Collaboration was the main topic in my mind during this course and I was thinking about peer collaboration among students… maybe it could work well if I collaborate with them more…

What I mostly appreciate from this course is that I learnt how to build rapport with my students. I was using Sean’s ideas about setting examples and models, peer correction, constant communication, extended feedback, encouragement… That has nothing much to do with technology as such but does help learners much.

The starting point of the course was unbelievable. Search engines and delicious… tools that I will be using throughout my professional development and will certainly pass on to my students. I will continue to fill in delicious with links and experiment with the search engines for my next task, which is the doctoral dissertation (a bit scared of that, but we’ll see).

I will use the padlet for distributing class related information and constant communication. I have used email and email groups but it didn’t seem to work well at all times. There are newcomers in the courses who are not on the mailing list, there are students who are excluded from them for administrative reasons (the mailing lists are prepared by the administrators and I am not authorized to interfere). Padlet would be suitable for that for sure.

I will definitely use interactive powerpoint more. I will try to have students prepare them. I believe they will be using it in their professional careers quite a lot.

Webquests seem to be a good tool to engage students in projects and groups. Students can be creative if allowed to be. I think they’ll enjoy some breaks from the regular classroom routine and course dynamics which is good, but needs to be different from time to time.

I hope I will be able to explore more of the tools and websites that offer software for games and puzzles… My students are not young learners, but they still have the right to have fun when learning, right?

I am really grateful for the opportunity I was given to participate in the course. It did change a lot in my view of teaching with technology, as well as learning with technology. The reversed role that I had in this course (being a learner, not an instructor) was a real eye-opener.

Sean, thank you for the time and patience!