Week 10 - Reflections

Well it is the last week of the course and I can only say that it has been overwhelming regarding the knowledge acquired.

In this last week we took the LoTi survey and I have to say again, as I have in my Nicenet post regarding this task, that the results were not surprising for me, as they represent the exact situation as I expected it to. My biggest fight for overcoming the present situation and applying the LoTi instructions would be to try and have a language classroom equipped with computers so that I can fully implement everything I learned at this course.

We also had to give our own advice to future participants and here is what I wrote on Nicenet and what are my advice:

1) Read all of the Readings links at the course site and a couple of additional links too if you have any doubts
2) Read all posts made by colleagues from the course because it will help you form your opinion and enrich your post
3) Make your posts on time, do not leave everything for the last minute because I have done so a couple of times and it is exhausting when you need to do everything in a short period of time
4) And last but not the least, never give up, because there may be times when you find a certain discussion or a task to be not so interesting but then "right around the corner" you find out about invaluable tips, tricks and tools and you enrich your in-class experience in a way you never imagined.

And I will use this media as well to thank our core instructor Janine one more time. And I am not being falsely grateful when I send my biggest gratitude to Janine, our core instructor. Janine thank you, it has been a privilege to work under your guidance and I wish you many more successful courses which will enlighten you and your students with new skills and knowledge.

Week 9 - Reflections

This week was all about Final Project, at least that's the way I saw it, and we had to go through the checklists our peers made and to make final touches and corrections before handing them over to Janine's hands.

So I have posted my Final Project on the wiki on time and I hope that it will suffice.

Also this week's discussion topic was interesting and it was about learning styles and intelligence types that exist with different people. It was interesting to remind myself of the learning styles I prefer and the days at faculty when we were learning about this in the first place. Regarding this topic and the posts we had to make I found the following link to be most helpful http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSdir/styles.htm.

I also plan to take the quiz found on the link http://www.open2.net/survey/learningstyles/ to all the classes where I teach to see the results and then try to apply different tech based tools and solutions to address different styles with students and although it won't be easy the goal is to make them feel comfortable while acquiring new knowledge so that they can all learn with the same ease.

We also had to fill out our course evaluation, which I did, and there are no secrets here. I have been saying this from the start. In my opinion the course is great and all the knowledge that has been transferred here on us is of great value and we will definitely use some, if not all of the tools acquired during this course to better educate our students in our schools.

So our journey is coming to an end, who would say that there is only one week left.

Week 8 - Reflections

I will be very brief in my reflections on this week for a sole reason of me being sick, which is also the reason why my posts were so poor in content and in depth, so I beg you for understanding and I apologize for not contributing to the discussions as usually but a virus of some sort chained me to bed for four good days and I am even doing this with utmost difficulties. 

So, the leading role of this week was given to PEER REVIEW of our project drafts and writing the drafts in time in the first place, which we all did, I hope.

Second we learned about ANVILL at https://anvill.uoregon.edu/anvill2/ and what a great tool it presents and what capabilities it has to offer.

We also had to make an online exercise, which I did using a cool site www.easytestmaker.com 

So that would briefly be my inadequate summary of the week 8, for which I apologize once more, but my health condition is preventing me to make a better one.