Week 10: Wrap Up

Hello dears, it's the last week of Webskills online course. It's been very exciting and useful time for all of us; and we all are lucky to have a very kind instructor, Robert! I express my gratitude to Robert and other participants of this course for being nice and supportive throughout the course! Dears, maybe I don't realize it now, but I am sure that after a week or later, I'm gonna miss all of you A LOT!!! Thanks for being here and sharing your experience! Together we learned many useful things which will help us in our teaching. It's been great to be an online student and a coursemate! I hope we can establish good networking and keep in touch with each other in future too. 

For those who are just about to start the course, my advice is the following:

• familiarize yourself with course requirements 
• follow the instructions
• get used to online course routine
• get acquainted with other participants
• spend more time on weekly Tasks because later they will make up the part of your final project
• be active in Discussions throughout the week
• support others and share your experience and knowledge       

Good luck to all who are about to finish this course soon, and welcome to all who are going to take this course.

Cheers,
Shahnoza from Uzbekistan

Week 9: Final Reflections

It's already the end of week 9, and most of us have already introduced a technology related change into the class and have submitted a final project. It's been very intensive and eye-opening period. Just like many others, I hardly managed to submit the assignments on time, but I also realized that I have learned many useful teaching tools which could be integrated into the class. Throughout the course, I found the followings most useful for my classes: 

• WebQuest (fantastic tool!)
• Interactive PowePoint (I discovered a new way of using ppt. Great one!)
• Rubrics (I knew what it is, but always wanted to learn more about and develop my own. It was very useful!)
• Formulating the ABCD objectives (totally new for me, and find it very useful)
• Blog (I've already been using blogs, but I learned many interesting things and guidelines of using It. it was very useful!)
• Effective search engines (it saves my time now; I find it very useful!)
• Voki (that's something fun to use! my students are going to love it!)
• ANVILL (takes time, but I think later I will use it)
• Hot Potatoes (very useful tool, especially, when you don't have internet access! Very useful!!!)
• Delicious.com (have been using and recommend it to everyone! Essential tool!)
• Nicenet (I liked it, but I think my students will be limited a bit due to the absence of text formatting menu)
• many useful tools for educators 

I think I will not only use these tools in my teaching, but also will ask my students to use these tools in creating their own projects. After the Webskills course is over, I am planning to follow the edublogs and websites for any updates and keep learning new things. Also, I have added Dhika and Rahmat to my Delicious network, so once they bookmark something new, I will also learn about it.     

Week 8: Implementation of Webskills

Oh what a crazy week! Things kept me busy all the time. Changes in work and personal life are making my usual schedule more intense. What's more, this time we have been given lots of links to explore and try in Webskills. Project draft also took sometime and I had to do it in a rush. Nevertheless, I did my best to manage everything and meet all deadlines.      

Having created the webquest about American Civil War, I asked my students to try it and then reflect on it in their blogs. It was a real surprise for me to see how my students got excited about doing the webquest. Initially, after giving them roles, I was going to let them explore the webquest and fill in several tables, then play a powerpoint jeopardy game and read their blogs to check their understanding. However, they also came up with the idea of making a role-play based on their roles they have been given in the beginning. 

My students' excitement and motivation made me work harder and inspired me to create more webquests. 

Week 7: Reflections

Due to Eid Holiday, I spent more time not on readings and discussions, but facebooking, sending "Eid Mubarak!" letters, thanking my friends, visiting my relatives and having guests at home! This week was special not only with Eid Holiday, but also with choosing project partners, reading articles and discussing our teaching experience in discussion board. However, it seems like every week readings are getting more and more, and instead of one topic, we have two topics for discussion. So I hardly manage to cover all readings and take part in discussions. 

This week I read many articles. Deborah Healey's article Microsoft Word and PowerPoint in the Classroom was really interesting. Asking students to do brochures and newsletters in the computer lab is really effective! It really works. I tried it with my students and they just love it. However, if we had a color-printer and board for posting the brochures, students would be very happy. 

To sum up, I can say that by week 7, I feel more confident in implementing technology in class because I know the methodology and different ways and techniques that go with it. Also, weekly readings, tasks, experience sharing and discussions are helping a lot!

To be continued ...

Week 6: Interactive PowerPoints

If last week I learned the basics of WebQuests, this week was special with interactive powerpoint! I like using power points in class, but they are mostly used to give information and in the middle of the slideshow I notice that students get bored. For that reason, in the middle of the slideshow I started using some activities or gave quick questions to keep them focused on the slideshow. Also, I was more concerned about the design of the powerpoints, and found useful tips on how to make effective powerpoint slideshows. However, I never thought about using different techniques which could be used during the presentation to make the powerpoint more interactive. For that reason, I find Deborah Healey's  and Garr Reynolds's tips very useful. After reading these tips, I started working on the powerpoint which I have already uploaded to my webquest with the aim of making it more interactive, turning it into a jeopardy game. 

When I was already about to finish my interactive power point, I decided to search for other samples of jeopardy games in the internet. I thought they would give me more ideas for making my jeopardy game more interesting. Surprisingly, I found lots of samples! Especially, I just loved the "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" game powerpoint template with music and directions. You find it here: http://www.teachnet.com/lesson/misc/winnergame022500.html  Also, I found an amazing websites http://www.techteachers.com/jeopardytemplates.htm where you can find jeopardy game samples created by other teachers, and http://www.jmu.edu/madison/teacher/jeopardy/jeopardy.htm where you can download jeopardy templates and get instructions. Unfortunately, I found these websites only after my own powerpoint was almost ready, so I think I will use these templates for my next interactive powerpoints.   

   

Week 5: Webquests Take Time

During Week 5 I read about Webquest, looked through some samples and decided to try to set up my own webquest. At first, I thought it would be easy to make a webquest. The reason for thinking so was that I have already used wikis, weebly, free-own-website and some other tools to make websites, and things were so easy and fast. However, when I started working in zunal the process got very long. Whenever I needed to make changes and save it, the website asked for additional confirmation to save and the process was not fast. Also it didn't let me put tables and asked to upgrade if I wanted to add some additional features. Perhaps, these limitations are due to the fact that zunal is a free tool. If I were to change something in zunal, I would give more possibilities for teachers to play around and make it easy to update and save quickly, because teachers are so busy and some are resistant to use new things. In order to encourage teachers to use online webquests, things should be easy and fast!   

Another concern that I have is that it took me long time to think about students' roles and the way I should set up the task. I also spent some time to search for necessary links about the topic, because I usually use one coursebook in class, so never had a necessity to search for internet resources for my History class. But now, when I have a good collection of internet resources and when I made my first attempt to make an online webquest for the History class, I feel so proud and happy for the work done in Week 5! Well, I cannot say it is complete yet. There are still many things to add to the webquest. But in general, I learned to do webquest and used search tools to find necessary websites, and I believe I made a significant progress. 

Week 4: New Things Learned

Throughout this week I have been very busy with paperwork and other urgent things. Real life events made me work intensively. Nevertheless, I tried to focus on Webskills week 4 tasks too. The discussion board offered very good teaching ideas and useful links on reading, writing and vocabulary. The reviews to these links given by Webskills course participants were very helpful. For example, Lauri's ESL Website reviewed by Charbel had very nice readings with definitions. I think I'll use the texts about Identity Theft and Searching the Internet in my Computer Skills class. I cover these topics in the class, but in the past I've been using the texts from ClassOut magazine. 

The websites BreakingNewsEnglish and Manythings.org, which were also reviewed by Eugenie, Cecilia and others, offer great amount of resources for EFL teachers and learners. I've been using these websites for a while and find them very useful. But thanks to Webskills course, I spent more time going deep into the sites and find many other useful pages withing these websites. Especially, I think the mp3 files with their transcripts about American History which are available in http://www.manythings.org/voa/history/ will be very helpful for my students. Also, breakingnewsenglish has very interesting texts+ listening as well as pre-while-post reading activities which are very user friendly. For example, the website has a text  with  an intriguing title World's First Flying Car Makes its Debut and I believe it will be good to use in my class and will surely initiate hot discussion afterwards. All in all, I truly think that Webskills course and its participants are going a great job reviewing and giving their opinion on websites! 

  

Week 4: Catching Fish in the Ocean

What most teachers find problematic is actually the lack of listening tapes/CDs for their classes; whereas, reading, writing and vocabulary resources are more than enough. However, when teaching vocabulary teachers mostly translate or define in order to clarify the meaning of words. They rarely use flashcards and other visual aids to foster input. The main reason for doing that is they simply don't know where to get such illustrations and fashcards. What is more, many don't know that going online learners can read texts, do the follow-up interactive tasks and learn words from flashcards. The Internet offers tons of resources for ESL learners and teachers. They just need to 'go fishing' and get some resources from the 'ocean'!

Week 3: Voki.com Avatar

Get a Voki now!

Week 3: Power Point in Blog

Today my PC made some updates and now I have new Windows Live 2011. Now my Windows Live Messenger is connected to Facebook account. Also, I noticed one interesting add in Microsoft website: how to embed Power Point in Blog. http://blogs.office.com/b/office_blog/archive/2010/09/24/say-more-in-your-blog-with-embedded-powerpoint-and-excel-files.aspx  I read it and now right away I'll try embed Power Point into my blog post. Here you go  :)

Personally I think embedding power points into blog is a good idea. I already imagine how I could use this feature in my teaching. When I ask students to write their reflections in their blogs, they can also share their power point presentations too. For example, they could reflect on their presentations made on other classes proving the power point presentations and discuss what went good and what went wrong. Their groupmates could comment saying, "I especially liked slide 4 in your power point", etc.  

Perhaps, some of you already knew about it, because this information was posted in Microsoft page in September 24, 2010. I found out about it just 3 hours ago, and possibly there are some people who might not know about it yet. So I decided to share it with you too. I hope you find it useful  :)

Best,
Shahnoza   

Week 3: My Steps to Delicious

My bookmarking experience was a step-by-step process. I passed several steps to get to the 'Delicious' and here is my story.  

Several years ago, when I had no idea about bookmarking, I used a very primitive way of collecting the links: I used Notepad! Yes, it’s the one which is in Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad. It was not that easy to keep all links there. Also every time when I needed to go to a particular page, I had to copy-paste the link.  

After that, my friend saw what I was doing to save a link, smiled and recommended me to use Favorites in menu of a browser. Things got a lot easier, however, when I was using another computer, I had to save the link in my email and come home and save the link in my Favorites (if I didn’t forget to do so).

One day I got an email from my friend with a delicious link. When I clicked on it, I understood that it’s time to use delicious. So, I've been using delicious since August 2010, and I just love it! I can save the website links from any computer and have access to it from anywhere. Tagging helps me to organize and easily find the links related to one area. Also, I found out that I can change the display options: I chose to display 50 links in page, and open the link in a new window. You can organize the links according to an alphabetical order or the date you added the links. Up to now, I have 66 bookmarks there, and from my experience of using delicious I can say that it’s a super tool for keeping all links in one place.

Week 2: Puzzled

I was puzzled in week 2 and got a bit behind. There is too much going on around me, and I am facing some difficulties concentrating on online course. Nevertheless, I put all my efforts and pushed forward to keep on going and fulfill all tasks of Webskills course for week 2.

One of the difficulties I am having is understanding and producing well developed objectives based on ABCD model. Writing is a long process for me, and for such perfectionist like me, who gets frustrated when seeing own mistakes after a while, it takes double time to develop something new.

Things get a lot easier when I see a model of my groupmates, especially, I try to follow Rahmat and Hassan's posts in discussion board and blogs, and get less frustrated when I read other groupmates' reflections on the course and see that it's not only me who is a bit behind. I hope by week 3, things get a lot better for all participants, and we all will stay tuned in and successfully complete all tasks on time. 

       

Week 2: Search Engines

I have been using Google for academic purposes all the time, and was assuming that it's the only powerful search engine in the internet. Only now, having tried the SweetSearch, I realized that I can search more effectively, faster and easier with SweetSearch. The search results of SweetSearch are 100% academic, and evaluated by internet researchers and librarians. Thanks to Webskills course, I discovered this very useful search engine for myself and will recommend to anyone who is experiencing difficulties with searching for information in the internet.  

However, this site is not equally good for all users. If you need to find information which is non-academic, then you need to use other search engines, like Bing, Yahoo, or our-old-Google. Accordingly, depending on the needs, one should be able to choose a particular search engine. 

Week 1: Privacy settings

One day just out of curiosity, I typed my name in google search, and was shocked to know that any person can learn many things about me and my life through the internet. Thanks to the Webskills course, now I know about privacy settings in blogs. The trick is to uncheck all necessary boxes in 'Edit Profile' page which is found right under the profile picture. If not to do so, the programs called 'bots' will find the email address. Also, I learned how to make the blog invisible to search engines. I think it's always good to know such privacy settings.

Besides, if I ask students to create a blog, some of them say that they prefer privacy and don't want everybody see what they write. They think that once something is in the internet, any person in the world can view it. So, in such cases, knowing about privacy settings lets students relax and helps them write and reflect freely.

Week 1: My Blog Experience

My very first blog I created in January 2009. I was very excited to learn about blogging. It was like discovering a new planet in the Galaxy.

Later, as a part of a course requirement, I asked my students to create a blog and reflect on their class. However, after a while some students complained that they couldn't understand anything in blogger.com and couldn't create a blog. So, next class (as we don't have internet access at the university) I made a power point presentation on how to create a blog and explained every step. Finally, by week 4, all my students had their blogs (*some students forgot their passwords, and had to create a blog again though).

As I had 60 students, it was a bit hard for me to read all blogs regularly, and when it was time to grade these blogs, I had no rubric for assessing them. However, despite all difficulties with blogging experience, I found blogging a very useful tool for improving students' writing and developing their reflection and thinking skills. What is more, one thing which made me very happy was that even after the course finished, some students still keep writing in their blogs.