The journey begins.

·                      The end of the ten-week online course has drawn near. In late January 2012, I created my first reflection blog, naming it Web2012 spring fun. I am glad that I did have fun learning and growing professionally. Of all the web skills or online resources presented during the course, zunal.com （webquest） and Rubric star are the most useful to me. I had been exposed to the technical terms of Webquest and rubrics before the class. I was terrified by the “complexity” of these two. However, the above-mentioned websites easily ruled out the difficulties. Hurray!

·                  For my classes, I will use PPT most often and I will strengthen the part of making it interactive. Nothing introduced in this class is irrelevant, at least to me.  I am curious about what the other colleagues would suggest for us to have looked at.

                 This is the end of the online course, but a journey to begin, a journey to add more digital essence to help the students with their learner autonomy. If teachers nowadays are preparing our young generation for 22nd century with knowledge we don't even know exists, building the students with skills to deal with what comes up in the future should be our contribution in educating them.

digital citizen to be

The better me within

Week Nine is still as busy and as fruitful. While going over the final project, I got to do more reflection on my teaching. There always leaves something to be desired no matter how experienced a teacher I am according to my age and the 28 years of teaching career. I am proud of myself for never giving up to be a wiser and better or should I say a more efficient and effective teacher for over these years. I have always expose myself to something helpful to my teaching. I can consider myself an early adopter in almost everything.

 I am planning to retire from my current job next year, but my ambition for making the world a better place and my love for bringing up every child, leaving no one left behind shall never cease.

 Several of the students who graduated years ago address me as their mentor. But there are still a lot I can do to adjust my teaching so that I can assist my students to be more efficient learners. They are happy in my class, but I want more than making them happy. I would like them to be someone with life skills and competences when they leave my classroom. For long, I have lacked the part of setting very specific assessment criteria so that some of my students might have been lost and confused for having no directions to follow. Take it seriously. I might even have deprived their opportunities to be autonomous learners because they were there to wait for my next instruction step by step.

Nevertheless, I am not upset or frustrated because I know in my heart there lives an even better me when tomorrow comes only if I don’t stop myself from learning.  

Something Old, something new

While going over the course project, I reviewed what I have done with technology-related method in teaching so as to implement the project with something I haven’t tried before. I have used PPT a lot, but not necessarily an interactive one. I created a class site with Google.doc and ended up with an unsuccessful experience. I know that there are several reasons leading to the unwanted result. However, I keep wondering if I prepared my students and myself well enough before I introduced something new. Neither most of my students nor I myself have adequate knowledge of how to use the site. I am still not very familiar with all the features of the tool until now.

     I am lucky to have the chance to get exposed to so many useful web skills through this online course. I was very excited when seeing the task this week. I have long wanted to create online exercise games for my students because interesting ideas of practicing grammar rules or evaluating students’ reading comprehension pop up from time to time. It’s not easy to directly download one that fits my students learning or levels or vocabulary ability online without some adjustments before I use it in class.  The only frustration comes from not having enough time to try out everything. I took a peek at Anvill, registered but still felt vague about using TCast.  I was really packed with two workshops, three speeches to prepare for the next week and getting the final project draft together with doing peer viewing over Zun’s. I wanted to be cautious and helpful with Zun’s project.

My only hope is that after the course is over we can still access to the website at https://sites.google.com/site/webskillsuo/home or we are given some more time to upload all the useful sites to the Delicious page. 36, 48, 52! I am a curious explorer! I would like to expand a day to 36, 48, or 52 hours.

Gladys