Week 2--Practical Ideas and Experiences

Dear All,

Online course--not that easy. I was so nervous and excited last week when I saw the list of to do things on the course for a week. I thought an online course would be too easy. But, this course has started changing my perception about the online courses. There were two things which has made me happy about the course from the start. First, the active participants from so many countries and I am the only one representing my country Pakistan in this course.

However, the second week in the course has been really interesting and full of learning because of its practical teaching content for instance ABCD model, Web searching tools, Taxonomy of technology domain, and blogging which gives a lot of insight on how to integrate technology and interactive web in teaching language.

I started the second week with the welcome note from Deborah which gave me confidence to take up the challenge. The first thing I did this week was to understand ABCD model for setting instructional objectives. I read the articles and web link resources to understand the model and try to incorporate it in one of my lesson. This is a brand new model which I tried but found it extremely helpful to set objectives. ABCD makes it easy to remember and the structure looks very practical. I couldn't be able to fit it so well like Johanna our friend from Poland. However, I have learnt a lot about the practical usage of the model by reading others posts in the thread.

The second thing I looked at was Noodletools. I never tried searching on web beyond Google. This tool classifies and narrows the topics for search which saves lot of time. I remember wasting lot of time hunting the specific information through a general search engine. I liked inute for academic search http://www.intute.ac.uk/ and tried others for the specific query. This is very helpful.

In addition to these two, I read a lot of reading material sent to us this week. I read articles on ABCD model and Blooms revised taxonomy for understanding ABCD model. Moreover, I also read that long article taxonomy for technology domain which helps to set the targets for myself and students to improve their technology domain. I shared the ideas from this article with friends in my office. Technology is such an instructional strategy which provides equal opportunities to everyone participating. The key work is OBJECTIVE. The integration of technology in curriculum makes the teaching and learning objective. The creation of rubrics through technology for subjective assignments like essay writing is one of the best examples. The buzz work in the article was COLLABORATION. It is the most powerful theme in language teaching and learning. Technology helps us as a teachers a lot to make our lessons collaborative and interactive where our students would give meaning to their learning.

I have read almost all the blogs of our friends in the course and learnt so many new things. I like the way NADINNE has organised her blog--specially the reading list and design.

I am learning new things and implementing them in my teaching. I still regret that I joined it late and lagging behind in many things. I am trying my best to keep up the good work going.

Thanks

Piar