Fifth week reflection

Greetings to all,
I said in the beginning of this course that I am going to learn a lot of new
things. That's true. This week I have learnt how to devise a PBL and put alternative assessment tools into practice.  I have also learnt an interesting lesson: Dealing with technology means having a lot of patience, especially when one is not well informed of all the details of the functioning of a computer. True I have been using it ever since I was a university student but because my learning was far from formal training I still have to find out about some minor things that may cause trouble. Today I had to stop working for a while after spending a good amount of time typing my checklist. Of course I didn't want to waste any more time. However,and as I said I am still learning about my PC, I accidentally switched off the mouse. I tried to continue working, but a second touch made impossible to get back to the rubrics templates. After struggling to fix it i just felt it is necessary to turn it off all together, and repeat the whole job from the beginning. While waiting for the computer to reload, I thought it is good to take a look at the booklet. How funny! a double click on the left corner of the mouse could have saved my time. Here again I am thankful to the course it makes learn through discovery.
Best wishes,
Ilham

hello there,
Happy to be back to the blog after a long week with a lot of rich material to read. At the first two days of the week I  could write just few things and read a lot. Right now I have posted my technology enhanced lesson plan. It took me some time to decide on which skill to focus, and also the sites to use. I made it at last.
I may say good morning because it 2 in Morocco.
best wishes to all.
Ilham

Week 4 reflections

Greetings to All

Here we are in our fourth week. I agree with colleagues who say that we hardly feel the length of time we have been studying together. But we are fully aware that we have been learning a lot of interesting stuff.

 As I started reading the article How to Write Integrating Lesson Plan, I felt that the task of writing a technology based lesson plan is not at all easy. All the lessons I used from the net so far were not based on using technology in class. They remained classical, suggesting the use of blackboard, chalk and talk plus handouts. This idea made me read the text again and again to be able to make decisions on the next step.

I started pondering over my ABCD objectives, ways to integrate technology and so on and so forth.

I fathomed I had to read more articles so that I can see clearly how to take each step properly. Thus I read two more articles: How to Develop an Integrated Lesson Plan, The Effects of Integrated Lesson Plan on Students.

What I liked about e-how.com is that I could shift my first article to others following the directing hints at related articles which are being read by other people interested in the same topic. This time and energy saving.

I ended my day thinking of how to start my lesson, bearing in mind that we don’t have neither    PCs nor net connection in class. The only solution I thought about is to ask students to bring their laptops ( a few of them can)or give them some tasks to do outside the class. Then their work out-come can be presented in class.

Dlicious is really delicous

Some months ago I felt upset because I couldn't access the educational links my colleagues in The Morccan Association for Theachers of English (MATE) kept sending on my facebook. At first I didn't have time to check all the sites. I said well let's do it later. But after a while I couldn't. I wondered if it was possible for me to find it again. However, the search, with time limitation was a headache.fortunately, I don't think I am going to experience this feeling of disappointment for loosing my online resources with my Delicious page.

I still have a slight problem. I can not put the bookmarklet  on my PC even if I tried to drag it to my tool bar many times. It didn't work.

Still Learning about blogs

Yesterday I learnt a new thing about my blog.Priviously I tried to go over my colleagues blogs by clicking their names on the class wiiki. I got tired of opening too many windows to start working.Luckily, I noticed the "add blog" I thought it could be of great help to all the blogs on my reading list.So I started adding all your blogs. It took me sometime but I am glad I have done it.

Second week: More to learn about the web

Firstly, when I joined the class I was thinking of its outcome. That is what I will acquire, teaching habits I will develop, and how well I proceed with my work in the course. I thought all this is going to be shown at the end of the course. I was astonished to receive an e-mail from Janine asking to check my grades. I knew I didn’t hand in some tasks on time for some technical reasons. To my surprise I happened to do all the tasks. I was pleased to know  I am on the right truck, which I hope to keep to. I didn’t have enough time to fully explore the site but I believe it just the right tool to be used to evaluate my students performance. This is the second lesson I learnt.

Secondly, I read the word search engines in the task. I felt a bit scared. I know that there are multitudes of them. The most used one is google of course. However I am asked not to use it. I seemed to me that the task is challenging , bearing in mind the limited time I have to do it. I did a search about search engines and was overwhelmed by the number I had to check before I can try one. Fortunately, Janine gave me a good help when she provided a whole list of specialized search engines from which we are to choose. Here I found it easy to check the ones of interest to me, focusing on education/teaching. That made my life easier. I guess “noodles” are my target from now on. Surely, there is other  new information I am going to learn throughout this training.  

First Lesson

dear All,
This is the blog I was trying to make look active. It took me quite a long time make to all the steps correctly, maybe because it is the first blog I ever created. Was this task easy for me? surely not. When I read the task at first I thought it a matter of following some piece of cake guidlines on the documents I could read. However it turned out to be harder not because I could not understand the language but because I had to deal with the computer.That is; the absence of the human side in technology hinders our quick fruitful response to any instruction at first. I understood ,as a reasult, that my students may undergo the same kind of confusion as they start their learning via the web which I have to help them through.This was the lesson I learned from trying to creat my on blog.I think there are other lessons to come and I hope learn them all with you.