WEEK 7

Dear All,

It is the 7th week. Isn't it unbelievable? After the course, I will be missing my friends' invaluable posts, Robert's reminders, everyone's comments... Time flies away very quickly. Besides, I literally kill time just as I did yesterday.

When I went home at around 6 pm, I thought taking a nap would refresh me. There was a concert on the school campus, where I live, but I decided not to go to be able to focus on my weekly assignments. I turned on TV and my computer, I picked the reading tasks and all of a sudden I fell asleep. after a 13-hour short nap, my alarm clock crazily rang to wake me up. If it was possible, it would pull me out of the sofa and drag me on the floor until it was sure that I was awake.

I will cross my finger and hope that I will do my best for this week.

LEARNER AUTONOMY

Let's start the weekly discussion with Robert's question 'What could you do to encourage greater autonomy in students, with and without technology?'

I read 'What is Learner Autonomy and How Can It Be Fostered?' by Dimitros Thanasaoulas, ' Learner autonomy: drawing together the threads of self-assessment, goal-setting and reflection' by David Little, and 'Learner Autonomy' by Richard Smith.

They all agree that learner autonomy is acquired either by natural means or by formal learning. Thus, teachers should be a helping hand by

- using L2
- involving students in activities
- helping students to set their own targets
- requiring students to keep a written record of their learning
- engaging them in regular evaluation of their own progress.

As a results, learner involvement, learner reflection, and target language use can be encouraged.

At this point, multiple intelligence comes to my mind. As you may know, by means of integrating various activities, we may cater to our learners' needs.
In her article, 'Two Activities for Fostering Autonomous Learning', Galina Kavaliauskiene  describes two activities.

• In one activity the teacher lets a student answer a question. If the answer is correct that particular student has the right to ask a question to his/her peer. If not, the teacher chooses a different student to answer. Alternatively, the teacher may prepare different versions of a progress test and ask students to swap their paper with their peers after the exam. Then they evaluate their peers' paper.
• In the other activity, students are asked to prepare a test for their peers.

In each case, before students hand out the paper and tests, the teacher should check them to make sure that there are no mistakes.

I believe that first of all we, teacher, should teach students to take thier own learning responsibility. Only after that we can talk about learner authonomy. For instance, most of my students are not aware of their skills, needs, knowledge, goals, or achievement. In this respect, we can put the blame on our education system, but still the problem is not sorted out.

PEER READING

This week Robert wanted us to find a partner for the peer-reading. It is like asking someone to dance.in the ballroom.:)
Ryadh picked me and hope he will not regret it....

 

PADLET/WALLWHISHER

Inspired by my classmate Kayyum's Padlet, I prepared my Padlet about your country. Please upload images, videos, or texts.

Created with Padlet

ONE COMPUTER OPTIONS

 

 

 

I mostly use my computer for various reasons as mentioned in the article '7 Categories of Classroom Computer Use', which are



Administrative tool: I mostly use it to keep my students' grades- the one described in the article seems practical but I couldnt activate View, to do research, and to communicate with both students and other teachers.


Presentation tool: I present some materials like graphs, PPPs, videos, etc and when my students are needed to give a presentation, they are allowed to use the computer.

Communication station: The labtobs are not available in the classroom, so students can just use the computers available in the computer lab when they need.

Keypals is seems great but seems more suitable for teenagers.

Information station: During the class hour, the labtops can be used for this purpose.

Publishing tool: Preparing such kind of actitivites are usually assignments after school.

Learning center: Some software p

rograms to drill and practice some skills are awailable in the computer lab.


Simulation center: Unfortunately we dont use it for this purpose.

As you may know, we should not totally trust technology, so sometimes when there is a possible power cut for instance, we need to have a B plan.

In such cases, I usually download the video clip, audio or podcast if I think I may lose it, or print out some pages to hand out in the class for a probable power cut.

In the article WebWhacker is suggested, yet you need to pay for it.

I believe that if we are required to pay for everything such as WebWhacker, SurveyMonkey, HyperStudio, Ning we cannot get the most out of technology. For instance, once I created class Ning, which was very practical, but now you need to pay for it. It is not a high amount of money but if you pay for the good, useful softwares in total it is costly indeed.