WEEK 9

When I began this course almost 10 weeks ago I was full of expectations regarding what I was going to learn and as soon as I opened the course’s website, I knew those expectations were going to be met. When I first read the topics for the course I felt like I want it to start right there. Every topic of every week was perfectly planned to let us know almost all we need to know about implementing internet tools in the EFL/ESL classroom. The first week we read our rubrics and were allowed to make suggestions, which make me realize how important it is for students to get involved in their own assessment process. On the second week we tried different search engines and discovered a whole world beyond Google. I have to be honest, it’s been hard for me to use those amazing websites we saw, but right now I don’t have just one favorite but two: Google and Sweetsearch. Then we moved on to the third and fourth week and things got really exciting as we were introduced to very productive internet tools to master every language skill. Esl-lab.com, voxopop.com, vocaroo.com, dvolver.com, bbcenglish.com are just a few names of my new favorites and they were added to my delicious page as soon as I saw then for the first time. After learning how to incorporate these great tools into our lessons, we started reflecting a lot more on how internet can be used to foster autonomy and to make our classes more student-centered, taking our students’ learning styles and likes and dislikes into account. In the lasts weeks we also learned about ANVILL and how planning lessons with web resources is not as difficult as we teachers tent to think it is. To wrap up we were encouraged to create our own class website and wrote a project to apply all we’ve learned in one of our classes. We are about to finish the course, but the learning process just begins. With all the great resources we explored every week and all the different tasks and the deadlines, I wasn’t really able to get the best out of each tool I tried. That is why now that we finished I feel like I have the time to put into practice all the amazing things I learned in this intensive course and let my students benefit from what I have learned. Working with my students will help me gain the experience I need with internet tools to start sharing with my colleagues through our monthly in-services and the teacher training courses (for developing teachers) I teach in the institution I work in and with different teachers all over the city and the country through ELT and other English teacher’s conferences. But this process is definitely far from finishing; as we know technology changes very fast and we need to keep on learning and updating our knowledge. Now that I know not only on line resources for our classes, but for professional development I will continue using internet to learn new things. I would also like to keep in touch with my web classmates to share experiences. And I would also like to continue taking advantage of the opportunity that this kind of courses give us and become and active member of webskills courses all over internet, and maybe one day become and instructor myself. Lorena

WEEK 8

Project: the beginning of the end, the summary of what we’ve learned, to go from theory to practice, great effort, tiredness, sharing, expectations that are sometimes unfulfilled, great expectations. I’m just trying to put in words what this week meant to me. We learned about teachers resources on line and the amazing Anvill was introduced to us. It was a great week since we were able to see many nice tools that can be used on line and off line and that we’ll make our lives easier. However, the most meaningful task for me, and I would say for all of us, was the project draft. Writing the draft made me reflect on the extend of the decisions I made and how important I is to take into account students’ needs and likes when we perform conduct any kind of academic project whether we’re using internet tools or not. It was only when I sat down to write my project draft that I took the time to look back to what I had done with my students and how things had worked. Lorena

WEEK 7

It's been a great week in the course. We read some very honest articles about autonomy where the conclusion made us realize that fostering autonomy is very hard. I have to admit that I have always thought that I encourage my students to be autonomous but i don't keep track of students' work outside the classroom. I try to guide my students to independent learning, since I am a self taught myself, but I only ask them informal questions about what they do outside the class and I don't really provide a space in my classes for students to reflect on their learning process. Reading about autonomy I became aware of the fact that I have to go beyond and really make sure my students are doing more that fill in the blank activities on line, they have to decide what to look for and not only follow my instructions to work outside the classroom. They should be taken into account in the decision making process and be active participants. Besides autonomy, we learned about ways to work with just ne computer in the classroom and saw all what we can do with the computer and the roles students can play in classes with one computer. With a little bit of creativity we can get the best of technology with limited resources.

WEEK 6

Every week is a great learning journey in our Webskills course. I have read so much about pedagogy that what I usually feel when I read a book is that somebody is explaining to me something that I already know, either because I read about it somewhere or because of the classroom experiences. But every week in our class I feel like I have an epiphany that is going to change the way I teach radically. This week's epiphany came with the readings about interactive PowerPoint presentations, because despite the fact that I always try to make my classes as student-centered as possible, whenever I plan a class with PowerPoint is very teacher-centered. I am one of those teachers who writes questions that only the teacher answers and even worse, I explain tips that need no explanation, elongating my talking time. I also learned that a large class is not a class with 55 students. This week, Naglaa told us about her 300 to 400 students and I decided to stop complaining about my not so large classes.

WEEK 5

This week we read about alternative assessment, rubrics and project based learning. Alternative assessment and rubrics are not new to me, since they are both part of the way we assess students in the institution I work with. I assess my students through oral presentations, interviews, portfolios, role plays, games, etc and I design rubrics to assess every single task. What was new to me was the use of an on line tool to create rubrics. Working with Rubistar made things really easy and I have to admit that even though I am a fan of rubrics because they make the assessment process more clear, creating a rubric for every task I assess is extremely hard and exhausting. But now that I learned about Rubistar I am sure things will flow more naturally. As for PBL and WebQuests, I am definitely going to try them at school. Of course, I have to adapt the idea to my needs and my students, but I am pretty sure it will work.

WEEK 4

Week after week our class gets more and more intersting, the discussions jucier and the resources more productive. This week we had to write about the problem we want to solve in our project, it is becoming real. Besides our course project we worked on some sort of mini project when writing our lesson plans and I must say this was the task hat I enjoyed the most because it made me think of every aspect of the class (the topic of the class that I was going to write about, students' learning styles, skills that I wanted to addressed and the criteria to assess students' performance in the activity) and the use of the tool chosen to meet the goal. The other assignment for this week was to write about Reading, Writing and vocabulary I wasn't expecting much because most of the websites I knew for practicing reading and writing before this week were to plain for my taste, meaning boring. But this week I explored different websites for writing that I enjoyed very much, like Dvolver.com to create a movie, Kerpoof Studio to write stories with animations and Lauri's ESL website to write crazy stories taking the different parts of the speech into account. I am still exploring the websites to find one with cool reading comprehension exercises. I know that what's really important is that the tool is useful, but if is also entertaining, even better. Aside from what happened in our course, this week I presented the workshop for the ELT conference about technology in the classroom that I wrote about in a previous post, and it went great, especially because one of the attendees was David Fay, the US Deparment of States Director of the RELO for the Andean Region and after the presentation he was kind enough to introduce himself to me and give me some feedback. I am just glad he approached me after the workshop and not before: Had i known who he was I would have panicked, I know. After I finished planning my workshop I realised that you were right in your comment Robert, what I have learned throughout this four weeks gave me a lot of material for my presentation. I am very happy with what we have done during this whole process and convince that what is happening in our class is going to have an impact in a lot more people than we can imagine.

WEEK 3 I started this week reading the articles about CALL for Listening and Speaking and browsing through several websites to practice both skills. Reading the articles I found out that Internet is a great source of authentic material, but I also found out that it is a good way to encourage my students to talk without the pressure that being observed while speaking represents.I have used many websites for planning my classes as resources to get ideas for speaking activities, but only until now I am starting to use those resources to have my students produced. The other assignment we had was to create our own delicious page, and if well I can recognize the many advantages of the bookmarking website, the experience was a little frustrating for me at the beginning as I wasn't able to create my page from the beginning. I did what i was supposed to, but it reminded me technology's big con, our patience. Finally, I read the sample projects created for former students of our webskills course and I got some hints to write my own project. This has been a very busy week and also a very fruitful one.