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