Week 10

So here we are - it's the last week of this webskills course! When it started, I thought I would never find the time to do all the reading and all the tasks, but somehow I managed, which I very much congratulate myself on ; )

This week we have been looking back at the previous nine weeks and reflecting on what we have done and learned. It's actually pretty difficult to remember everything since there has been so much useful material to go through, but I'll try to pick a few things that I remember the best at this moment.

If I think of my future use of the internet both for work purposes and for private life, Delicious.com has saved my life concerning re-finding the all the good links I come across or am recommended by others. Now I can just add them on my Delicious site and find them again when I need them. Great!

The tools I will definitely use on my courses next year and after that are blogs and Padlet. They are both easy to use and easy to find various uses for. Also the several search engines and indexes were learned about at the beginning of the course are tools I will use.  Tools for creating online tests, such as SMILE, are things I will gradually examine more closely and take into use when I find the one I prefer.

Oh, there are endless links to nice and useful grammar materials, listening exercises, video materials etc etc that we have received on this course and that I will gradually go through and pick the ones I can use oncourses or for instance recommend to my students as extra revision materials.

Things like interactive Power Points are also something that I will have study more thoroughly.

All in all, this course has been enormously useful, but it has made me wish I had more than 24 hours in my days... But then again, better a bit too much than much too little.

One of the best things on this course has been getting connected to so many smart, talented and nice colleagues around the world! it has been interesting to hear about the conditions and challenging they face in their work as ESL/EFL teachers and to see that many of the issues are so familiar to me as well. That has really made my world seem a bit smaller.

Thank you to our marvellous instructor Dr. Donna Shaw and to all my wonderful colleagues on four continents! We'll keep in touch!

Week 9

Almost there! The past 8½ weeks have gone so fast with all the new information I have studied on this course.

This week's reading material and discussion topic was about learning styles. I have come across this topic in various sources all through my teaching career. The "original" categories (verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial etc) are ideas that I think most teachers in Finland have adopted in their teaching. The second list of styles compiled by Richard M. Felder including e.g. intuitive vs. sensing learners, sequential vs. global learners, and active vs. reflective learners is probably more unfamiliar for many. At least I found some of that information new to me, but it seemed to make sense.

The New York Times article Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits by Benedict Carey gave another interesting point of view to the matter or individual learning styles. I founf it very intriguing to read his view on testing and especially the benefits of testing as it is a frequently debated topic here in Finland as well. From my own experience, both as an instructor and a learner, I can say that testing is at least slightly useful both for extrinsically motivated learners who wouldn't otherwise be able to persuade themselves to studying and for intrinsically motivated ones who are interested in knowing what they have actually learned and what should still revise.

The resources given to us by Donna included plenty of useful sites with lessons plans etc. Once again, I will have to look into them more thoroughly later on. One resource I looked at more carefully right away was the learning style online quiz as I was curious to see what kind of results it would give to me. To quote some of the results, the quiz told me that my learning style consists of linguistic (50%), logical-mathematical (31%), intrapersonal (38%), interpersonal (56%) and musical (19%). The results didn't surprise me at all so I guess I have come to know myself pretty well so far.

This week was, or actually is tomorrow, the deadline for our final project report. I wrote the final draft with the help of the comments and corrections I got from Monika and Rosmery. A great, big thank you to them both!

The last thing to do this week is the course evaluation.

In Finland, Saturday is a big day for students! It's Graduation Day!

The pictures above are from openclipart.com and free-clipart.net.

P.S. I just have to share this with you all. There is an osprey's nest up north near Oulu in Finland and there's an online camera at the nest so anyone can follow what happens at the nest. At the moment there are 3 eggs in the nest. Here's the link:
http://kotinetti.suomi.net/saaksi/index.php

I find it both interesting and somehow calming to have a look at the osprey family a couple of times a day. 

Week 8

So close to the end of this course!

This week's new material to study was about technology tools to use for e.g. making tests, websites, exercises... I had a look at plenty of sites and tools, tested a few of them and linked them to my delicious-site so that I can have a closer look at them later.

I found Tools for Educators http://www.toolsforeducators.com/ a nice site. I managed to make a boardgame and a small crossword with those tools but creating a bigger crossword puzzle with longer text hints didn't work for some reason.

SMILE http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/mimea/smile/v2/ looks useful, but I haven't had the time to explore and test the tools there yet. Another thing to spend a rainy summer day on in preparation for work next autumn.


Another thing I spent time on this week was the project report. It took plenty of time to write but the reflection I needed to do while writing was very useful. I also received useful and insightful comments from my two proeject partners, Monika and Rosmery, and I will go back and revise certain parts of the report with the help of their feedback.

Reading and peer evaluating Monika's and Rosmery's reports was very interesting as they had very different types of projects, both of which were very concrete and useful for their work. All in all, having read their reports and seen the great interactive PowerPoints and this week's tasks on the wiki, I can be really proud of belonging to the highly qualified ingenious group of people we, English teachers around the world, are!

No more lessons to teach this spring, only exam week left!

The picture above is from openclipart.com

Week 7

This has been a busy week, both with this course and at work.

Early in the week I read texts about learner autonomy and one-computer classroom. I spent more time on the latter topic as I found it somehow closer to heart and also because I couln't open all the links given on the learner autonomy. Anyway, both topics gave a lot of new ideas.

Learner autonomy is actually something we often discuss in our teachers' lounge at work. For some reason, there seem to be age groups that are less autonomous leaners than others when they start high school studies. It would be interesting to know what the reasons are since we get our students from the same comprehensive schools (or junior highs) every year. For instance our current first year students seem to a lot less motivated and autonomous on average than the precvious age group was a year ago. If I believed in astrology, I'd blame the stars and planets, but since I don't, there has to be another explanation, still unknown to me and my colleagues. ; )

Besides reading texts this week, I hve also gained two great partners for the peer evaluation of our projects, Monika and Rosmery. Thank you both for including me in that co-operation! I worked on several evenings on the first draft of my project report and I e-mailed it to my partners last night. I'm very nervous to see what they think of it.

Oh, one more thing I've learned about this week was Padlet. That seems like a great way ofsharing information, links, assignment instructions etc with my students. It is really high on my list of tools I will start using during the next school year.We use Moodle in our school but I have found using it a cumbersome so Padlet and blogs could open up whole new digital ways of activating my students online.

Srping or actually summer has started in Finland. The last couple of days have been summery warm (+18 - 23 degrees Centigrade) and all the flora is growing so fast that one can pretty much see it happening! Only two weeks until summer holidays start here!

 

The photo was taken by my 8-year-old daughter a couple of days ago.

Week 6

This week's topics Teaching Large Classes and Interactive PowerPoints were interesting to study although I didn't find parts of the information very useful for me at the moment. That's because the groups I teach have 36 students at the most so I don't really give lectures in class that much. Through the readings I did find some useful links e.g.  Interactive Lecture Ideas (http://www.thiagi.com/interactive-lectures.html) that I will have to look into more closely and apply to my lessons next year.
Secondly, we don't have PowerPoint in our classroom computers but OpennOffice so I will have to spend some time examining the possibilities of OpenOffice Impress in creatinf some of the more advanced gimmicks that could be used in interactive presentations. Of course, things like blank slides and think-pair-share and concept test don't require any fine technology. The latter two are the methods I used in my presentation about the comparison of adjectives. While making it, I tested a couple of sites I just found namely bubble.us (https://bubbl.us/) which I used for making a mind map (one version of it below) and http://hcmc.uvic.ca/clipart/ where one can find free clipart for education. You just have to add credits.

I've given my students the assignment I planned to have in the project and actually, some of them have already handed it in. The project includes both reading online newspaper articles on specific topics and the summarising the contents and commenting on them. The students can either hand in a typed report or write their News Watch report as a blog. Gladly, a few have written a blog, which I told them they would get extra credit for.

It's Mother's Day on Sunday here in Finland so a nice weekend coming up, I hope. ; )

Week 5

Unbelievable, we are half way through the webskills course now! I feel that my head is spinning with all the new informations and ideas I've got.

This week's topics have been alternative forms of assessment, rubrics,project-based learning (PBL), and web quests. Alternative assessment is something I should get more familiar and comfortable with. I occassionally use it for oral presentations in the form of peer evaluation but I should apply it more. That's another challenge I have to take on next winter. Writing a rubric was easier than I had thought when I used Rubistar http://rubistar.4teachers.org/, which gave a lot of ready-made criteria that could be modified.

Web quests sound really interesting! I found a few that could be used with my students, maybe they should beslightly modified to meet my students' needs and interests better, but I will look into them. We got an extra credit assignment concerning creating a web quest. I have an idea that deals with applying to universities, but I'm afraid I won't have enough time this week to make it into a web quest. At least not a nice, "formal" web quest. Maybe I'll just write down the ideas more informally.

I hope you all my dear colleagues around the world participating in this course with me still have the strength to carry on with these readings and tasks we are working on! This is hard work but also rewarding.

Week 4

This week has brought me new ideas for teaching reading and writing. As always, we on the course have got so many useful links to good ESL sites and so  much new information and ideas both from our teacher Donna and from each other. It is just impossible to wholly grasp the width of all the knowledge we are gaining on this course.

As the essay constitutes about 30% of the maximum total score in the final school leaving exam in English and the reading comprehension part amounts to approximately 25%, these skills are extremely important to teach in our high school. Naturally, they are also essential in the students' further studies at university and polytechnic as well as in their future global working life. Our text books are mostly fairly up-to-date, but they can never contain current news articles. One can of course find news articles online, but creating exercises to go with the texts requires so much time that few teachers actually have that much time. That's why finding a site such as Breaking News English http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/ was like finding at least a small treasure chest at the end of the rainbow! Now using current news texts is so much easier : )

Creating a lesson plan for a lesson using technology was interesting and challenging at first as it is a long time since I've last planned a lesson on paper. I do plan my lessons but only in my head. The last time I did it on paper was probably during my teacher training year a long time ago ; ) Anyway, it was useful to have to actually put the planning process in writing this time as it made me think about all the factors involved more thoroughly. It was also very nice and educational for me to read my peers' lesson plans on Nicenet because teaching is sometimes a bit lonely profession as we don't much get to see what our colleagues are doing with their students when dealing with the same topics as we are. So thank you, all my fellow learners on this course, for wonderful ideas I can apply to my courses next year!

And a short weather update from the far north: still a bit of snow on the ground, it was raining and even sleeting yesterday but there are also a few early spring flowers visible here and there!

 

The choice of picture has to do with my lesson plan of studying houses for sale ads online.

Just playing with web tools today. I first searched the word education on Just the Word http://www.just-the-word.com/ to find collocations with that word. I collected a couple of pages' list of the collocations and made a word cloud/squirrel with the list of vocabulary with Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html.

Week 3, Part 2

Project Task #2

I read two project reports and scanned through a third one. They all appeared very professionally made and interesting. The groups of students, the teaching circumstances, and the goals of the projects differed a great deal. It was intriguing to read the teachers' anticipations on the results of the projects and then what the actual results were.

What was the most useful and interesting thing about reading the reports was, of course, getting a clearer picture of the project and the report we are also going to do on this course. Now I have a better idea of what I have got myself into. ; )

Week 3, part one

This week has been an eye-opener and a useful reminder when it comes to teaching listening and speaking skills. We do practise especially listening fairly much as it is and we do a lot of speaking exercises on all courses and even have a separate oral skills course, which is voluntary, but I should really look at new ways of teaching these skills. Making the students speak and listen is of course the main objective, but I will have to explore the webtools that could be useful and see whether they will make the practising of these skills more efficient or more tempting for the students.

One advantage that the web tools could bring to practising aural and oral skills is that students could be doing that practise as homework and that would save us some of the valuable time in class for other things.

Another thing I've done so far this week was creating my Delicious page. The process was easy and adding links is pretty simple as well. I had already started collecting useful links on my blog, now I'll have to make a decision which I'm going to use as my link "achive" from now on; doing double work seems a bit unnecessary. I'll probably use Delicious in the long run. Anyway, creating the link storage was a great improvement for me as a person who hates filing papers and "filing" electronic information such as useful web sites.

Week 2 continued...

I attended an interesting seminar in Helsinki today. It was organised by the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities and the topic of the seminar was the future of Finnish high school (or upper secondary) education. The speakers of the seminar represented e.g. the organising association, the Ministry of Education and Culture, Aalto University and the national Board of Matriculation Examination.

Several aspects of the high school system are currently undergoing big changes. There will be new curricula, the planning of which has recently started and which should bein use in 2016. Besides that, the matriculation examination, which students have to pass in order to graduate from high school, will be made computer-based gradually, the first exams being "computerized" in 2016. All of this change has raised a lot of questions some of which were answered or at least discussed in today's seminar.

The greatest benefit that I personally gained from the seminar today was that whatever direction the new curriculum and the new forms of the matriculation exam will take one thing is sure: teaching and applying different webskills and tools will be more and more important in all the subjects. Being once again reminded of that increased both my motivation to learn more myself and also my despair at the enormity of the area we are entering when talking about webskills. Striking the right balance will be essential.

About starting the project:

Our school years in high school are divided into 5 (or in some schools 6) 6 - 8-week periods. The students can choose fairly freely which courses they take in which period as long as they complete all the obligatory courses as well a the required number of optional courses in order to graduate.
This system means that the groups we teach change approximately every  7 weeks and in our school with about 540 students, there are always several new faces in every new course.

We just started a new period yesterday and I have two new groups in which most of the students seem to be previously unfamiliar to me, so I have no clear idea of their skills in English at the moment. As I am writing this, I'm still undecided which group I will get involved in the project for this course or whether I'll have them both do something. The problem is that they do have the study books they have bought, so whatever project I will have them do, can't take too much time from studying at least the main topics of the text book; otherwise there will be complaints about "wasting the students' money on books they didn't need"... So I'll have to find a balance between the project and the "normal" stuff we do.

By the way, it IS so nice to finally get organised concerning useful links that I need or may need. I have added a few here again. The Worldmapper and BBC's How Big Really are truly nice visual representations of geographical, ecological, historical etc things in the world.Good prompts for discussions or writing for example. TED Talks is also one I have used; the students watch a video of their choice and write a comment.

Week 2

Websearching

The Internet is soooo full of materials I could use if only there was time to search, test, evaluate...
I've looked through more than ten of the links given in this week's material and I still have at least another ten that I've marked on the list as sites I'll have to have a closer look at.
Here are just a couple of ideas I got when checking out some of the links:

- USAgov - that will be useful together with http://cencus.org/ when writing essay instructions as we sometimes make the third years students analyse statistics in their essays

- I will use Hot Topics and IDEA Portal for discussion courses

- American Memory will be a gold mine if we ever have time to do projects on topics related to American history and I will definitely ask my colleague (a history teacher) whether he knows that site

- National Science Digital Library will be very helpful on two of my courses, those covering science and technology and environmental issues

- I also found the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation site interesting as well the couple of sites recommended for searches concerning arts; I'll have to look at them more closely in the autumn when I teach courses with global and cultural topics.

- 10x10 looked like a lot of fun! That I will definitely show my students!

When doing all this websearching last night, I also came across a couple of sites that I found useful and/or fun.

- On snopes.com you can search for urban legends and see whether they are true...

- I also found several falsh fiction pages one of which is Flash Fiction Online. I will surely use texts from those sites on my writing course as well as on the course on culture next term.

All in all, searching the web for new sites and materials made me both ecstatic and despaired. So many sites, so little time!!!

I combined country info about Finalnd from the CIA web page with trying out a web tool called Tagxedo. Looks nice, doesn't it!

At last I have a place (and enough motitvation) ...

... to collect all the links of potentially useful web tools and sites in one place. I hear and read about sites and tools that might be useful or at least entertaining to use in class, but there is so little time to look into them and see whether they would actually bring something beneficial in my courses. So I write the names on post it-notes and have those little pieces of paper everywhere and seldom have the energy to sit down and actually go through those sites. And after a while I usually have to clean my desk and throw the notes away...

But now I have a sensible place where to store that information and maybe I will even get to looking at those tools and sites more closely as I visit the sites bríefly in order to get the URL for this blog.

Khadija, thank you once more for mentioning Testmoz - that's one of the sites I will have to study more carefully!

As a final note: it's snowing in southern Finland..

Week 1

So now the much awaited and slightly dreaded course on web skills has started! Much awaited because it was an honour to be accepted on the course and I'm looking forward to getting a lot of new ideas from the course, both from the instructors and course materials but also from my colleagues attending the course. Sligthly dreaded because the next two months are usually very busy at work and I'm still wondering where I'm going to find the time to do everything on this course, but I will take it one day at a time and not stress about the whole of the ten weeks quite yet.

This first week has been interesting as I've read the presentations of the other teachers on the course and realised - once again that we, English teachers, are a huge group of professional people all over the world sharing the same passion for the language, all the cultures that it is spoken in and the idea of teaching and spreading this modern lingua franca to our students to ease their communication with people from all over the globe. Our contexts differ as our students represent different age groups, skill levels and cultures, but still, a lot of our challenges and rewards with teaching English are nonetheless similar.

The Ground Rules for communication on the course as well as the rubrics for evaluation sounded very thorough and well-motivated so I didn't really have anything to add. Just have to keep them in mind, which shouldn't be too difficult as they seem fair and professional.

About blogs:

I have never used blogs in my teaching. Some students of mine have occassionally handed in a written project as a blog, eg. a travel journal, which has been a nice change to all the hand-written texts on paper I usually grade. Now that I saw how easy it is to create a blog (it took about 5 minutes or less), I will seriously consider requiring certain written projects to be done in a blig form.

What I still have to ponder on conceerning student blogs, is how to correct the language as it is not a similar process as on a text on paper. Of course a simple solution is to print the text on paper and make the necessary corrections, and that's probably what I'll do, but on the other hand, that sounds unnecessarily unecological to print a text that is on the web. That's something I have to think about.