WEEK 10 - The end of a great journey

How to describe all the intensity of this 10-week course? That's a tough one! A great amount of things have happened and now... mixed feelings! :) :(

On the one hand, I'm knackered and I need a rest – not just because of the Webskills course, but because the end of the year drains all teachers, I guess. I need to recharge my batteries for next year, so a well-deserved two-month summer holiday should do it for me! I can't wait! hehe ;)

On the other hand, I've enjoyed sharing ideas, exploring new resources, trying things, asking and giving advice, reading opinions, seeing things from different perspectives, failing, learning, succeeding... the list is endless! And most importantly, I have gone through all of that with an amazing group of people: both mentors and colleagues. A BIG THANK YOU TO ALL OF YOU OUT THERE!! I'm definitely going to miss all of this... but not for long, because when September comes, those same experiences will come back flashing through my mind and I'll make sure I apply the knowledge acquired in the Webskills course to keep working towards a better teaching practice.
So it's not a 'goodbye', but a 'see you soon' :)

My list of pet resources that I didn't know about before or I had never tried even if I had heard of them:

• Delicious
• ANVILL
• Nicenet
• Rich Internet Applications, Michigan State University.
• Hot potatoes
• Vocaroo
• And last but not least, blogging, using Google docs and the course wiki

Happy teaching everyone and enjoy your summer!! :)

WEEK 9 - Learning styles

I must say that it's been such a relief to hand in the final project this week! I think it's been a very useful project because, as I mentioned last week, it has forced me to apply some of the interactive resources in my teaching context and I've seen how it will help my students in the future, as well as allowing me to reflect on the changes I can carry out next year to make their learning experience even more effective.

On the other hand, I'm really happy that I finally found some time to explore other resources from past weeks that didn't get my full attention before. Firstly, I watched the ANVILL recorded webinar and fount it really interesting (what a shame I missed it!), so now I'm going to make it my own personal aim to actually open an account and start playing with it to create some resources, come up with some ideas, watch tutorials and think how I can apply all of those into my own teaching context next year :) I believe it will be a great tool to get students to speak outside of class. They never have the chance to practise their oral fluency, accuracy and pronunciation, so ANVILL will be a great way to achieve this. Hopefully they'll appreciate the effort, will show some interest and will be willing to participate.

Secondly, another resource I've really liked is the "Rich Internet Applications" from Michigan State University  http://clear.msu.edu/clear/ria/   I came across it in one of our old Nicenet threads. I think I'll keep backtracking Nicenet in case I missed any other good websites shared by colleagues. You can never be too sure! :)

As for learning styles, it's been interesting to discuss different issues related to them on Nicenet this week. Even though I did one of my PGCE projects on learning styles, I have read some fresh ideas and views on the subject and some of the articles have made me wonder about the whole thing again. However, I'd still say that having a mixture of activities in class is the best option for us as teachers. We all have students with a variety of learning styles, so they can all benefit from a range of resources targeted at different styles. I believe it's good for them to practise all skills in different ways to train both their strong and weak learning styles and thus become better learners.

WEEK 8 - Teacher resources

This week has had two distinctive parts for me: I spent the first half of the week doing my project report and the second half exploring teacher resources.

It was very nice of our teachers to be a bit lenient with us during the first half of the week – not having to post on Nicenet, I mean. Writing a draft of my project wasn't too hard, I think, but that was because the results weren't ready, so it wasn't a full draft. I'm not sure I've ticked all the boxes requested and I definitely have to do a lot of work on it to have a decent final project: articles, bibliography, results, changes... I wish we got some kind of temporary grade for us to know if we're missing too many things or we're doing fine. Jodi and Celeste told us not to worry too much because we would get an email if we were NOT in the right direction, so I guess no news is good news! :)

Mª Luisa very kindly commented on some aspects of my project, especially on the language/grammar/structures part of it, but I still have doubts about things like assessment of the recordings, so I asked her straight away. And I just managed to send her my feedback and checklist of her project, so I hope she'll find them useful!

As for the second half of the week, we had some very interesting conversations on Nicenet and we had the chance to meet Jeff. I think we should be really honoured! I didn't manage to attend the webinar and I was really looking forward to it, because I'd like to learn more about ANVILL and I think discussing it F2F in ANVILL would have been far more useful and efficient than reading lots of instructions on paper. But I'll try to do my best. I wonder if we can watch the recorded session... We also spent some time exploring different websites and software to create activities online, but to use both online and offline. And obviously, this has meant... more delicious links! :) I've downloaded Hot Potatoes and I'd like to use the software to prepare listening and reading activities for my students to do from home (multiple choice and true-false).

NOTE TO SELF: Remember to do the Webquest now that I have more time...