Week 1 Impressions

Hello everyone!

It has been an eventful week. I am not entirely new to using technology in the classroom but this is the first time I am engaged in the hands-on experience on my own. Now that the first week is over, I have to admit that I have been thinking really hard about the topic and felt encouraged to do so by all the ideas flooding in from my colleagues, prompted by the readings and surfing, arising from the richness of our professional experience.

The initiative to summarize and visualize, through collaborative mind maps, the suggestions on our weekly topics, brought up by Nina and Amjad is excellent, as managing and channeling information is one of the critical skills and has its practical benefits. I also like having a course wiki, where the interesting links and documents referred to in our discussion posts will be collected, as one of the features of our course. This is likely to become another treasure box, along with our blogs, as I expect that little by little a repository of interesting and useful links may be created.

Among a myriad of uses that have been proposed for blogs in EFL, I believe that with my students using a blog would work most effectively as a place they could integrate their work done in different tools (from word processors to multimedia) for others to see and assess or simply comment on. Seeing that my colleagues also need to handle large groups of students only made me more determined to try conduct blog-mediated activities in teams, rather than individually. Whatever we do, having an open technological mind and everything, the question should primarily be What are we trying to achieve? and only then How are we going to do it? I hope to get more insight into that in the upcoming week dealing with the issue of objectives. Asking our students what they think about it may be an important step in making our blog, or any other tool we use, even more productive.

As to my colleagues, it is evident that, with the kind help of our tutors, a 'list of participants' has been shaping into a vibrant group, with ties and sharing as the underlying principle. A true academic network, whose members have already proved to be curious, hard-working, responsive and generous.(What can compare to the feeling you get upon reading a positive comment to your post?) It is a kind of cooperation we would like out students to engage in through ICT, with manifold benefits. It is a reminder that our students also need clear instruction and encouragement from us as teachers - everything we have been getting plentifully in this course so far.

Another important thing is that starting to be trained on how to best use functionalities of all the tools Sandra and Deborah have encouraged us to use so far (blog, discussion board, wiki) plus the tools proposed by others (Amjad, thank you again!) will all be useful in formulating our future projects.

The bottom line has to be about how well have we/I been doing? As a benchmark and a reminder that our teaching practices are a work in progress, I warmly invite you to briefly visit the following blog (please go to the post dated December 14).

For me, it is a starter for the new week on the E-course.

Best wishes,

Andreja