Welcome to my blog!

The reason behind creating this blog is directly connected to the online course I am happy and proud to be part of now. I am honoured to be selected into the group of passionate and professional English language teachers who want to develop their skills and share their experiences. Building Teaching Skills through the Interactive Web offers a chance for me to go a huge step forward in my teaching journey.

Let this blog serve as a record of my attempts and efforts. Please feel free to comment on anything that is going to happen here.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Week 2 - Web Searching and Setting Objectives

The course is gathering momentum... This week my attention was divided between learning new tools for web searching and analyzing the classes I teach in order to prepare for the final project.

As far as the first one goes, I discovered that Google is not the only search engine and, most surprisingly, not the best one for all purposes. I can now strongly recommend NoodleTools, especially Clusty and AskKids. However, I still believe in Google, especially for finding information in my native language, i.e. Polish. The most important lesson I learnt is that to save time and effort in doing something, you first need to devote a lot of both in order to learn how to do it effectively! It may sound awkward, but it proves right when you try!

The other task we were assigned this week was to describe one (or two) classes that we currently teach. Although most of my great colleagues used the same class for two tasks (setting objectives with the ABCD model and preparing for the final project), I decided to present two of my classes. And the reason is not that I have too much time, but I feel we often miss this stage of planning our teaching, especially as regards more experienced teachers. It proved a fantastic opportunity to reflect on the state and condition of my classes and individual students, which obviously change with time. Something that was true at the beginning of a semester, may be completely invalid at the end! Continuous reflection and re-analysis of the teaching-learning environment constitute a key feature of effective teaching and learning.

I hope my enthusiasm will endure for the next eight weeks and I will end up with a challenging and apt project for my teaching.

2 comments:

  1. Hi,Joanna.
    Nice to meet you in the class. This week was so much informative and rich in new knowledge that I was scared a little bit,but your posting on ABCD learning objectives model helped me a lot, I understood more by your definitions and decided to follow your way and techniques you used. That is true that one learns better from peers rather than academic resource.
    Regards,
    Nilufar

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  2. Hi Nilufar,

    It is really nice to hear that I facilitated your going into the ABCD model. At first it also looked pretty complex too me, but as I like things done in some logical order, I decided to break the whole objective setting process into small steps - and it worked!

    Now we need to put in practice, so let's get to work!

    Regards,
    Joanna

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