Week 8: Draft, Teaching with Online Tools, and Creating an Online Course

Few days remain before we hand in our final projects. It seems to be the last week when we started to work on this online course. I feel the time has passed so fast and I have not even noticed that because I was so engaged in the different activities we have had since we began classes. Each activity was as interesting or even more than the previous ones.

After choosing a partner with whom we were going to work on this peer-reading task, we finally handed in our drafts. When writing it I could notice many things have changed in the way I used to conduct my classes and the way I have integrated internet as a technological tool to be used outside the classroom. To share drafts and read a partner’s draft were really fruitful because we also learn from other person’s experience and sometimes we notice we face similar realities in our classrooms. So, reading a partner’s draft was like having worked on two projects.

We were so happy to have Jeff in our discussions and we learned about Anvill. This is a wonderful tool that would fit my students’ needs, especially of the ones who are in the intermediate, upper intermediate, or advanced program of English as a Foreign Language. The tool we use depends on our objectives and our students needs. I feel that Nicenet is a good option if I want my students to practice their reading and writing as well as have some discussions. Blogger is a perfect tool for writing and reflection. Google sites is great if we want to share files with students. In the discussions, I learned about other tools as well. Now our next task is to get familiar with those tools like Anvill or others that are designed to foster students’ independent learning.

Our task was to create an online course site or an exercise. I created my Nicenet class. It is called “Distance Course”, and it was meant to reinforce the activities we have to readapt with my Listening & Speaking class. This is the class with which I worked for my project and this past week we were announced it was either going to be closed or reduced the length of time to fifteen days out of twenty days a regular class has due to administrative policies. So, to have a more efficient use of the class time, some of those activities may be removed outside the classroom. An online course can be also planned more carefully and used from the very beginning with a new class since the one I have now is about to get to the end.

Working on activities like these ones were really useful and our real task is to be able to use them in our classes and extend those activities to all our classes considering our students’ needs and background.