Week 8: Summing up

This week has offered a great variety of teacher on-line resources. For instance, tools for educators http://www.toolsforeducators.com/ and Personal education press http://www.educationalpress.org/index.asp/ offer innumerable resources for word search, bingo, crossword puzzles, board games, flashcards, matching and multiple choice exercises which you can make online and print out to use offline.

Easy test maker http://www.easytestmaker.com/default.aspx is also a tool for making paper tests in an easy way. I used this site to create a test for my BA students in English philology to check the understanding of basic stylistic devices which we need for conducting stylistic analysis of literary texts.


At this point I was not able to explore Hot Potato Program http://hotpot.uvic.ca/, as it required downloading, which might change some of my computer programs and I did not take a risk, but judging from my colleagues exercises that they have made using it, I can say that it is a really great tool for teachers. As far as I know, Moodle has the HotPotato option, and I am going to use it later.

However, there was another Option, SMILE, offering web-based activity generators which, I think, is similar to Hot Potato. I was able to make a Jeopardy like game for beginners for word search in different categories.

At a glance I liked the Web Poster Wizard - http://wizard.4teachers.org/ which I could use for a single lesson assignment or for short-term Projects.

For this week's task we were also asked to create a Nicenet class, a class blog on blogger.com/ or a class wiki on sites.google.com/ .

The first two were quite easy, which I had done with pleasure. Creating a Wiki was really challenging for me, and I wasn't able to do it yet, but I'm not going to give up, as this is the tool I will be definetly using with my class very soon. Victoria kindly offered detailed instructions to solve some of my problems, and I'm going to follow them.

In addition, this week we worked on finalizing our Project report/plan drafts and sending to our peers for review. I have read very interesting projects from Janet and Hanan and sent them my feedback already. Now I'm looking forward to their feedback to my Project plan. While reviewing my peers works I used the recently studied techniques of 'tracking changes', and 'adding comments', which I found very helpful.These are the techniques I need to use all the time while reviewing my students assignments or papers.

On the whole, this week, like previous weeks, was full of amazing new things we learned. I wonder, how many more new things are awaiting us ahead!