End of Week 1: Summing Up

The first and the most exciting week of my new on-line course is drawing to a close. It was full of new experiences, meeting new friends, learning new things...

Some interesting additional reading was offered to us that opened new opportunities of using technology in teaching and learning. I liked Larry Ferlazzo’s article: The Best Ways For Students (And Anyone Else!) To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly & Painlessly (Feb 09 2008). He says that the main thing is not just using too much technology, but to make your students use it for their learning purposes. I totally agree with this statement. My aim in this course is to learn as much as possible of the best ways of using on-line tools and techniques to make my lessons and lectures more interesting and best adjusted to the demands of our technological age.

The first task was to create our own blogs. It seemed impossible for me at first, but thanks to Deborah’s very clear instructions, as well as to Arjana’s kind support, I was able to create it successfully. Some of my coursemates are already using blogs with their students. I think, it is a good idea to use it for writing activities and for group projects. Besides, I like Graham Stanley’s idea about using blogs for creating students’ on-line portfolios, which will help learners to ‘return to previous written work and evaluate the progress they have made during a course’. http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/blogging-elt

As a matter of fact, a week ago I presented a paper at our faculty annual conference about the importance of creating students’ e-portfolios in higher education. Although we can use the Moodle system , the transition from traditional educational instruments to electronic means is rather slow at our university. With my paper I wanted to draw the attention of the academic staff to the benefits of using e-portfolios.