Week 2: The course is getting tough

Another week of my learning experience is ending. This week I found that it was a bit tougher compared with the previous week, and I’m sure it’ll be even tougher as we proceed. It’s natural! We had more assignments and more readings to do, so I realized that I needed to organize my work properly to do everything in time.

Thus, I started with the task – to share a behavioral objective for a class we teach using the ABCD model. At our university we are required to design our syllabuses including all the components of the ABCD model (i.e. Audience, Behavior, Condition, and Degree) but under different headings. After reading about it, what I liked most was that the focus was made on behavior – as the saying goes ‘I do and I understand’. So I decided to apply the ABCD model to my teacher training session in TKT on lesson planning, as this was fresh in my mind. Though, in the beginning, I was not quite sure whether it was the right way to do, but Deborah’s kind comment encouraged me. From now on I’m going to look at my syllabuses and lesson plans from the ABCD perspective.

Then I moved to another assignment – a discussion on Web search engines. I read all the suggested material and learned about a lot of other possibilities apart from Google. Thank Deborah again for offering such trustworthy and reliable sites as http://www.noodletools.com/, http://www.intute.ac.uk, http://hakia.com, etc. and also for disclosing some search techniques about how to limit/expand our search. Now, I’m sure, my search will be more efficient in terms of the time used as well as the topic searched.

Today I started making steps towards Planning my Project work – I described my class of MA students in ELT with whom I’m going to do a course in ‘Using Multimedia in ELT’ applying all the knowledge and techniques learned within this course.
And now I’m summing up all this for my Blog post. I find it very interesting to reflect upon the fulfilled tasks and assignments – I feel it’s becoming a habit that’s got a lot of advantages: first, you report what you have done for the week; second, you can track the progress of you work, and third, you can refer to it any time if you need to recall or use something from it.

However, I have to confess that this week all my work was self-oriented, I mean, I wasn’t very active in discussions and comments to my coursemates, which I lacked very much. But, I’m going to make it up during the week-end.

I suppose, that’s all for now.