WEEK 3

This week of the course was rather hard.
STEP 1
We had to read and discuss lots of materials dealing class activities while working with listening, speech, phonetics and so on. The resources proposed are really helpful and I have already used some ideas at the lessons.
STEP 2
We had to create a delicious page. The process was exciting but the most interesting part was visiting the pages of  my course mates, I have found lots of resources and sites which are really interesting, I haven`t looked all of them through so I am still in the process.
STEP 3
We had to read and analyze the projects which were created by the participants of the same course the previous years. I read the project by Aleyda Linares from National Pedagogical University of Honduras.This project is oriented to undergraduate students who are Spanish native speakers and are willing to learn English. The author focused her attention to the grammar aspect and the program aims to develop students' grammatical competence.  The author hopes to stimulate students` motivation and introduce technology into the learning process.

Creating a blog with lots of useful grammatical resources and links is a variant for realizing her ideas. I have had such an experience myself (though my blog http://zubrilina.blogspot.com/ was concentrated on different aspects not only grammar) and I think that it is a worthy way out.
I like the project proposed for analysis as it is well-planned, all the details are included and it is practically oriented. I like the way issues were handled and the solution applied.

So I am thinking about my project...

Week 2: 
Writing Objectives. Describing a Class. Web Searching

Writing Objectives. Describing a Class. Web Searching

Web Searching

I usually used Google for searching information, as it is a good, general-purpose search engine. However, this week I have understood that  it's not the best choice if you are looking for academic sources or other specialized needs. There are discipline-specific portals, such as Intute's Arts and Humanities Hub; there are librarian-recommended sites, such as Librarians' Internet Index; and there are kid-friendly sites, such as KidsClick! and Ask Kids.

Describing a Class

It is so great to read about our classes – just a small virtual excursion like visiting our classrooms.  

Writing Objectives

You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to search more effectively

Thanks to our course I have learnt about The A.B.C.D. method. The ABCD method of writing objectives is an excellent starting point for writing objectives. In this system, "A" is for audience, "B" is for behavior, "C" for conditions and "D" for degree of mastery needed.

1.      Audience (A) – Who? Who are your learners?

2.      Behavior (B) – What? What do you expect them to be able to do? This should be an overt, observable behavior, even if the actual behavior is covert or mental in nature. If you can't see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it, you can't be sure your audience really learned it.

3.      Condition (C) – How? Under what circumstances or context will the learning occur? What will the student be given or already be expected to know to accomplish the learning?

4.      Degree (D) – How much? How much will be accomplished, how well will the behavior need to be performed, and to what level? Do you want total mastery (100%), do you want them to respond correctly 80% of the time, etc. A common (and totally non-scientific) setting is 80% of the time.

Our Nicenet Forum has lots of examples of well-written objectives

For my coursemates I advise to watch:

http://www.wikihow.com/Write-an-Educational-Objective

Week 1: Introductions. Creating an Academic Blog

The Fall 2013 online "Building Teacher Skills Through the Interactive Web" course is a real experiment for me, it is both very interesting and responsible as it is conducted publicly. They say that teachers are often the worst  students but I still believe we will succeed and get really much for our practical work.

I hope this blog will become a good reflective log of our course activities.
And  my initial reflection is that I feel very lucky to have such a great chance of professional development. It was my first experience to get online on Nicenet . And I am happy I managed to get acquainted with my new colleagues with the help of this tool. I have already created two blogs:

TEACHING EXTRAS  http://zubrilina.blogspot.com/ (a blog for my students)

LANGUAGE CLUB BELARUS  http://englishclubbelarus.blogspot.com/

(a blog for teachers). They are both in English and Russian, so if you have any questions, you are welcome.
This blog will have another functions and I am sure we`ll share our ideas on its pages with great pleasure.