Week 9: Reflections

This week, we have done the following assignments:

• Submitting the Final Project Report
• Creating Class Sites and Making Online Exercises
• Discussing the Online Tools Explored This Week

1. THE FINAL PROJECT REPORT:
By the end of this week, i.e. Sunday, June 6, 2010, all participants in our online course will have to submit their final project reports to the course coordinator, Deborah Healey. My project, which I started eight weeks ago and have already submitted, examined the usefulness of web blogs in fostering motivation in English writing in students. To do that, I created a class blog for my engineering students at the University of Bahrain in order to encourage them to write more in English. The response and reaction of the students are amazing despite the fact the students have been busy with tests and exams as their course wraps up by June 8, 2010.

Some benefits from using my class blog:

• The students became more confident to write in English.
• Their writings improved from one post to the next.
• They were able to read their peers’ writings and comment on them.
• Silent students in the classroom had the chance to speak out.
• Our physical classroom became a more relaxed and friendly place to be in because we all felt a sense of community resulting from the online interaction on the class blog.

In my final part of the project, I concluded that the experience of incorporating a class blog in my teaching was successful and that it made me value the role of technology in motivating my students to write more in English. I also warned from rushing to blame students for their inability to progress well in English writing and suggested that a change in the way we teach, especially using blogs, would greatly help to improve the writings of students.

2. CREATING CLASS SITES AND MAKING ONLINE EXERCISES:
In addition to the class blog that I created for my engineering students, I have created Nicenet and Wiki classes for my business students.

The purpose of the Nicenet class is to enhance the students' reading skills by posting reading texts and asking the students to comment on what they think about the way the problems in the texts are probed and what they suggest as a solution. They will also be required to research for some terminologies in the readings and do exercises, such as matching, cloze and crosswords activities that will be uploaded on the class Wiki.

I have used Easy Test Maker to make a paper cloze exercise for my General English students and Hot Potatoes to make a crossword puzzle for my business students. The latter activity is called Vocabulary in Context which is done after reading an article titled Learning to Cope with Corporate Culture Clashes to help the students find the answers.

The most interesting online exercise maker that I have explored this week is Hot Potatoes. It is an essay tool to use. First, you need to download the program on your computer and then follow the steps in this file here to get started.

3.DISCUSSING THE ONLINE TOOLS EXPLORED THIS WEEK:
In the discussion part on Nicenet, we shared our ideas about how the tools we explored this week, such as the ones in 2 above, might change the way we teach and the way that our students learn. In addition, we discussed how using these tools could promote learner autonomy as well as the constraints that would make it difficult to use the tools and how we will overcome these difficulties.

For me, using these tools would enable me to create materials that are tailored for my students instead of adapting ready-made ones. The activities that I make can be posted on the class wiki where students can download them and do them at home.

In my view, the tools we explored this week can promote learner autonomy, as students will use most of them outside the classroom boundaries where there is no direct help from the teacher and this will provide the opportunity for the students to take more control over their learning.

The one thing that could constrain my using of some of the tools is the fact that I have no Internet connectivity in many of my classes. Some students find it difficult to use online tools unless someone shows them how to do it. Without Internet access in the classroom, this will not be possible.

To overcome this problem, I would create How-To files (documents with instructions and pictures) to help my students to acquaint themselves with the online tools that we plan to use.

Yours,

Mohamed