Having a Sense of Urgency

Having a sense of urgency is an indispensable quality that all successful people must have. If you move quickly to finish your tasks, rather than put them off, you save time and effort. You become dependable. Hence, your chances of having new opportunities increase, because when you say you will do something, you do it fast. People will like you and will be happy to be around you.

Now, let's see how we can nurture the habit of being urgent.  Here is one tip that might help:

When you do a task for someone, do not expect something in return. That's, do not expect gratitude. You do what you do because you love to do it, not because you look for materialistic rewards. Indeed, rewards might be a by-product of your hard work and perseverance. Therefore, the rewards are guaranteed but do not try to look for them. They will come to you.

Please post your comments. 

Getting Started on a Major Task

Getting started on a major task is not easy. It requires courage. The courage to begin or launch and the courage to persist. Successful people always start with tasks of higher values and get them done before they move to the less important tasks. There is an endless temptation to start with what is fun and easy rather than what is hard and necessary. This is called 'procrastination'. It is an epidemic. If we were to succeed, we have to discipline ourselves to do what is hard and necessary rather than what is fun and easy. When we start on major tasks and get them done, our self-esteem goes up and we start to like ourselves.

How do we stop procrastinating?

Well, this is a difficult question. But there is one strategy that might help. If you have a big task to do, don't try to do it all at once. Divide it into as many small steps as possible, and every time do just one step. It's called 'salami-slicing', that's, don't try to eat a whole loaf of salami at once but slice it into as many slices as possible and then eat one slice at a time.

Hope this helps. I wait for your comments.

Tips for good public speaking

Many of us want to be good public speakers. This requires a lot of effort and experience. But public speaking is not so much different from ordinary conversations. Hence, if we pay attention to how we handle one-to-one conversations and apply these techniques to our public speaking contexts, then we might excel in the business of speaking. Here are some tips for doing well in public speaking:

1- Be yourself. Never try to be someone else. Our society needs more originals than copies.

2- Don't try to empress the audience. Do your best and if they don't like your talk, it's not your fault.

3- Choose a topic that you know well and that of interest to the audience.

4- Prepare well. It's said that for every minute, you need two hours of preparation.

5- Always feel positive even if things don't seem to work well.

6- Don't look for praise from the audience - look for critical feedback.

7- Reflect on your talk taking into account the critical feedback you got from the audience (if there is any).

8- Reserve to do your best every time out and always strive to do it better.

One goal of public speaking is to change others. However, people might not be encouraged to change if they suspect that the speaker has little knowledge in the area he or she speaks about or that he or she does not show interest and enthusiasm in what they talk about. Hence, honesty is important. Never pick up a topic to talk about in public that you have no background knowledge about. In this case you might be deceiving yourself and others.

See you tomorrow with another thought. Please feel free to post your comments!

Free Writing

It's been a while since I last wrote a blog. Today, I decided to revive the blog and post my reflections on a daily basis. The aim is to help me get addicted with the habit of writing. Most of what I will be writing about is about myself and experiences in life. I will be very pleased to receive any comments and answer any questions.

My to topic for today is about getting started writing. Because writing is a complex activity, it is naive to approach it in a normative and prescriptive way. I believe that good writing comes from trial and error. What makes my writing good is when I am free to write. Hence, the motto that I follow in writing is 'Make a mess, then, clean it up!' This means that you start writing about any particular issue of interest for at least ten continuous minutes without stopping to correct grammatical and spelling mistakes. Don't even care about coherence or the link between ideas. The goal is to cement the habit of writing. Editing comes later. It's when you clean up your writing.

This is what I have for today. I will come back tomorrow to add more thoughts.

Summer Institute, 2011, UMBC

Cultural Visits: 

1.Maryland, Baltimore Trip

2.Visit to Philadelphia.

3.Visit to New York

4.Visit to Washington DC. 

Project:  The use of wikis to promote collaborative learning in students

GOALS: 

1. Facilitate S-T Interaction
2. Facilitate S-S Interaction
3. Enable Ss to Construct & Co-Construct Knowledge
4. Promote Community Learning Environment               
5. Encourage critical thinking

To read my research, please  Click Here

Week 10: Reflections

This week, we have done the following assignments:
1. Blog: Final Reflection
2. Self-evaluating ourselves with the LoTI framework
3. Overview of the course

• BLOG: FINAL REFLECTION

It's really hard to believe that this is the last week in our course! I am sure everyone of us feels sad about it because we haven't just been learning but also having fun with technology tools on the Internet. I was very excited to work with experienced teachers from all around the world and have learned a lot from reading their posts and comments. I wish we could keep in touch for as long time as possible. For me, I will continue to write on my blog so please make sure you come and comment. I would also welcome the idea of continuing our discussions on Nicenet as we will still be able to have access to the class.

We could swap our students' emails and let the students practice their English by writing emails to each other with a CC to the teachers. I think this practice will improve the students' English and introduce them to other cultures. It's so wonderful that a class in the Middle East for example is working with a class in Europe or any other part of the world.

• SELF-EVALUATING OUR TECHNOLOGY USE
  

The Levels of Technology Innovation (LoTi) framework is a scale of seven levels used to "assess authentic classroom technology use". In this task, we had to read the aforementioned framework and decide which level we are in now and where we would like to be in a year. We also had to include ideas about how we will get to where we want to be in the future.

In my post on Nicenet, I pointed out that my technology integration was in the past limited to finding materials on the Internet to enhance my lectures, which is LoTi Level 1 (Awareness). However, since the start of this online course, I have implemented some technology enhancements in my teaching such as the use of blogger and emailing, which I think puts me now in LoTi Level 2 (Exploration).

I think if my classes were equipped with technology and all of the students were used to using it, I would aim at Level 4a – Integration: Mechanical. Of course this is not the case in the place where I teach and therefore the target level I hope to reach in a year's time is LoTi Level 3 (Infusion).

To achieve this, I would use Task-Based and WebQuest activities that are based on authentic materials to enable my students to apply, analyze, synthesize and evaluate problems.

I would also involve the students in reading activities on Nicenet where they can use their critical thinking skills in their analysis, synthesis and evaluation of the texts. The students would also need to start their own blogs to practice their reflective thinking by writing about what things they do in the course and what they think about them.

• OVERVIEW OF THE COURSE

In this task, we discussed what topics were most successful in the course, which ones were most useful for us and which were not relevant to what we do or will do.

For me, all the subjects were successful and useful, particularly the following:

• Creating class sites and making online exercises.
• Creating a rubric for assessment
• Writing class objectives in the ABCD method
• Technology enhanced lesson plans
• Project-based learning
• Interactive PowerPoint
• Learner autonomy and Teacher autonomy

The less relevant topic to what I do right now was probably Teaching Large Classes. Although some of my colleagues are teaching large classes, there is a tendency towards making the classes smaller (approximately 25 students). However, it was undoubtedly interesting to read about the subject.

Yours,

Mohamed

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