Week 10

I can’t believe this online course finally comes to an end. I can’t remember how many times I said that I have learned so much form this program, either. What’s more, being able to learn and exchange ideas with so many wonderful teachers around the world is just amazing. Without a doubt, I’ll sign up for another course if there is any in the future.

It’s really difficult to say which topic or tool is the most successful because they were so connected to each other. To me, looking back on those past ten weeks, I just enjoyed every assignment I have done, including the readings, discussions, tasks, reflective blog and the final project. For me, this course itself is Project-Based Learning because we kept on leaning something new each week in order to finish the final project step by step along the way.

The way Robert organized this course and guide all the participants to the final project is the best thing I learned. Not only is he so resourceful to provide us many practical and insightful articles and links, but he also did the best he could to solve the problems we encountered and give us constructive feedback every week. As for the final project, all you had to do was connect the dots, combining everything that you learned and did in the past few weeks.

These past ten weeks has truly been hectic and fruitful. Although I have to admit that I didn’t do my best for very few of the assignments because I was busy doing something else, overall, I consider myself a dedicated student actively participating in everything this course demanded. Undoubtedly, I still need some time to fully take in all the abundant knowledge and skills from this course. And then, I will have to think about the real application of what I learned in the classroom.

I wish you all the best and hope all your dreams come true.

Richard Li 

Week 9

Thanks to my peer reading partner, Thin Peng, I have revised some of my draft and also added certain extra information based on his suggestions. The first draft was done in a hurry last week, I found a lot to improve after careful proof reading this week. In addition to some typos and grammatical errors, some paragraphs were also not well-organized enough, and others were wordy and not concise. I really hope I’ve done a better job this time.

Of course, I also quickly went through others’ wonderful works and really admired their great efforts. We have teachers around the world, and some of them are teaching in colleges. Not only are those projects diverse and interesting, but some of them are actually good models for me to follow because of the thought-provoking ideas and good English writing skills. It would be great if we still the access to Robert’s Wiki because I would definitely need to go back and check all the works from each dedicated members of this online course.

 How to give proper individual guidance to every student in a large class has been a very hot topic here. For example, there were several workshops about “Differentiated Teaching” have been held to raise teachers’ awareness of its importance. Therefore, I think this week’s topic of discussion, “Multiple Intelligences, Learning Styles and Technology”, had much in common with it. As usual, we read suggested articles and learned more about it’s basic assumptions and practical resources we can use in the classroom in terms of technology. The most important thing for teachers is to identify each student’s unique learning styles and try to incorporate at least three intelligences when teaching new materials.

Where did the time go? It has been nine weeks already? Looking back on the past weeks, again, I would really like to say that I have learned so much more along the way week by week. With all the readings, tasks and final project each week, I really feel I’m a student again. So, I guess the next question would be how to apply what we have learned into our real classrooms and benefit our students. Also, when given an opportunities to do a presentation next time, I would also like to share this course with other English teachers in Taichung, Taiwan.

Week 8

Without a doubt, the most demanding task this week was the draft project. Not only did we have to finish it in time by Wednesday, but we also had to read our partner’s work and give feedback. We were given a final project template, information about project plan and report, rubrics, peer reading checklist, etc, so I think all the members of this online course must have a clear picture of what to do. Then, there were discussion and task to do as usual, and this week’s topic was about online course sites.

While I was doing the draft project, I thought I could just copy and paste my previous task steps, but then I realized it was not that easy. I found most of them were not organized enough or looked not like a serious academic essay because oftentimes I was just reflecting on my own current teaching practice and wrote down whatever came to my mind. So, I almost had to start all over again to fix the problem, and still I wasn’t quite satisfied with my draft. I wish I could have more time.

It was a pity I didn’t catch up with the online face-to face discussion, but Robert has kindly recorded the whole webinar so that I can check it out later on. Actually, I myself have been practicing speaking English one on one via Skype for five years, and it has really helped me a lot, like giving presentations in English at workshops here in Taiwan. I wonder if there will be another chance for us to exchange ideas of this online course with the teacher and other course members.

With the help of modern technology, language learners have more access to different learning methods and motivating resources, which also makes it much more challenging to be a teacher. Since our students are so exposed to different formats of stimuli, traditional lecturing might not be sufficient just to grab their attention, and that’s why we teachers have to keep on learning and studying. Therefore, I am grateful that I get to know so many online resources because of this course and its tasks.