The most challenging week ever!

It has been of great benefit to us to have Jeff  Magoto in our class and I was deeply impressed by his expertise and the things he posted on Nicenet indeed gave us rich food for thought concerning ANVILL. It lets teachers share lesson and materials development even grading. I would like to quote what Jeff Magoto, Yamada Language Center Director and ANVILL designer said "Because it [ANVILL] is focused on speech and the production of oral language, it is easier for teachers to get in and get oral lessons back from students than in other systems.” I have learned that it is a powerful and useful tool waiting for educators to take full advantage of it. 

From his article "From Aerograms to Voicemail: Connecting Learners for Cross Cultural Understanding" near the conclusion, he said " As you can see, there's nothing dramatically new in this approach to teaching about culture. We show students a video; we help them understand its context and meaning; we ask them to speak/write about what they understood. What is new and what we're still struggling to understand is the delivery and response vehicle—how much of this can should be done in class? And, what are the outcomes we're looking for?" He has raised questions for all of us to analyze our teaching and what should be done to get favorable outcomes. I have realized that whatever tools we use, the most important factor we shouldn't overlook is how we use it so as it is tailored to the needs of our students and help them foster learner autonomy and therefore teacher-centered and monotonous teaching methods will be replaced by learner centered and independent learning.

I had great time experimenting with Nicenet, Googlesites, wiki and bloggers. From the start of the course we have been very familiar with these tools but I didn't expect that we could actually exploit these tools by ourselves. What a fantastic week where we have learned so many tools to use in our teaching and we can even hand on all these things to the people we associate with either educators with their teaching and students with their learning. Thank you! Web Skills Course. Like Courtney said in one of her emails, the evolution of ideas, plans to meet the needs of the students has been an unexpected at the same time exciting experience for me.

Hot potatoes has been one of my favorite exercises and some other links which can be used online and offline have certainly captured my attention. I have even tried some exercises with my students. Showing them printed pictures and let them match the words with pictures. They had fun doing this activity which I got it from http://www.toolsforeducators.com. The most interesting part was reading planned  lessons for their students by my classmates. I have learned a lot from what they have shared. Thank you all of you. 

And thank you Courtney for helping me go through this week's difficulties since I was so confused because of my health and worried about everything. Her emails were comforting, encouraging and helped me ease my tension. It has been the most challenging week for me so far because the final project draft was due on Wednesday and I came down with diarrhea and flu and I thought I wouldn't be able to finish my draft. With all my might, I could manage to finish it. Thank God. I prepared for the worst that I was not able to submit it. But anyway, the worst moment has passed.

Anyway, I have finally seen the light at the end of the tunnel.

Best,

Kyi Tha Wai