WEEK 4 - A CHALLENGING WEEK

This week was really challenging as I performed a lot of tasks. First, the topic of discussion was 'Reading, Writing and Vocabulary'. Our dear instructor has presented a number of valuable and useful articles and websites on improving these skills. The sites provide a wide range of activities - conversations, quizzes, exercises, etc. I will benefit from them during my classes. Besides, my colleagues have also suggested exploring other websites and I will try to add them on my Delicious page.

Every week we learn how to improve the students' language learning skills and I must say that I have discovered a number of new techniques to apply.

Another task was writing a specific issue connected with our students. This is the next step to writing our final project. Every week we work out a part of our final project so that it can be easy to prepare it. The main problem with my students is that they don't like writing, have no desire to put their thoughts into words. And once they write an essay they make gross mistakes. So I hope using new technologies I will be able to tackle the problem.

Finally I want to say that I am so happy to have taken part in this course!!! Thank you again for your attention!!!

Sincerely

Gulnar

DELICIOUS!!!!

At last I created my Delicious page! I can't believe that I did it. But thanks to my dear instructor Ms Donna and my dear colleague Anna I managed to do such wonderful task! I have never had Delicious page. It is new for me. You can add your favorite websites and keep them safe on this page. It is very very very interesting! I will also recommend my students to create their own Delicious pages and I am sure they will enjoy doing it!

I don't know what else I will learn on this course. Frankly speaking, I have made much progress in my studies.  Thank you again for your care and attention!

And I wish all my colleagues great achievements in their lives!

Best regards,

Gulnar

WEEK 3 - FEELINGS

This week was really challenging, I hope everybody did their best to accomplish the given tasks on time.

I don't know what to begin with. Because each week is full of colorful activities, you learn new techniques, get a lot of useful information about the recent innovations. The only thing to do is to apply them in your classes.

This week's discussion was Aural/Oral Skills. I read several articles about teaching listening, speaking and pronunciation by Lindsey Miller, Maria Busa and Julia Gong. The authors presented valuable information about developing these skills, especially using authentic materials. Besides I got acquainted with several websites full of activities, such as One Stop English I found more interesting First day lessons and drama activities. And esl.about.com provides with conversation activities, classroom worksheets, boardgames for all levels. All the websites suggested by our dear instructor Ms Donna are so useful that we need enough time to apply them in the classes.

Another task was to read nine final sample projects  and share our opinions about how efficiently the projects were implemented, what changes the authors made in their students, whether they achieved their goals. All the projects were clearly described, among them a project by Aleyda Linares from Universidad Pedagogica Nacional Francisco Morazan of Tegucigalpa, Honduras - Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web Project Report drew my attention. She completed her final project successfully. What I liked in her project was that we should think and satisfy the needs and interests of the students in order to make them highly-motivated in the class. Using a class blog, assessing the students' accomplishments and defining netiquette rules for them enabled her to involve the students in the activities with enthusiasm.

I want again to thank the staff of Oregon University, especially Ms Donna for nominating me for this course. I already feel positive changes in me.

Best regards

Gulnar 

MY IMPRESSIONS OF WEEK 2

I am going to share my impressions of Week 2 - how successfully I applied what I learned in my classes - and my opinions with you!

There were a number of valuable activities that we did during this week. First of all, the discussion topic was Websearching. I confess that I was familiar with a few websites like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, I always search for the topics on these websites. But thanks to www. noodletools.com - the search engine that Ms Donna offered us, I found many websites useful for my students and me too. As I mentioned in my post there is a great choice of websites that we need time to browse them thoroughly. I will recommend them to my students as well as my colleagues in the university. I hope they will also enjoy them. The websites such as Intute which provides lots of information in all spheres - medicine, art, education, psychology, communication, etc., Bing and iSEEK Education- will be beneficial for students in preparing their reports, Ask.com - we can find the answers to any questions that interest us, Merriam-Webster Dictionary which will enable the students get the definitions of the words, their synonyms, etymology and do quizzes to test themselves. I also took into account some websites that my colleagues recommended me - eric.edu.gov, sweetsearch.com. 

Besides our dear instructor informed us with amazing statistics about the Internet users. We must acknowledge that nowadays the number of Internet users is growing exponentially. More than half of the world population have access to the Internet. As the technology becomes a tool for learning, we should benefit its power and go far in our life.

Another important task was to present our ABCD learning objective. We had to share a behavioral objective for the class we are teaching using this model. And I created my learning objective following the criteria suggested by it. It was really interesting. Without objective you can't get success in your teaching career.

And the last we had to describe our classes and inform about the class setting in detail in order to let them know whether we could apply the new technology during our classes. This is the start for our final project.

Every week I learn new things, new technologies that I really didn't expect to be like that! 

Thank you so much for giving us opportunities to benefit from your experience!

Sincerely,

Gulnar

MY FIRST WEEK IN THE SPRING 2013 WEBSKILLS COURSE

First of all, I want to mention that I am so happy to participate in this online course organized by University of Oregon, American English Institute. I am so grateful to all staff for creating such opportunities for us teachers!

I want to write about what I did during the first week.

The first week was devoted to the course and introducing ourselves to each other. There are many instructors from different countries and different cultures, so I am so glad to make new friends and share opinions with each of them. All my colleagues have devoted their lives to teaching and are professional in their jobs. So it gives me great pleasure to benefit from their experience. 

The main tasks to be performed through the whole week were filling out the needs analysis survey in order to help the course instructors determine the best class for us. And the most important task was to create a blog that I had never done it. At first I faced some problems in creating a blog, but thanks to the instructions I coped with all the difficulties and managed to do it. Every week we must post new messages and inform about how successfully we completed the tasks and given assignments.

What about discussions, I found them more enlightening among all the tasks. Because I witnessed respect and collaboration between the course members. As my colleagues mentioned, everybody took the topics seriously and presented valuable opinions. I really enjoyed them.

We were informed about the guidelines and ground rules for discussions. I absolutely agree with them. We must all follow these rules for improving ourselves and being professional online instructors.

Finally, I want to say that the course is really fantastic. I can see the progress I made during a week. And all these due to the strenuous work of the University staff, especially Ms. Donna Shaw. She is so kind and attentive to all of us. Thank you so much!!!