Week 8 - Project Draft + Online and Offline Tools

Unfortunately, this week has been quite busy and due to a project draft to be finished by Wednesday, there has not been enough time to explore all the different tools and exercises in details.

Pretty luckily, I was able to finish my draft on Monday and also check Tuula’s project and send her feedback so I could concentrate on this week task.

On Thursday I had some time to explore some of the tools and was amazed how many of them we were introduced to. They are all great but having registered to so many websites and keeping records of usernames and passwords has become too tiring. I have to admit that if I do not save it somewhere on my PC soon, I will forget all of them.

As for tools, I have already been familiar with, my number one is Hot Potatoes. I came across Hot Potatoes about 10 years ago and since then I would say that this software is one of the most advantageous tools a teacher can use because it may be used both online and offline so the Internet connection is not always necessary. I used to save the .htm files on my USB and before the lesson, I copied the files into each computer or the network administrator created a special drive for students, I copied it there and the students accessed it from each computer.  In addition, a teacher can create tailor-made lessons reflecting grammar and vocabulary of the course book. I have uploaded some Hot Potatoes files I made a couple of years ago for you to see on Donna’s wiki into Week 8 resources.

Another tool worth mentioning are Google Documents. Creating a Google Form has never been so easy. I enjoyed creating the forms so much that I am going to use them quite often when I feel that something should be improved or get some feedback on activities at school.  I also used Google Doc to prepare a record book of mistakes that my students made in their posts. The task was to go through the lines with mistakes and correct them. When they did it at home, it was quite ok, however, when I introduced it at the lesson – checking their “corrections”, my students realized that they might “tease” the others by deleting their corrections, making mistakes in others’ lines etc. so I was forced to threaten them by leaving the document as it was, without checking their corrections and explaining what mistakes they had made and of course, starting to assess their posts full of mistakes and give them appropriate mark.

After checking our Week 8 Resource Page on Donna’s wiki, I found out that William used Quizlet so I checked it. I was nicely surprised because it was the tool I had seen before in an English course of Masaryk’s University in Brno, The Faculty of the Arts. So I logged in and created flash cards for my students to prepare for the test on Gerund and Infinitive and sent the link to the exercise to them.

While going through various tools, I decided to improve my skills at managing an LMS Moodle I have at my disposal on our school server. I had created several courses for students to promote their autonomy, but mostly used the “passive” part of it – posting links to interesting articles, online dictionaries or online exercises.  I did not have enough time and strength to learn how to create tests there because it seemed too complicated. I am not saying that is not difficult, but it gives you opportunity to prepare questions and then you may create various test and set marking and a penalty mark and after the student takes the test, the result of it is sent to the marking book so the teacher does not have to evaluate it.  What teacher would not want a tool that evaluates prepared tests?

Finally, our Nicenet discussion about the use of these tools and exercises and their influence on promoting Learner Autonomy was due today. My colleagues expressed their opinion on the different tools and what constraints might be expected and how they might be overcome. Nobody has mentioned that Learner Autonomy happens mostly outside the classroom and therefore the need for a computer for each student in the class is not the issue to be solved. However, overuse of the tools might result in students’ indifference towards them and their purpose. So even though, I am IT positive and a one-computer teacher and a computer geek and an enthusiast of technology-related tools, I have to admit that the tools should be used wisely and to such an extent so that they fulfill their role and help both the students and the teacher to create a positive learning atmosphere, to learn with fun and to enjoy the use of language itself.

Now, I am pretty tired so I am going to sleep, but I am also looking forward to evaluating Rosmery’s project plan and making amendments on my own project.