Week 10: Ten Weeks of Wonderful Experience!

When I first started this course with week 1 and week 2 discussions and tasks, I had the impression that I would never get to week 10. I have been struggling a bit in finding time to finish the tasks with the loads of work I’ve had at work. Now, I have the impression that time has gone so fast and I’m now used to being busy all the time and staying up at night. I might sound a bit crazy to tell this but I’m sincere: I’ll miss it! J Each week was really meaningful to me as I learnt a lot of useful things during them. The experience I’ve got from this course was very rich. And I can now say that I’m so wealthy because I’ve got a great deal of invaluable knowledge and skills. Thank you webskills E-course staff. I really want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the staff, the participants and especially our Instructor, or I would say “Facilitator”, Courtney, who has never hesitated to help us whenever we needed that and who did her best to guide us all along the course. Everything has been done step by step till we reached the end and now, I can’t really describe my feeling; I would say I have mixed feelings: happy, sad, excited, and relieved!

We’re ending this course then with readings about technology integration levels. The two articles “Tiers of Technology Integration” and “The Technology Integration Matrix” described different levels of technology integration depending on how we use or involve it in the teaching. Thanks to this course, I have been familiar with different approaches of technology integration in teaching and I can say that I’m part of the Tiers 2 category or the Adoption level. I often use technology to enhance students’ productivity through collaborative activities. I hope to continue integrating technology in my teaching to better achieve the course goals and get better output from students, even in the future and I hope to reach higher levels in its use.

As a result of my reflection about what I have experienced during these 10 weeks, I left some advice to future participants in this webskills course in Nicenet and I would like to take the advantage of this last blog post to wish them the best and wish them to be able to achieve outstanding work. I also want to encourage all my webskills fellows to keep up the wonderful work they all did along the course and continue using technology in their teaching by all ways.

Good luck Everyone!

Hugs!

Week 9: Towards the End!

When I look back on these past weeks which went by during this E-course, I can’t help being amazed of the multitude of great things I have learnt along each week. They were all contributing in the development of my skills and I’m so glad of the experience I could get so far. Now it’s already week 9 and it’s the week of the final project. I remember reading sample projects written by former E-Webskills course participants in week 3, and while reading it, I was kind of a bit afraid I wouldn’t be able to do something like that. However, this week I realized that I did it. I could start implementing my project and share what I’ve done on our class wiki. Though the implementation hasn’t reached its end, I can say that I’m proud of myself because the different project steps I could cover so far have been enough to let me experience technology in class and taste how technology can work in class and what it’s like to use technology as part of the teaching supports. I wish I had enough time and was able to finish implementing the project till the end, but I hope the report I have shared will bring a clear understanding of how it went from start and would go till the end.

Apart from the project report, we have also been fortunate to have Russell Moon as a guest moderator this week. We could learn from him, discuss and exchange ideas about teaching strategies and learning styles. He has incited us to reflect on our teaching and brainstorm creative ideas on how to deal with different learning styles with technology use.

The discussion has been generated from the readings that were focused on “Learning Styles or Strategies and Multiple Intelligences”. The topic is really interesting and the readings provided a lot of information about how students learn and retain better, and how they can perform their capabilities and skills well.  “Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences” provided me with thorough knowledge of the 9 different intelligences that can define human potential. As it is said in the article, they can be used for curriculum development, lesson planning, course activity selection, and assessment strategies. The article “Learning Styles and Strategies”, by Richard M. Felder gave me a clear understanding about the different types of learners that can be identified according to their learning styles. Knowing the different learning styles of the students will help us, as teachers, to choose the teaching materials and balance our teaching strategies to cater different learning styles and meet the students’ needs. In considering myself as a learner, I think I’m more reflective, sensing, visual and sequential. I’m the kind of person who likes thinking hard before trying something, likes clear methods and ideas connection, and can memorize information more with the support of visual aids.

That’s what I can say about week 9 and now I’m looking forward to week 10 and especially to the feedback of my project report.