Week 5: Moving Forward

Week 5 is here with all its assignments and new tools to learn about and explore.

Most of the reading we had to do have put focus mainly on the term 'alternative' thus giving detailed insight about alternative learning through Project Based Learning and the concept of alternative assessment and rubrics. 

We learned the significance of Project Based Learning (PBL) through an example of  Susan Gaer and her article Less Teaching is More Learning. In my opinion, Project Based Learning gives an opportunity to students to take advantage of such elements as curiosity and independence as one of the key drives in a quest for new knowledge. In order to find the required information related to a project, students must be empowered to search autonomously and independently, even when given guidelines by the teacher. They are responsible for their learning and therefore, project objective(s) must be clear and appealing to students, whereas topics should be challenging and related to real-life. PBL can encourage students to learn independently, thus motivating them to gain not only more knowledge in a certain field, but also to better achieve language competences in an EFL classroom. 

A model completely new to me until this week was WebQuest. A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web. It was a great experience to read through examples of WebQuest from the Quest Garden  as well as to look up some of the WebQuests some of my colleagues in this course made. I'm thinking of creating one of my own, since my students could benefit from it in many ways. 

Another issue that was covered this week was alternative assessment and rubrics.  It was brilliantly presented in The Essentials of Teaching article. After considering all the aspects and different varieties of alternative assessment and rubrics, I have also created one for my discurssive essay  class, that I will post in my Edmodo virtual classroom.

Speaking about Edmodo, I now have 50 students in my two classes, and 22 + 19 essays turned in. Students were leaving comments and reacted postively to this new concept. I have also left a rubric so that they can know how their work will be evaluated. Morevoer, they will be able to use it for future discursive writing as well.