Week 10: The End of the Line Opens New Paths

And here it is. The final week. It looks as if it had been only 10 days of endless readings and the insatiable thirst of wanting to learn more, try out more. 

Ten weeks ago I was an apprehensive participant, often doubting my own skills, not even confident with creating a blog. I guess it had to do with the fact that I am quite an introvert when it comes to sharing my thoughts with a bigger audience. This course has taught me that sharing ideas, no matter how trivial or insignificant they might seem, is rather necessary. To me it was indeed all about building: building confidence at first, but more importantly building teaching skills through the interactive web, building one's own little database with tools and technology to be further explored and used.

Blogger was the first tool to get familiar with, and then followed Nicenet and Wiki Pages. As my confidence in using these was increasing, so was my curiosity of discovering new ones. From day to day I was like a small fish swimming in this vast sea with a myriad of possibilities and novelties. Unfortunately, it was quite time-consuming, so I had to adapt my teaching time, my free time and even my sleeping time to the reading requirements and assignment deadlines on the way. 

Delicious helped me organize my newly discovered, useful websites for EFL teachers and students, and now, even though my list has some 83 links with numerous tags, finding resources for practicing reading, speaking, listening or writing skills takes only a minute of my time. The links are easy to be shared, and I've done that with some of my students. I've learned how to create a technology-enhanced lesson plan. Moreover, creating a Rubric is no longer a problem for me. To start with, I have introduced it's practical use when grading discursive essays for my upper-intermediate class, but also when creating my first ever WebQuest. The WebQuest was more than a quest. It was a mission, both for me and my intermediate students. Fortunately, there were also my course instructor and my webskills course classmates, whose feedback during the process lead me through my times of doubt. Moreover, I got parents from my intermediate class involved, too. I organized a PTA meeting, where I explained the idea of using new technologies and the internet in my English class. The positive feedback that I got from the parents was another sign that being in this course was worthwhile.

Unaware that I was also in a class and constantly learning, my students were using the same tools as I was. That's how we started getting used to Edmodo and Padlet. They did their assignments and tasks, experiencing a new and (hopefully) interesting way of technology-enhanced learning. It was wonderful to see that at the time when I was struggling with adding interactive elements to my PowerPoint Presentations, some of my upper-intermediate students were already mastering Prezi. It opened up a new door for them, and for me. I learned how to create customized online and offline activities with Hot Potatoes. And yet, there are so many other tools that I didn't have the time to introduce, such as Audacity,  Dvolver or  ANVILL. Ten weeks were too short a period in the end.
 
However, my teaching-with-technology journey has only just began with a small step in the webskills course at the University of Oregon, and I look forward to continue  the journey together with my students, hoping that we shall all enjoy and benefit from it. I feel very honored and grateful for having had the chance to participate in the E-Teacher Program.