Friday, May 16, 2014
Thursday, April 24, 2014
A new online course :Achieving writing expertise
The following is our warm-up :) activity:
Hello everyone,
It feels great to be here surrounded by all those fond of writing :)
Actually, before watching the video I wouldn't have called myself "a writer since - to me - it was an attribute to be found in the ones with a published book accompanied by a prize or so. Having watched the video and completed the activity with timeline, I now understand that I have always preferred to express myself on paper or something readable.
While doing the timeline activity, I remembered the little me writing pages of letters to the pen pals living away, keeping a diary or writing notes on friends' memory notebooks.. then in secondary and highshool all those notebooks full of poems or half-finished stories.....
I can never forget the time when I was a freshman because it was then when I started to understand what writing in academic context meant since I had to struggle to get a passing grade in my composition class.It was rather complicated to adapt to the style of academic thinking and scripting it on paper in an organized way. I tried hard very hard to transform my so called "stream of conscious" into a coherent and unified body. That's one of those periods in life, the one the value of which you understand only years later, to be exact when I started teaching academic writing at university level.
I shouldn't forget to include all the essays, research papers I submitted as course requirements during my both graduate and postgraduate education as well as the master's thesis.
Before putting down my last words, my electronic writing journey is also worth mentioning, with the urge of reflecting on anything readable I started blogging first to keep the memorable moments of my daughter constantly fresh and then to stay updated professionally. I am now the writer of these two blogs too.
Why have I decided to take this online course?
To achieve writing expertise :) and motivate myself to write more since I believe, I better understand myself as a teacher and an individual through writing, and contribute a lot to my professional and personal life.
Hello everyone,
It feels great to be here surrounded by all those fond of writing :)
Actually, before watching the video I wouldn't have called myself "a writer since - to me - it was an attribute to be found in the ones with a published book accompanied by a prize or so. Having watched the video and completed the activity with timeline, I now understand that I have always preferred to express myself on paper or something readable.
While doing the timeline activity, I remembered the little me writing pages of letters to the pen pals living away, keeping a diary or writing notes on friends' memory notebooks.. then in secondary and highshool all those notebooks full of poems or half-finished stories.....
I can never forget the time when I was a freshman because it was then when I started to understand what writing in academic context meant since I had to struggle to get a passing grade in my composition class.It was rather complicated to adapt to the style of academic thinking and scripting it on paper in an organized way. I tried hard very hard to transform my so called "stream of conscious" into a coherent and unified body. That's one of those periods in life, the one the value of which you understand only years later, to be exact when I started teaching academic writing at university level.
I shouldn't forget to include all the essays, research papers I submitted as course requirements during my both graduate and postgraduate education as well as the master's thesis.
Before putting down my last words, my electronic writing journey is also worth mentioning, with the urge of reflecting on anything readable I started blogging first to keep the memorable moments of my daughter constantly fresh and then to stay updated professionally. I am now the writer of these two blogs too.
Why have I decided to take this online course?
To achieve writing expertise :) and motivate myself to write more since I believe, I better understand myself as a teacher and an individual through writing, and contribute a lot to my professional and personal life.
Monday, January 27, 2014
Saturday, January 25, 2014
About e-textbooks
Week 2: Discussion questions
1)Which visual elements do you think are important for your learners?
colorful pictures & images
tables & graphic organizers & flow charts
2)What are your thoughts about the future of textbooks?
I agree with the idea that they will be more prevalent.In my institution we are using a coursebook supplemented by an itool and most days I teach with the itool without referring to the printed book (even though I am a traditional reader who adore the touch and smell of paper :)) But the itool eases my life in the class extraordinarily- no more file opennigs to search for a track, just one click for an answer key or scripts) I believe in the near future students will be buying those itools but not the books. Once in my classroom, a student had forgotten to bring one of his books that day, he just took the picture of certain pages from his friend's book with his smart phone and read from his phone and did all the task.Nothing is impossible for them :) I couldn't even get angry for his irresponsibility as he was that creative :) lol
3)How do you believe digital textbooks should be designed to best match learner's needs?
I believe everyone can benefit a lot from etextbooks if they ......
*are user friendly (not all the learners are digital natives)
*have simple icons to lead through the pages
*have direct links to appropriate websites (be it an online dictionary, wikipedia or any relevant website)
*direct links to audio/ audio-visual materials (difficult to search through a huge list of tracks)
*downloadable
*have interactive exercises for self-study
*enable students to communicate with the instructor via instant messaging or emailing
*allow file sharing (for writing/speaking assignments) and feedback
1)Which visual elements do you think are important for your learners?
colorful pictures & images
tables & graphic organizers & flow charts
2)What are your thoughts about the future of textbooks?
I agree with the idea that they will be more prevalent.In my institution we are using a coursebook supplemented by an itool and most days I teach with the itool without referring to the printed book (even though I am a traditional reader who adore the touch and smell of paper :)) But the itool eases my life in the class extraordinarily- no more file opennigs to search for a track, just one click for an answer key or scripts) I believe in the near future students will be buying those itools but not the books. Once in my classroom, a student had forgotten to bring one of his books that day, he just took the picture of certain pages from his friend's book with his smart phone and read from his phone and did all the task.Nothing is impossible for them :) I couldn't even get angry for his irresponsibility as he was that creative :) lol
3)How do you believe digital textbooks should be designed to best match learner's needs?
I believe everyone can benefit a lot from etextbooks if they ......
*are user friendly (not all the learners are digital natives)
*have simple icons to lead through the pages
*have direct links to appropriate websites (be it an online dictionary, wikipedia or any relevant website)
*direct links to audio/ audio-visual materials (difficult to search through a huge list of tracks)
*downloadable
*have interactive exercises for self-study
*enable students to communicate with the instructor via instant messaging or emailing
*allow file sharing (for writing/speaking assignments) and feedback
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Again
That's for sure now...I need to be taking an online course to reflect here on this blog. Anyway, the course is on EVO again.It's titled "Creating e-perfect textbook".I'm doing much better this time because I've been able to complete the tasks of first two weeks. The following presentation is for second week's task: outlining the principles of our prospective e-book.I enjoyed using the tool (prezi) a lot :)
Monday, January 14, 2013
a new electronic journey
Hi ... again..:)
I've mentioned the online course I'm taking before. It is EVO Digital Story Telling for YLs 2013. I've been interested in teaching English to very young learners since my daughter's birth. The course has started today. It seems to be really fun and the idea of getting acquainted with new tools to create digital stories is exciting. I've played with photopeach, x-tranormal and storybird so far and enjoyed them all a lot.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)