Week 9: My Reflection

This week task was very interesting. It was about individual differences. We were asked to read about learning styles and strategies. Since our course is about web skills, I tried to think of a tool fits with students’ characteristics. So, I read an article about that written by Richard M. Felder and Barbara A. Soloman. Another article that I enjoyed was Technology and Multiple Intelligences. It showed many kinds of characteristics. They are:

■Verbal-Linguistic

■Logical/Mathematical

■Visual/Spatial

■Bodily/Kinesthetic

■Musical/Rhythmic

■Intrapersonal

■Interpersonal

■Naturalist

■Existentialist

 

I believed that students are different, although they are in the same age. Knowing these characteristics helps the teacher to understand his students and use the proper technique in the class. The teacher can make a questionnaire to analyze the students’ abilities. As for me, I learned many tools in this course, so I can provide each student with the tools that meet his interest. Some students do not know how to study English. This helps me guide the students to the best way of studying using technology (not only in my class, but also with any teacher in future).

Week 7: Project Task 5 - Continued

As I said on task 4, students were interested to use technology in their smart phones. I found they are interested in twitter and they all have accounts and use it daily to socialize with their friends. I created a course a count on twitter and ask all the students to follow it. I used the course acount to tweet  some assignment questions and  I asked my students  to post the answers via tweeter. This time, they can discuss their project in the role-play and see how good each member does. The teacher can check their tweets and give them marks according to their tweets. The best tweets (answers) can be retweeted by the teacher to show how great they were.

Week 7: My Reflection

      This week is new challenge for me. It is difficult to ask students to practice English using their mobile phones. They were impressed by this idea. They have not used to hear something like that. They used to have their mobiles for fun and entertainment. Education became more interesting with this new technology. At the beginning, I asked a group of students teach their classmates how to create and use Google Documents. They have not used it before but they decided to search for it because they were curious about new experience they would practise. As for me, that was my first step to check how active they were to the next challenge. They use their mobile phones for chatting most of the time. So, I found it a good chance to kick off my new idea and start with this as introduction to my point. All class were active and interested. What was funny, they asked me about my phone number :)

     Writing on Padlet is something strange to the students. Some students like painting on walls on streets. I will try to make this idea meet their interests. We can imagine that Padlet is a wall in public. By the way, here is my post:

http://padlet.com/wall/WebskillsF2013