WEEK 10... THE END OF THE COURSE AND A NEW BEGINNING

So this is already the end? These ten weeks flew, it always happens when you are engaged and motivated and this was exactly how I felt in the course. What a great opportunity for new learning and experiences. Every single week was a surprise box or a tool box to open and discover. I enjoyed a lot reading such interesting texts on creating objectives, learning autonomy, learning styles and the different approaches and strategies to teach reading, writing, listening and speaking using technological tools. I was aware of some of the tools, like power point, some sites to practice English and blogs; but most of them were completely new to me: Webquests, ANVILL, interactive PPT and they are still a challenge because I think the journey didn’t finish here, it’s just starting, I see it like a new beginning for our professional development. The learning has been enormous but now it’s the time to travel the road alone, or at least without guidance because I think it would be very valuable to keep in touch with the participants of the course and continue sharing knowledge and experiences.

Thanks to Janine for her valuable and encouraging comments and thanks to my classmates who took some time to read my reflections and leave a short message.

Best wishes to all of you.

WEEK 9.. THE END IS NEAR

This week we reflected on Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles. I learned there are several ways of classifying learning styles and there are many learning styles inventory quizzes on the web that we can use not only with our students but also to check our own styles. The way we as teachers learn is very relevant in the way we teach, for that reason it's very important to refect on own processes in order to understand our students better and for the benefit of our classes and lessons. It was very interesting also to read about the introduction of technology for different styles of learners, there are excellent ideas in the texts assigned for this week. 


This week was also very important because we put a final period to our projects, we published our final report in which I am sure all of us did our best and are anxious to implement it in our classes to see what happens.

WEEK 8: A VERY BUSY ONE ...

The end of week 8. This has been a very busy week because we have been working hard in the draft of our project and the peer review. I have peer reviewed Ilham's project and it has been very interesting to see that despite we are so far away, she in Morocco and I in Colombia, our students share similar features with respect to the attitude about learning a language. We both focused our project on improving their motivation and autonomy. We had a very interesting guest, Jeff Magoto, who is the creator of the virtual lab ANVILL, and has kindly shared with us his valuable knowledge. Thanks Jeff. Getting to know ANVILL has opened my eyes to a great range of possibilites to use technology in my English classes. What a wonderful tool! I'm just getting familiar with it but I plan to become an expert and use it as much as I can in my lessons. Something that is very good about ANVILL is that it promotes learner's autonomy in a very interactive and appealing way. Certainly this has been a very productive week.