Week 8

Two more weeks to go before the graduation party: The celebration of a great learning session. Thank god this week was off thanks to the end of term 1 break in Morocco which for me means more time to dedicate to the course under no pressure at all. At least, that was what I had thought. This time the pressure came from my children who wanted a change of air during the break. Guess what? The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it as Oscar Wild used to say. I myself need to recharge my batteries to start a new term on good grounds especially that a major project is underway this year thanks to my participation in this online course. However, when you are away from home, all the routines that you have established these past weeks collapse. To make things worse, the internet connection is unstable as some areas in Morocco are not wired. Hopefully, I have managed to strike a balance between my duties and spending quality time with my children. Although I am tempted to describe my vacation, I won't yield to the temptation this time because I know that you will feel jealous and it will affect your performance on the course. That's why I am going to focus only on the learning experience of this week which as usual was very fruitful. Writing the draft of the project and peer editing a partner's draft was a very enriching experience.  As you may know, we are the only group of three partners in this course project and Donna would probably confirm to us whether this was unprecedented. If you are interested in our projects, please feel free to pay a visit to our blogs here or here. In addition to the project, this week was also rewarding in terms of the new web-tools that I learned about which catered for all the skills and activities ranging from creating simple offline printable worksheets such as crossword puzzles (which I enjoy doing) to a more complicated CMS (Class Management Systems) such as ANVILL which I am considering for my future projects after the course now that I am hooked on integrating technology in my teaching. I may now say that I have overcome the tech phobia that some teachers have when they hear about the new trends in teaching. I believe that I am well prepared to try any innovative tool regardless of its complexity for the benefit of our students.

Week 7

This is the climax of the course. I am now seeing the result of the six weeks of hard work reflected on my students. Before this course, most of my students didn’t even dream of having an email account. Now, they are speaking out loud to the world in their broken English. Even better than that, they are seeing the reaction of the world to what they are saying.

Thanks to the project, my students managed to create email addresses, a class blog and a large community across the Mediterranean. They are now in touch with students from countries whose language and culture are totally different from their own.  English therefore is the language they have to use to communicate. They have already exchanged greetings and expressed their enthusiasm about this experience.

Now they are working on developing content to share with the community. They are very busy reading, writing and taking photos and videos about their hometown to share with their new friends on the other side of the sea. I can’t hide my excitement because, for me, this isn’t the first time I have created blogs for my students, but it’s definitely the first time I have managed to go beyond the boundaries of the classroom. Evidence for this, is the abundance of warm greetings and encouraging comments from both teachers and students from the two partner countries on the project: Portugal and Serbia.

My excitement over this great achievement has overshadowed week 7’s assignments which were equally beneficial. The articles on autonomy and m-learning added greatly to my professional development as an English language teacher. Although I have been witnessing the overwhelming evolution of communication technology, I cannot trace back the history of such rapid overlapping innovations in the mobile technology. However, Robert Goodwin-Jones’s article about mobile apps for language learning was very insightful in this matter, especially on what is available now in terms of applications that could be used by the students inside the classroom as efficiently as if you were using a multimedia lab in your school, as well as outside the school for individualized informal learning. Of course, smartphones are far from being democratic gadgets, but due to the fast spread of such devices, they will soon replace the personal computer as the prevailing source of information and means of communication. Meanwhile, the one computer approach is still considered the best alternative to the sophisticated costly media-lab which is most of the time unavailable in the largest majority of public schools in the world. The references on the word processing tips, strategies and applications of this approach are abundant and viable. So, it is high time we started integrating technology in our classrooms even if our schools aren’t equipped with the latest computer laboratories. 

These are the links to the blogs involved in the project so far. If you are interested in joining the experience, we will be so pleased to welcome you in this global learning adventure.

Soure, Portugal

Tetuan, Morocco

P.S Also check the fantastic feedback my partner Alex from Portugal is getting on her week 7 reflection

Week 6

I think this week has been the most challenging week in this course for me so far. But not because of the assignments and the regular tasks, though. It's because of technology. Yes. Technology is supposed to help you and make things easy for you- at work, at school, at home. But when it fails, my goodness, when it fails everything collapses. Everything is turned upside down. And you start panicking.

You don’t know what to do. Has this ever happened to you, or not yet? It will. I Know. It’s not the first time this happened to me, and it won’t be the last time. The worst thing is when it happens in the wrong time. When your life depends on it. This is what happened to me this week. My computer went down. Of course I panicked. The only thing I was thinking of was Wednesday 11:59 and Sunday 11:59. My thoughts had even gone so far as to think  about who would be able to survive on this planet if technology fails on a global scale. I thought of the poor farmers in the country-side who don’t rely on electricity and running water. These farmers and their animals would be the only ones to could rescue us and provide us with food and water.

This week, I started implementing the project with my students in collaboration with Alexandra Duarte from Portugal and Zeljko Andrijanic from Serbia. We created a class blog and G-mail accounts for all the students. In the middle of the process my computer started to give weird signals of weariness. A command that took a split of a second to execute seemed to take forever. Finding other computer to work with and saving what could be saved and backing what could be backed was not a piece of cake. Deadlines for assignments don’t take these variables into consideration. Although this week’s learning experience was frustrating thanks to technology, it was fruitful and insightful content-wise, as usual, the topic for this week, teaching large size classes and how technology might help to overcome the drawbacks of this inevitable situation in so many public schools around the world including the school where I teach. According to the research referred to  in this week’s articles, students are very much unsatisfied with large lecture-style class, which no one denies, but I would rather say that it is mostly teachers who should suffer from the limitations and the frustrations of large size and multilevel classes on top of students’ frustrations. Another point is that small size classes also have drawbacks, although not at serious at the other type of class. In both cases technology, of course when it doesn’t fail, plays an essential part in lowering these challenges.

The techniques suggested in the articles are very useful, especially in adult classes while with kids and teens classroom management is a bit harder. Cooperative learning methods in combination with technology quite often enhance the learning/teaching situation up to a certain level. However, they require very strong commitment from the teacher and an active engagement and willingness to learn from the student.

This week, I had not been very successful in staying on my personal schedule posting the discussions but fortunately I have managed to respect the deadlines of the course although I know I might not get any feedback from my course mates as they will have already engaged in week 7.

Next week is a new week.

Week 5

Halfway through. I can't believe it. Another rich week. Although nothing was new to me in terms of knowing about all these innovative approaches of teaching and learning and therefore assessing, I have not yet seriously implemented any of these techniques in my teaching due to several challenges mainly availability and access to technology in my school. Revisiting these tools allowed me to get a deeper insight and a different perspective from the one I had eight years ago. Back then, I was merely impressed by the technology and the attractiveness of certain tools more than the usefulness and the pedagogical benefits for my students. Today, and thanks to this course, I think I have technologically matured and I am more than ready to implement technology not for the sake of technology but as means to solve long existing issues in our classes such as authenticity of materials and communicative settings as well as realistic alternative assessment and autonomy in learning. Now things are becoming more engaging and more concrete especially after I shared my problem and solution for week 5 and the unexpected amazing response and suggestions from my course mates who are willing to embark on a technological multi-dimensional cross-cultural experience in teaching English.
Karima Nazirdeen from Sudan, zeljko andrijanic from Serbia and Alexandra Duarte from Portugal have all expressed such enthusiasm about the idea that there is no room but for going ahead with the project and start working on a project that would involve all our students in a true authentic learning experience.
So let's get it started .

Week 4

Testing period.  Grading papers. Regular classes,  Daily chores ... I don't want to sound alarmist but since we have to reflect on this week, this is the first thing that comes to my mind. Next week is even worse becuase I am not done with grading yet and I don't know what we are expected to do for week 5. I hope we can make testing and correction less tedious so we can devote our time to more teaching and learning. Speaking of learning, week 4 seemed to me like the second part of week 3 since we had to deal with the 4 skills (Listening, Speaking and Pronunciation) and now (Reading, Writing and Vocabulary) and how they could be enhanced with technology. I still have the same remarks about the recency of some articles though I enjoyed reading them all, epsecially Larry J. Mikulecky's about using online children and young adult's literature in teaching reading. I want to reiterate my admiration for the "breakingnews.com" and "manythings.org" websites. Two gold mines.The tasks were very practical since we learned how to integrate the technology component in our lesson plans, not per se but as a tool that would provide a solution to a pedagogical problem in class. That's it because I need to go back to the stack of papers that are waiting for me. I know that on Monday, the first thing my students are going to ask about is their grades and I wouldn't like to tell them that I haven't finished yet.