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.