WRAP-UP WEEK

Dear Visitors,
       
 Its 10th Week-the wrap up week actually.
'Building Teaching Skills Through Interactive Web' is the first online course that I have attended and that too from the prestigious international University. I am so happy to have completed it ! Though I have not received the consolidated scores yet, but I was so full of doubts when I entered the class with almost no knowledge about 'what am I required to do here to pass the course?!'
It went well, support from Sean was always there. And though it was a bumpy start , I kept on learning new things and tools that could improvise my teaching.
So many new terminologies have been added to my vocabulary during the course e.g Web-quests. Consequently I will introduce my colleagues and students with this new world of web skills.
To me, the most engaging and convenient tool for communication and also for posting new announcements is 'The Blog'. I am using this as a platform for continuous interaction with my students and they too seem very enthusiastic in participation.
  There had been so much contribution from the fellow participants on the Conferencing yet I could not benefit from all of them due to being always on run throughout this 10 weeks' course.
I hope to add some of the shared links on my Delicious page soon.
Overall, I feel satisfied from the standard of the course and that it was worth spending time and effort on.

Yusra Anwar

Week 9: The Final Project

Dear Readers,
        Its week 9, culminating all the major assignment with the submission of the final project. It was a huge task and I was full of doubts whether I would be able to submit a respectable and presentable project because of the time.
The template and the guidelines provided for building up the project were very helpful, it was just the time constraints. September onward our college teaching load is also on peak with immense pressure of course covering, marking monthly tests and other routine teaching jobs. The load magnifies because two out of four classes of mine are what we can easily term as 'large classes'.
Yet, it is perhaps human psyche that we don't work to out utmost unless and until there are deadlines!!
I feel satisfied today that I was able to maintain a balance between my work and domestic responsibilities and still was able to accomplish the assigned tasks of this course. It was the effect of adrenaline that made me think,read and write and write for the last few hours on expanding the first draft to the final version before uploading the final version.
I received more emails from my class that is working on the project on this weekend and I will keep on updating the project website with the information collected by the students. This way, I am learning how to edit and add posts/links and files to the website.
I wish I could make a final presentable version of the site before the week 10 ends.

Week 8:Class Blog and the Project

Dear Readers,
        This week I wrote so many times on my blog-I mean the new blog that I created for my class ; the same class is working with me on the Project Wiki.
Its link is http://bseng2013-literature.blogspot.com
I would invite the readers to visit the blog to be able to appreciate the participation from my class on it.
This is an entirely new teaching/reflecting tool for them and it has really encouraged me to see their spirit for learning new things. they created their emails for this project and the very first words that majority of the girls wrote on any site are on this blog. They hardly know even how to type in a good speed.
So many girls did not have a regular access to internet but when they see others participating and then discussing about the blog and their interaction with the teacher and class fellows via this blog, they are getting interested in convincing or rather pushing their parents to get them internet access.
Our guest moderator Jeff Magoto is introducing our class to new tools via ANVILL on the discussion forum.
I must say it had been hard accessing many of the ANVILL links and taken quite a lot of time while getting to the exercises proposed.
Its majorly because of the technical faults with my system. That I have been trying to resolve simultaneously.
Its a great learning experience though.
Yusra Anwar

Project Wiki and Learners' Autonomy- Week 7

Dear Readers,
        We are already in week 7 and working on the tasks and the final project of our class Wiki to become a reality.
I started this week by choosing two of my classes to work on the project. One of this class is BS English 1st semester who have a fairly good level of English and they are enthusiastic about the new things they are exploring. They are 30 in number and I divided them into 6 groups. At least one of the members in each group has access to the internet.
The detail of the task assigned to them are available on the following link that I created for my web quest task:
https://sites.google.com/site/pblquest13/classroom-news

I have amended some of the details in the task while assigning the writers to the respective groups for the final project that I intend to draft on the template recommended by Sean on the following link:
https://sites.google.com/site/projectwikitemplate_en/

Its Wednesday and I have set off for the project. My project is long-term and the students need hours of ransacking the library though it is a very small one with not more than 6,000 books altogether. But they need extra time out of their scheduled classes to be able to look through the available books on literature for the topic assigned to them. The group leaders and the members with access to net at homes will collect a data of web-links related to their topic. By Monday, that will be the week 8 of the this virtual course, I will be able to view their progress.
In my second class, with large number of students, I am running a test for the project. I have chosen only the active workers and given them the same writers to assist with the BS class which is the main audience for my project. They are required to collect at least 10 links/books on the topic given to them by Monday. for them I have squeezed the project  and shortened its length.
Lets see how the rest of the week unfolds and how successful I end with all the tasks and readings of this week.

Yusra

A Dormant Week- Vacations!

Dear All,
        Week 6 brought some activities and tasks to work on.
This week the topic had been engaging students in large classes -something very pertinent to my teaching environment. Since in Government Colleges, those in cities especially, the usual class strength is around 60 plus. I have taught in Peshawar city colleges and always had large classes because English is a compulsory subject at all levels and the entire number of students on roll for any grade would attend it.
I go for pair activities mostly and have taken very useful tips from the readings of this week Teaching Large Classes II – Enhancing Learning by Engaging Students By Rick Finnan and Donna Shaw' about  small group activities like 'Think-Pair-share'.
'Using Online Assessment in Face-to-Face Courses' enlisted the advantages of using blackboard for grading and feedback . We personally are aware of this Blackboard experience in this virtual class where we, although, dont receive face-to face instruction or verbal feedback.
Creating power point presentation is a very useful tool for teaching, it saves a lot of time for the tecahers to write on white/boards and the same presentation can be used for other classes too.
Yet, creating a master slide presentation was very very tough!!! I made some hyperlinks and experimented but it was not a very good effort and I hope to improve in it when I can spare more time for practice.
In practical teaching, the week had been very silent. It was a dormant week- Government announced holidays from Tuesday onward due to Moharram- religious rally were being held on roads by Shia sect zealots and many of the roads were blocked for the safety of people.
Mobile services were down for  three days too.
Internet reception was down at intervals too.
And in Islamabad , the capital, it was curfew situation till Sunday.
I literally taught nothing because only few of the students turned up on Monday due to convenience problem.

Week 5; Reflections

Its Weeks 5 and we are midway through our course. Its really such an enlightening experience for me. I am not a teacher for whom technology is a new approach in teaching. While studying for my MA in the UK, I have realized the importance of technology in research and teaching. Yet, getting schooling via this course is opening so many new doors for me. I were not aware of the things that I could experiment with before doing this course e.g; web-quests.
PBL is something I always aim at whenever there is the opportunity and time.many of the tips I learned from Susan Gaer's articles and student projects.I cant wait to share many of these tips with other teachers in SPELT- Society of Pakistani English Language Teachers. Once in a month, we have an academic session/workshop where the members learn and exchange their ideas. Its a voluntary professional development activity where the resource person or the members are not paid for their services.
Well, coming back to the course contents, this week was about Alternative assessments, Rubrics , PBL and Web-quests.
For me as a teacher, checking large sets of assignments or papers has always been a nightmare!
I do practice peer editing but very rarely because the students do not seem very satisfied that their work has been marked by a partner instead of a teacher who is more qualified and authoritative. Creating checklists and rubrics for assessment criteria will make the checker's award more authentic. RubiStar is a very useful website in this regard. An asset for a teacher, I must say.
I suggested a technology related  'change' that would come as a solution to the problem faced by me or the class. I tried to integrate the solution with the newer approaches that I have learnt this week. I used PBL and web-quest to find a solution to the problem. I state it here once again:
    Plan is to divide the students in groups and assign each group the task of making a list of the books available on a specific writer e.g one group is given Jane Austen and they have to enlist all the books available in the library of her and  at least 10 web links containing information about her novels . At least one member of each group must have access to internet and should be computer literate. They will also search for the relevant websites containing the authentic information about the writer assigned to them. 
The links will be added to the lists prepared on MS word by each group.That way the class will have resources to search for their assignments on some writer consolidated at one place.The print-outs of the completed lists can be taken and exchanged among the groups. a soft copy can be emailed to those who have their email accounts to be accessible even if they use internet occasionally at a net cafe or at a friends etc. 
I hope this project could work though I anticipate that it will take quite a long time to complete since there is just one library period of this class per day.
The course is tickling our brains for ideas.
Yusra Anwar

Week 4.

This week had been hectic!

From writing ABCD objectives( in Week 2) to writing the whole lesson plans during this week and then reflecting on how they went-seems  a week was short for them! It also reflects upon the pace with which the course is moving. Sean-our tutor- himself recognized the handwork we are putting into this course.  I must say that this class of ours is a mixed competence class. May be for some it must be taking a lot of effort and time to cope with the pace of the course. Yet, some are so experienced in their field that I often see them giving very healthy and useful tips on the discussion panel to the others.

While searching through various websites, it was like discovering a new world of lesson plans and activities. But the problem is that, in my context, we have to follow the syllabus of the text book board while teaching in our classes. The courses have to be covered within the given time frame before the take their Detention Examinations and preparation leave (Preps). We are usually so tied up with the routine way of covering courses that it leaves very little room for experimentation.

I must say that my students are quite bewildered by the new activities that I have discovered during the web browsing. When I took their feedback, they thought that it was important to cover the compulsory course components first, and go on with these kinds of activities once we are done with them.

Bringing changes in the educational system is an evolutionary process perhaps. I am saving the lesson plans and activities to be used in classes while interspersing them with their routine syllabus covering. It’s adapting to the context.Like many of the readers have done  many times.

Yusra Anwar