Week - 2: What a hectic week it's been!!!

Week two of the web skills course has been really hectic for me. For this week we had to post on three different things and keep up with the discussion in each. Overall, I found the experience very rewarding and educative.

For starters, the discussion on web search has been extremely useful and loaded with lots of new information for me. I learned about many new web search engines and also learned that there are websites that list web search engines for different fields: Metacrawler mentioned by Mbarek and http://www.thesearchenginelist.com/ suggested by Khoin Mai. The learning was not only beneficial for me. My daughters found the askkids.com suggested by Leena very interesting and educative. To keep the wealth that resulted from this discussion, I kept a record of all the websites that figured out in the discussion and a short description of what each website is about against each one.

I also found the discussion on ABCD objectives very useful. It reminded me of how important to be clear about one's objective in every session of teaching and the importance of letting the students know about the objective(s) they have to achieve. This is an invaluable teaching-learning concept/tool. Formualting an ABCD objective for every session, topic, task …etc. is very important and useful for both the teacher and the learners. It does not only guarantee the desired result of the learning-teaching process but also guides the teacher and the learners throughout the process, saves them time and effort, and gives them a feedback eventually about how successful they have been in achieving what they are supposed to do.

Finally, posting on the "Project-step 1" was quite uncomfortable for me as it reminded me of the harsh reality I have to face every time I think of incorporating technology into my teaching. However, I was comforted by Angela and Palwasha who mentioned that they have a similar situation. Together we can think of how to make the best of a given situation. This is really the topic that has been occupying my mind for a long time. What we need as teachers of English as a foreign/second language is to think about teaching methods and techniques that work for us in our situations, not the ones developed by people in the west whose situation is quite different from ours. The thing I find surprising is that most of the theoretical literature on English language teaching methods and techniques is written by people from Britain or America based on their experiences in their own countries. What we need is to think about English language teaching within our contexts and try to think of solutions that work for us in our situations.

It was also very interesting for me to read about the various teaching-learning situations of the participants in this course. The situations seemed very diverse on the surface but, underlyingly, I found that we face more or less the same problems, that we teach more or less similar age groups, and that we are all working towards achieving the same objectives.

To sum up, it's been a very hectic week but a very informative one. Thank you every body for making this learning experience very special.