Week 8: Real Work with Technology

This week, like the other weeks, has been very educative. One thing I felt was different this week is the real sense of achievement I felt when I managed to create a course website using ANVIL.

ANVIL is what I was looking for because I have been thinking of having a course website to supplement the face-to-face teaching in the classroom. Such tool no doubt will help me offer a better course. It will allow me to send the students more materials and allow them to discuss things using the class forum. It will also nurture self-autonomy as the students will be responsible for accessing the materials, reading them, participating in the discussion on the class forum and carry out the assignments/ quizzes they are asked to do. Compared to the other internet tools such as google sites or Nicenet, I found this much more superior because it has all the good features of these other websites. This was the task of the week

I also shared the plan for my final project with my partner Mr. Faisal Al-Hakem and sent him a review of his plan. Peer review is an excellent idea that allows the participants to look at each other's work and saves the teacher a lot of work.

I also made two posts on "Teaching with Online Tools". The discussion on using facebook and other social media was very interesting. Yes using these tools promote learners' autonomy and give them an opportunity to work at their convenient pace. There could be some constraints that would make it difficult to use these tools such as the skills of the students in using the computer and surfing the internet and there could be some basic constraints such as the availability of internet access to the learners. Such constraints need hard work to overcome and a plan need to be developed to this effect. I am working on one right now.

I don't want to forget extending heartfelt gratitude to Jeff for the wonderful ANVIL tool and his constructive feedback on my course website.

Looking forward to having another week of technology.