Reflections of Week 8

This week was full of action .I submitted my first draft of project report to my partners Ina and Mary for peer evaluation.I have received valuable comments from Mary.While waiting for Ina's comments I could not stop myself from thinking that there is so much to learn.We have been really fortunate to join a course where our value for time has increased and we are getting more and more than we can take in a short span of time.But the course has given our teaching a new direction and dimension which is a big reward.Moreover this is a learning for a lifetime.We will keep on improving our skills while revisiting these resources time and again.





This week I  also created a Survey as an assignment," Building Teacher Skills Through the Interactive Web - A Survey" https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArIkbFQUSxtldEFOUjB0Q3FqTzgxZ3hDeFJtRGZLTnc#gid=0

I also created a class on Nicenet by the name of Winners.My students can join this class by using this link- http://www.nicenet.org

Students can follow this link and create a new account by using a unique user name and password.This class creation reminded me of my opening a new account of Nicenet for this course.

We got  a lot of resources to make exercises online :

• Tools for educators - word search, bingo, crossword puzzles, and board games: http://www.toolsforeducators.com/
• Lanternfish - flash cards, bingo games, matching, multiple choice exercises to print out: http://bogglesworldesl.com/
• Easy Test Maker (paper tests):http://www.easytestmaker.com/default.aspx

• Hot Potatoes - http://hotpot.uvic.ca/  It's easy to use and lets you create matching, cloze, scrambled sentence, and multiple choice exercises and crossword puzzles. 
•  Some interesting exercises at http://eolf.univ-fcomte.fr/index.php?page=technically-interesting-hot-potatoes-pages
• Crossword Puzzle Games - Which can create crosswords to save and use on a computer or print out: http://www.crosswordpuzzlegames.com/create.html

• Web Poster Wizard - free website for teachers and students to use as part of a course. It uses a very plain format, but it's very easy to create something with text, one graphic, and links on each of 4 pages:http://wizard.4teachers.org/
• SMILE- a variety of web-based activity generators. Requires a free registration. Click on "I am a new user" on the opening page in order to register. The applications here are quite interesting, but they take more time to learn to do'
• http://clear.msu.edu/teaching/online/mimea/smile/v2/index.php

I opened all these links  which was difficult for me to handle in one go but I used Hot Potatoes and Google  docs to make online surveys.I will revisit these resources again to make their best use.

But the best resource and the find of the week has been ANVILL .

ANVILL stands forA National Virtual Language Lab.It's a modern web-­‐based replacement

for the old language lab with new features useful for giving learner autonomy.It replaces old language lab in a true sense.The best thing is that it can be accessed from any where.With the tools like Voiceboards,TCasts (teacher broadcasting),Livechat,Forums,Quizzes and Surveys,Practice Recorder ,Lesson Planning &

Course Management it covers most of the aspects of a good virtual language lab.

I liked the feature in which a teacher who registers for ANVILL, gets the ability to create courses (and the tools do so).As per the information provided," A course consists of lessons, voiceboards, etc. Teachers add their own students to courses. Once added students can see class lessons, links, and files. They can also make forum posts, use the voiceboard, livechat, etc."
If we as a teacher can not create an interesting interactive virtual class after having facility like ANVILL,there is no one else to blame.
It is full of possibilities which can be explored with careful detailed planning.

Webinars offered by ANVILL seems to be great.I would like to join next Webinar if I am permitted to do so.
ANVILL has given me one more strong reason to feel good as a teacher.Now moving towards the final phase of this course .............

Regards

Raj