Webskills Course - Week Six Reflections

Introduction

This week had been quite challenging in terms of finding time for the Webskills course as we, at my university The English and Foreign Languages University, were trying to host a celebratory seminar on National Education Day where the Research Scholars of the School of ELE were presenting papers.

You can see the programme and the abstracts by clicking here.

However, that does not take away the joy of all that we had to do in the online course on Week Six.

What I did and learned?

The theme of week six was 'creating student-centred classes and interactive powerpoint'. The objectives as always had the ABCD (Audience, Behaviour, Condition, and Degree) structure which, for me especially, reinforces what I'd learned in my week two of the online course.

Student-centred Classes

Due to the lack of time I could not go through all the links that were posted online. However, I managed to read on 'Interactive Lectures' and 'Just in Time Teaching' both of which I found thought-provoking.

Large classes is a reality in my part of the world and teachers often resort to lecture method to tackle this issue. Through these articles I learned how to make the archaic lecture method innovative and more importantly interactive. I believe that complements the objective of this week called 'student-centred' class, an important theme that takes away much attention these days.

The Just in Time Teaching is another interesting way of providing the learner a meaningful, immediate, and extended learning experience. Most of the time the actual teaching/learning scenario gets limited to the actual classroom contact hours and with that everybody knows nothing much can be learned. Learners as well as teachers might have more to tell and share and technology enables this. Moreover, finding out of the students what they want and how much they know about the topics to be taken up in the class before the class hours is an important step in the right direction of building 'student-centred' classrooms.

There are lot more resources on Teaching Large Classes and Using Technology in Teaching Large Classes available. You can access them all by following the links.

Digital Distraction

Another thing that I'd noticed out of my experience on the online course on week six is the struggle that an online learner has to make to remain focused. Generally my online life starts with checking my mail and facebook accounts, following links from that and very soon I find myself lost in a maze from which I find quite difficult to wriggle out. To my dismay I generally find the time flying and if I sit and reflect on the productive work I managed to do by being online sometimes I feel disappointed.

In my second post on Week 6 Discussion I have raised similar issues. There I used 'digital distraction' a phrase I thought will capture the spirit of my problem. Through a search I came across similar concerns being shared by novelists and their efforts to fight it back. You can read it here.

Interactive PowerPoint

Another interesting thing that I learned is about 'Interactive PowerPoint'.

PowerPoints are great way of engaging the audience during presentation. However, the same can be boring too if not used wisely. Through the readings in the course I learned about how to make my PPTs interactive rather than static.

I was particularly impressed by a very interactive use of PPT by Aashish Pandey where he used it to teach Wordsworth's 'Daffodils' to literature students. You can find his presentation here. (To see how interactive it is you need to download and view).

Doing this task made me think about my own PPTs and also how interactive they are. To my dismay I think many of them are information transmitters than interactive.

In order to see my PPT for this course click here. (You cannot view it online; but can download it).

I also refreshed my memories about Prezi, an alternative to PPT, through some of my classmates who ventured out and made some Prezi presentations.

Project

This term I do not teach; but, based on my experience of teaching before I understand my students need lot more language input and teacher support and I intent to take the help of the technology. However, the project steps being broken over a period of time need a pause from my part where I should sit and see how it'd evolved so far and in what direction I need to take it further.

Classroom Application

The issues raised in the sixth week are all pertinent to the immediate classroom scenario I have. Large classes or use of PowerPoint are all quite relevant because they are all part of the lived reality around.

The PPT bit is particularly useful for me as well as my students because we make use of PPT at some point or the other and this sort of input is really helpful in making our PPT interactive, if needed.

Largely, I think taking up this course is enabling me to reflect on me as an online learner and think of challenges that I come across and how I resolve them and I think this is an important take away that will equip me to understand online learning and learner in a better way.