Week 10, a week of self and course evaluation...

I have mix feelings of great joys and deep sorrows for this is our last week. Though we look forward to working hard in future to assist our students with 21st century tools. This course, no doubt, showed me the way how to use technology as an educational tool. I wish all participants could contact each other in order to share our work and learn from each others' experience. I believe we can get help from Robert as well. it can be a good idea to create facebook page for all participants so they can post comments on each others' work.
The article about LoTi was worth reading  this week. I described my self being in the "Awareness" level and wished to be in the "Infusion" level by the end of the year.
I cannot stand describing the course a unique and very informative one. It was my first time participating in an online course. The course was nicely designed and I gained so much from it. I felt nervous in the early weeks but things got better after having communication with Robert on regular basis.
I gained a lot out of this course. I used power point before this course too but using it interactively was a unique idea. I had never thought power point could be used like this. I am now preparing some slides for my school students which is going to help them in learning different subjects. Students blogs and the creating of school site with the help of google and anvill assisted me so much because this was what I was looking for. I have created my school site so students are going to submit their assignments from next week. This is very new and unique in my province. The suggested topics and articles really enhanced my learning to a great level. L gained so much from those articles like one computer in classroom, rubrics, web quests, and so much.
I used diary for remembering site addresses before but since I have created mu "delicious" page, i feel very comfortable. Diary was something I could not carry every where. I lost it sometimes. Now, after I have created my delicious page I don't need to use pen and diary for keeping sites' history in record because using delicious is really useful and delicious for putting sites in memory.
New participants have very great opportunity if they work hard, read articles regularly and post the assigned work in time/on time. Because I have no hesitation in saying that this course is a role model for learning/gaining much in short time.
I still look forward for another opportunity of taking part in another online course from University Oregon.
Thanks to Robert and his team.
Naqib

WEEK 9, a week of getting things done...

I am very happy to submit my final project this week. Things are getting to an end which makes me upset. We are on move  to the last parts of this great and fantastic course. Like other weeks, this week was also very good for learning point of view. Different topics and articles were shared and discussed. I was very surprised when I read about "LEARNING STYLES AND STRATEGIES" by Richard. The article talked about the different kinds of learners i.e. ACTIVE AND REFLECTIVE LEARNERS, SENSING AND INTUITIVE LEARNERS, VISUAL AND VERBAL LEARNERS, and SEQUENTIAL AND GLOBAL LEARNERS. I liked the article and got so many points to learn and share with my other colleagues at school.
I am very thankful to my partners Umesha from Sri Lanka and Shihanath from Maldives who read my project draft and shared their kind views, bunches of THANKS to both of them.
I heard about FORUM fot the first ever time in my life. I shared my views with the editor about how to get it. His reply encouraged me to cope for getting it for my school.
After all, this week was the beginning of deep sorrow for me in the sense we are about to finish next week. 

Week Eight, A week of online tools...

I am very surprised about the learning during these weeks. I cannot believe how much I have gained through these weeks. It's really incredible! I am glade to write that one of my older desire came true this week when I created my site. The site is not well developed one because it was too hard for me to create one. I was successful in doing so after the hard work of more than three days. The address of the site is:https://sites.google.com/site/naqibwebskills/. I will keep working on it in the future and will surely make it a great site for my school students (Insha Allah). At the moment I have just uploaded some old papers for our new class 8 students. They will solve them and email me the answers.

The 2nd useful topic of this week was "Teaching with online tools". In Pishin, people (schools) never use online tools for teaching and learning (so far my information is concerned). I often visit schools here. Once we had an online course for two weeks,we realized that online tools are playing vital role in spreading education.
These tools can make our work easier in terms of homework, assignments and internet usage. We teach students emailing but we have never taught them using it for educational purpose. Now, we are going to use emailing and blogs for learning plus teaching.
Many people are not familiar with internet in this area. New admissions at school mention some very weak students, so we need to work very hard with them in order to bring them to the use of internet. However, students get familiar with using internet and online tools soon with regular practice. These tools have really added much as helping guides to our education and has made our work easier.
Anvill still remains  an "undiscovered planet" for me. I worked on it a lot but could not come on the track. At one time I wrote to Robert about it but unfortunately got no reply (yet). I will of course work on ANVILL and will discover it soon. 
I also posted my project draft on our partners' page. After reading Umesha's and Shihanth's drafts, I did the peer reading and highlighted different areas through the provided check list.
At last I can't stand saying that I have not learned in the past ten years what I learned in these 8 weeks.
Naqib

Week 7, a week of practicality...

We have been brought to technology based teaching and learning step wise. I am very happy to be a part of this course. I have learned many technology based ideas which will definitely help me support my school-teachers and students.I am gaining much from the different articles provided on the assignment page. One of the articles this week, enlightened the concept of "Learner Autonomy". I read such article for the first time in my life. It gave me great ideas about how to enable learners work within and  beyond the selected boundaries of the syllabus. I am planning to work with my students with this pattern. A student can find more information other than the book, from news papers, TV etc. for a selected topic in the school course.
Computers are often used in big schools, especially in big cities. However, they are very rarely used interactively for teaching lessons in classrooms. I found it this week that one computer can play one special role in a class if teacher is willing to work. We often claim for having no many computers inside classrooms but now I realized that even one single computer is enough for efficient learning with an able teacher.
I was very happy to develop a lesson plan regarding the usage of one computer for students inside the class.

This lesson plan is as follows:

"This idea of "one computer lesson" looks very helpful for us and we can use it easily in our school. Activities such as vocabulary, grammar, listening voices may be very useful and easy tasks to be performed with the help of one computer lesson.
Below is the lesson plan for teaching vocabulary with the help of a 7-10 minutes video which will also be used as a listening exercise.

Lesson plan
class---9 (14-15 years old students)
duration 50 min.
materials-- , Pencils, board, chart, One computer.

ABCD Objectives: After listening to an expert in a video teaching vocabulary about garden (Condition), students in class 9 (Audience) will make sentences on words related to a garden (Behavior) on a blank page on MS Word that includes fill in the blanks too (Degree).


Introduction-reviewing of the previous lesson "Words in Hospital", teacher will bring the attention of the students to garden and related words to garden providing some key vocabulary and websites.

After making four groups Students will be shown the video. Each student having a blank page and pencil, will note the key words along with their meanings. After watching the video for the secong time, students will discuss the key words with each other within the groups. Each student will make sentences on the words orally. Every student will then come to the computer and answer 3 questions and will fill 5 blanks on a word document. The page will be saved with the student's name on the desktop. This process will be continued for rest of the students.


Evaluation--Each group will be asked to write 5 words from today's video-lesson on a chart sheet. The next group will be invited to write meanings with the words and the process will be repeated for each group.

Lessons learned--Students will learn how to use nouns, verbs, etc in sentences. They will also observe technology used for the exercise. They will get some more information about websites i.e. www.yotube.com, www.englishclub.com.
I welcome every suggestion from every one!"

Sihanatha and I will be working together on creating blogs for the coming days. I am glad I will be learning from Sihanath's experience.
Regards,
Naqib

Week SIX, A path to efficient teaching!

Week six came up with lots of practical topics. It gave me some very very useful knowledge and skills.  I could use Power Point before this week too but I could never create interactive slides for students. In many training sessions, I had seen and observed presentations made in Power Point but they all were readings only. This is my first time that I knew about interactive Power Point slides. THIS IS REALLY HELPFUL FOR ME AND MY STUDENTS!
The ideas about engaging large classes well was also  very impressive. I have never attended large classes but got very useful information about how to engage large classes.

Week 5, a week for technology based ideas

As the time passes away, we see and read newer ideas. This week's learning was excellent. I was very upset in the beginning because I had to travel to Karachi for attending a four day  "Connecting Classrooms Project Head Teachers' Training". But I am glad i covered the assigned tasks of the week. I had to work on assignments in the nights and eventually I succeeded and did not leave any work undone.
This week gave me an idea of project based learning. The idea was effective and easy to use. Rubric was quite new thing for me. I was surprised to see it and to read about it. It seemed difficult in the beginning but things got easier after looking through other peoples' rubrics. I developed my own rubric for story telling and posted  on the class wiki, at last.
I liked one thing very much this week. We had a special page where we could ask questions other than the course related. We really needed it because we have many questions to ask regarding certificates, further steps from the course designers etc.
Last time when i wrote about the issues during our teaching and in the school so Robert came up with some very useful suggestions for which I thank him, but this time the topic was related to the solutions to the issues. I was glad to share my idea of using Skype and Elluminate for distance teaching and learning. I am sure people will like the idea because we have tried them and have found them very useful. We often get less time in our periods so the mentioned softwares can make our work easier and also helps students to have free and easy access to their teachers after school time, if having any problems in their studies. I kept going with saving links to my delicious page. "Delicious" is what i needed for keeping useful site addresses in my easy accessible online memory.
I discussed the course of E-learning from the University of Oregon, with my  trainers  Tony and Dominic from UK, and Saleem Ibrahim, Project Manager iEARN Pakistan. They liked it very much and were happy to know about my grades. I also shared it with the representatives of British Council  Karachi and UK who appreciated such idea of E-teacher course.
After all, this week  is ended with putting more to our skills and practices.
Naqib

Week four, a fruitful end....

Dear all,
This course has been very astonishing for me since its beginning. Each week is a new educational start for me. Every new task adds much to my knowledge and compels me  work harder in order to learn more and more about technology. I have learnt about some very useful websites (i.e www.delicious.com etc) and many other shared by the participants during the week
Lesson planning was a new topic of the week. It definitely gave me an idea of pre-preparation of the topic. The different steps given in the plan were very useful.
I liked the articles of this week which were of great use and knowledge. I also highlighted the issues in our school in the way of computer based learning and English. New websites shared by the participants, are making our work easier.
 After all, I have to say I am very lucky to be a part of the web skills course.
Regards,
Naqib