THE END? THE BEGINNING!
I did it! The course is over. It was really intensive and rather hard for me. Now I can brease freely. But I feel some sadness. I got used to assignments, readings, blog tasks.
This course taught me to manage my time, to plan activities.I learned to make a project report (here in Belarus we are only beginning to perform methodological work in the form of a pedagogical project). This is very important for me because now I can share my experience with colleagues at school as I am in charge of the methodical union of teachers of English of our school and my duty is to provide them with new teaching techniques and tools.
I think all the teaching tools and techniques that we learned during the course were wery useful. I especially liked rubrics, WebQuests, Nicenet Discussion Boards, Class Wiki, blogs, online crosswords, Delicious, interactive Power Point. I will definitely incorporate more technology into my lessons and use more Web activities.  And I am also planning to hold some meetings with my calleagues to show them the new tools I learned and to encourage them to use them too. I'm also going to show them LoTi survey to motivate my colleagues to improve their level of using technology in teaching.
It's a pity  I didn't have enough time for ANVILL. Maybe it would be better to study it earlier than week 8 when when we were busy with the project report. But I'm going to learn to use it in summer when I have more free time.
Well, it seems to me that a new period of my teaching is beginning. I think I won't be able to have my lessons without technology. I think I have no right to deprive my students of possibilities to use modern tools in learning.
I'd like to thank our instructors,Jodi and Celeste, for teaching me so many new and useful things. I'm also grateful for other participants of the course for sharing ideas and tips. And, of course, I'd like to thank the Embassy of the USA in Belarus for giving me the opportunity to take this online course.

MY WEEK 9
Busy week, as usual! And a very important one. I'm happy I could finish writing my project report at last. I hope it's OK, I did my best.

This week I read a lot about learning styles. I was really interested in the article about learning intelligences. Here in Belarus we call them ways of perception. Learning styles and technology is a really interesting topic. Students learn in many ways, like seeing, hearing, and experiencing things first hand. Students study better if they change study habits to fit their own personal learning styles or it's better to say that the teacher changes his teaching habits in order to cater to a range of learning styles in the classroom.I think the teacher should be ready to incorporate different styles because students are different and the teacher has to be flexible.  And of course  technology can be very helpful for this.

This online course we are finishing will change the way I teach. I'll try to use all new tools and ideas i learned during this course. I can't imaging my work at school without technology now. I think this online course pushed us to change our teaching or at least to develop it. I'm planning to share all new I learned during this course with colleagues in my school and my town. I do believe this course was very helpful.
 

WEEK 8

Well, this week a did and learned a lot as usual.

I explored different teacher resources and exercise generators. I'd like to say that Hot Potatoes is really great. I've been using it for some years and I think it's easy to use(except crossword puzzles) and good for creating matching, cloze, scrambled sentences, and multiple choice exercises. I made some tests on different topics. My students like them a lot because they are interactive as students see their result, success or failure, as soon as they finish doing a test. Also they like reading some encouraging phrases like "Well done!" or "Sorry, you are wrong. Try again" which can be added while creating a test. I think that exercises or tests made with the help of Hot Potatoes promote learner autonomy because students work individually on their tasks and these tasks can be of different levels for different students. What concerns constraints, of course Hot Pot exercises are good to be used in a computer lab but also can be used in a one-computer classroom if students work in turn or these exercises can be assigned as home tasks. So if a teacher is willing to use Hot Potatoes he will find a way out.
I also explored some online resources. I find Nicenet useful for creating discussion boards, I made one for my students to use it next year because this school year has ended recently. I also think creating a class blog on Blogger or a class survey using Google docs is good too and I'm planning to use them with my students, not at the lessons  but as home tasks because we don't have the access to the Internet in our classroom or in our computer lab. I consider ANVILL a fantastic tool! But unfortunately I don't think I will have a possibility to use it because it needs a computer lab and computers in our school are rather old and weak. But at least I'm happy I had an opportunity to get acquainted with this great tool.
Writing a project report was rather time-consuming but useful, I think. It's always good to look back at what you did, to compare your expectations and what really happened, to think why it happened so, what could be different and so on. In my opinion we have two roles during this online course: we are students when we learn some new tools and write peer checklists; we are teachers when we apply teaching tools in practice. We are both teachers and students when we write our projects reports: teachers because we think about teaching methods and tools we used, students because we are waiting for our instructors' assessment for the project report. I think it's always good to change the roles because it helps see the other side of the teaching-learning process.