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.