Week 10; final reflections but not others...

Yes, this is the last reflections. The course is end here, however, teaching skills, learning experience, great discussions, friendships, sharing knowledge and experience and my desire for enhancing students’ learning will never come to an end.

The journey of the webskills course is successfully reached to its destination before I realized that it is time to write the final week reflections. Firstly, I feel proud of myself for graduating a webskills online course for the first time in my life. I also feel elated with joy after learning the new teaching skills with effective technology tools and resources. I am very glad to meet my instructor, Janine Sepulveda and all the colleagues from different countries. At the same time, I am very sad to say goodbye to my tutor and colleagues. I am certain that my colleagues will have the same feeling at this time.

Honestly it is hard to say the best part of this learning experience since I feel that the whole online learning experience is wonderful and amazing for me. I gain a great amount of useful teaching skills through discussions on Nicenet, accomplishing the tasks, planning and implementing the project and reflecting weekly learning experience on blog. Most of the teaching techniques with marvelous technology tools I learned from this course are very new methods for traditional classroom situations in my country. I believe that I can be a great help with the knowledge I gain to the benefits of language classes in my country. I am going to share the teaching techniques with my colleagues at school and together we will apply these techniques in our teaching. Most of the teaching materials will work for us, however, some may not. No one knows exactly what will happen until we try it out in the next academic year. In my opinion, our teachers can be beneficial by using social bookmarking activity on Delicious, searching specific information and resources on NoodleTools, writing objectives in ABCD style, setting up alternative assessment with rubrics, creating online and offline exercises and tests using web-based tools, preparing a technology-enhanced lesson plan and reflecting teaching experience for professional development on blog. Wow, what a collections of amazing tools! Most of my colleagues and I like to create our own class on Nicenet after we have wonderful discussions through this class. Nicenet is a great course management system for enhancing students’ reading and writing skills and learners’ autonomy. And hey, we can’t leave the topic of Project-based learning (PBL) approach in our teaching. Students learn more by doing the tasks and I will give them many projects on WebQuest which is a nice inquiry-oriented task where teachers can evaluate students’ work with the rubric. Moreover, I am going to use interactive PowerPoint in my lessons which enhance students’ interactions more instead of one-way presentation lesson. Having one-computer in the class gives lots of advantages in learning and there are many effective online websites for practicing listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Nicenet is not the only tool to create online course. I will create class blog and wiki where teachers can give assignments and students can share their learning experience, their works and comment on each other’s work. I really like the idea of creating keypal system since most of my students have their own E-mail account. I will create connections at school and then other schools in my country. As a next big step, I will form a connection with the schools from different countries. This can be simply done as I have many great friends from around the world in this course. I enjoy every discussion topic of pedagogical matters throughout the course and learned many new things from Janine and my colleagues. I feel that all these tools are effective and useful for teachers and each topic covers the most important parts of teaching and learning. I hope that webskills course can be offered many more innovative teaching techniques to the benefits of language learning around the world.

Please forgive me if I miss out something to mention from this amazing experience as I become emotional lately. This is one of the best memorable moments of my life and I will never forget all of you. A big thanks to the American Embassy, Rangoon, Burma for supporting me with tuition scholarship and I won’t get a chance to attend like this wonderful course without the help of Embassy and University of Oregon, American English Institute. Many thanks to our warm and resourceful tutor, Janine for her insights and encouragement to all of us. Last but not least, I really appreciate to all my colleagues for helping me, giving comments and actively participating in the course together. I am very happy that I have many friends who share the same interests of professions from around the world. I do hope to keep in touch with all of you and hope that you won’t forget me. Thank you everyone. Good luck and have a great success by contributing with your best skills to your community. 

With love and best wishes, 

Zun Phyu