Participating in this course will definitely improve your teaching skills, acquire new tools, methods and resources, collect materials, understand the key elements of learning English, combine technology and language usage, and grow professionally. Most importantly, you will have to the opportunity to apply your learning in a practical manner. I am planning to use lectures and/or presentations to share my experience and knowledge in my teaching context. Teachers should be able to identify students' needs, develop a lesson plan to address those needs, and use technology in their classroom curriculum to help students learn. Thus, in order to achieve the desired learning outcomes, all the stakeholders should create new materials and activities to meet those objectives. The ten-step process can help you create effective classes that use technology. It provides a clear overview of the steps you need to take to create effective lessons. Planning is very important to identify student needs. Teachers use analysis, development, and use when outlining the process of teaching. Analysis helps them understand what students are learning, development assists teachers in assuring that students are learning the material effectively, and use helps teachers plan and implement teaching strategies. Instructors should work together to observe how students are doing and make adjustments as needed.
I have benefited from the course in a multiple ways. However, I would be focusing on three of these. To begin with, collaborative writing task proves beneficial for the learners as they have the chance to receive immediate feedback, delayed feedback and work on their writing as it is process-based which allows learners to develop their final product while providing instant feedback to each other via the chat function on Google Docs. Furthermore, it is possible for them to revise changes. This is an excellent collaborative writing tool for learners as it offers them flexibility and may engage them better. On the other hand, this activity during the course proved a challenge for me as it was difficult to communicate with others and manage work online due to the location, time zone of each educator. This could also be encountered in a classroom environment where some parties are not as involved or not involved in the task at all.
The second benefit I would like to refer to is the concepts I have gotten hold of during the Module on Listening. As a self-trained English teacher, it was rewarding to be exposed to theoretical underpinnings of a listening lesson so that it becomes much more effective for learners. These concepts are bottom-up (decoding skills) and top-down listening (pre-listening activities like brainstorming) which I have tried to integrate as part of lesson in this course. I will definitely keep these concepts in mind while designing my future lessons. Furthermore, YouTube and AcademicEarth have helped me become more acquainted with the use of videos for educational purposes.. In my lesson, you can see how I scaffold these two tasks by preparing for them before class, and during the class session. This learning has helped me to become a better user of technology in my teaching.
The third gain I've had throughout the course is my major assignment on grammar teaching materials development. On the one hand, you can see how the use of COCA is present in the activities I have designed and how this platform can help students better understand how words collocate. As part of this lesson, students are using resources such as VoA articles. Additionally, the use of resources is a critical part of this lesson. This planning has given me a better understanding of the endless possibilities for word combinations and collocations when teaching grammar. This is guiding in that teaching and learning are data-driven sciences and are affected by data. Therefore, it is critical to incorporate data-based tools to increase awareness of learners in teaching grammar as well as vocabulary to guide your teaching and students as autonomous learners.
On the other hand, I find readability tools interestingly engaging and I would like to concentrate on how the results of these tools can be further used in teaching reading skills to learners such as choosing the right reading text for the right group of students. Checking the content of the reading before assigning a group of learners may help me understand I want to explore the potential of social networks in furthering my education. I think they could be a valuable tool for staying connected with friends and family, as well as for networking and finding new opportunities.
Ozan Tekin