Reflection

Reflection

I have taught this topic many times over the last decade. I have always used a textbook (I like Longman). This term I am teaching this class again with this lesson and textbook. I have infused only a little bit of web 2.0 technology into this class because of limited resources in the classroom. We have a class blog (on Blogger), a class wiki (on Wikispaces), but usage is limited to homework assignments only. We do not use these technologies in the classroom. Several of my students have earned extra credit for creating Wikipedia entries on certain academic writing/grammar topics. In the past, these lessons have been done in a similar fashion, but on paper. The biggest difference is that I always had students producing their own essays rather than groups collaborating throughout the writing process with one final product for each group. I realized through this assignment that technology is pushing me toward teaching using more collaboration and less individual student work. This is a positive shift, I believe, because the real world is increasingly collaborative, even in producing text.

As I was working on this project, I kept in mind my plans for next term. I think that using these technologies will have many benefits. First, it will help my students, who happen to come from countries where collaboration is completely absent in education, to develop collaboration skills using technologies they are already fairly comfortable with. I am fortunate in not having to deal with much of a learning curve. For example, our classroom computer has Office 2003, but a student had created a PowerPoint presentation last week in 2007 using features that are not available in 2003 (so saving as 2003 compatible was not an option). He converted the presentation to a video and uploaded it into YouTube and gave a magnificent presentation. This demonstrates such a level of comfort with new technologies that I have decided that next term I will require students to bring their laptops to class instead of textbooks so we can have expanded possibilities in learning using new tools.

This project was extremely useful for me. It got me thinking about next term and the exciting possibilities. I look forward to using these lesson plans. As written, they are a little fast-paced. I might stretch them over four lessons instead of three. There is one thing that I was unable to find that maybe you could help me with. I want a forum widget to use in Wikispaces that allows ongoing sequential discussion on the main page. I want a tool that does not have individually separated postings like in our class Moodle, but rather string discussions such as those after news articles on many newspaper websites such as the Statesman Journal. If you know of such a tool, please let me know.

Resources/Links

Wikispaces: http://www.wikispaces.com/

Oshima, A. and Hogue, A. 2006. Writing Academic English, Fourth Edition. Pearson Longman

Google Docs: http://docs.google.com/

Bubble.US: http://www.bubbl.us/

Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/

Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/

UNSW - Transition Signals: http://www.lc.unsw.edu.au/onlib/trans1.html

- cc 2009 Jonan Donaldson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.