Week 10

I'm on the last day of the course and see that I've gone quite a long way in my professional development.
Ten weeks have passed very fast and I have learnt so many interesting topics that MUST be of great value to my job.

There were a lot of articles to be read, a lot of discussions to be taken, and a lot of tasks to be completed. All created in me a feeling of being strongly pushed behind. Discussion assignments were the area that I was worst at (by looking at my Jupiter Grade book) because I was not familiar with this, as the result of my previous training at schools as well as university which mainly emphasized on understanding and memorizing, not higher order thinking skills.

Among the ten weeks, I feel that week 6 was the most successful to me, in the feeling that it was not as tough as others, and I got full points for it.

However, the topic I find most useful for me and help me change my teaching is that of Week 5, i.e.,

Project-based Learning, WebQuests, and rubrics

in which rubrics is almost new to me. Rubric and WebQuests assignments were challenging for me, especially in the week of my mother's funeral. I tried to complete rubrics assignments weeks later and find that creating rubrics is made less challenging with the help of  http://rubistar.4teachers.org/.

The most important thing I learnt through this is that rubrics should be created and given to students in advance, so they can be well aware of what is expected, and can self evaluate their work. I never did this before, but will do this from now on.

This week's tasks are not very difficult, but the deadline is not Sunday as usual, while I had to attend an intensive course by Intel Vietnam for three days, so I was still pushed.

http://www.loticonnection.com/ is useful for me to review my technology integration although I couldn't do the survey. I thought it was my problem and intended to try another time when I received Robert's message about it.  However, I will read the article more carefully to compare it with TESOL technology standard framework and TIM (Technology Integration Matrix. We are building technology standards for teachers and students of Vietnam and these are valuable resources.

No method is the BEST method, so teaching by principles is considered as a solution that I found in this article: The Seven Principles: Technology as Lever - specific recommendations for improving teaching with technology usehttp://polaris.umuc.edu/~cschwebe/gsmt800/7principles.htm .

Every course in ICT in LT ends with the article of the future of CALL. This is useful for teachers to keep going on.

The final words I want to say about this course is that through it, I found that I as a teacher can deliver my courses online without depending too much on an LMS and IT experts. I have created and taught my courses on Moodle, but now I'm thinking of designing and organizing my courses with a combination of the tools I learnt in Webskills2013.

Once again, thank you Robert and my courses member for a GREAT time! Hope to "see" you more later.