Week 8

Project Plan Draft
I started Week 8 with a change in direction of my final project. I had to move from Project to Project Plan. It's due to 3 weeks off (weeks 4-6) because of my mother's death and our lunar new year, so I couldn't implement what I intended and get the students' response. I had to think of what to do next when my course is still on the go and I have to keep track of new problems, and the one that I chose to solve in my project is the difficulties in face-to-face group collaboration due to shortage of classroom time, especially for project work which needs a lot of time and collaboration. Preparing the draft took me a lot of time, especially when I had to study about rubrics which I didn't do in Week 5 and found it difficult because I had never done it before. For my project, I tried to create two rubrics; one is for assessing students' online discussion and collaboration, and the other is for assessing final group projects.
I chose to write my draft on Google Drive (https://docs.google.com/document/d/18IL6aSlGiB35_677IeueuuWmdcifm5Xgp2p40fGYCjU/edit?usp=sharing), so it was convenient for me to keep working on it and improve it in my office, at my home, between meetings, etc. I tried to upload it on time to the course wiki, and while waiting for my group members to comment it, I still made improvement.
It was great to read and review my group members' drafts, too. I'm with Brigitte and Dagnogo in the same group. Besides commenting their drafts, I could learn something, too.
Preparing project plan and commenting my partners' drafts took most of my time for the week.

Creating a class site or make online exercises
Nicenet, Blogger and Google Docs are the things that I have tried and also used in my Project.
Creating a class website or wiki on Google Sites attracted my interest at the beginning of the course when I saw them created by Robert. I agree that this is the most complicated tool, but I will certainly try. Thanks Robert for posting the supporting link at :https://sites.google.com/site/ortesolwiki/.
For interactive exercises, I have used Hot Potatoes, Question Tools, and Violet (a program developed in Vietnam) and find them useful in different ways for different people. In 2008, we produced CD-ROMs for ESL/EFL school teachers and students in Vietnam, in which Hot Potatoes and Question Tools were used.
Through the links provided concerning this topic, I will try all the applications/soft-wares suggested, analyse and evaluate them to introduce them to teachers, as part of my job.

ANVILL
ANVILL attracted me due to its potentials in speech tools which is not available in Moodle, the LMS that I have explored in my teaching. What a pity that I missed the webinar because of my health problem and had to watch the recorded one. I have joined this platform, created my own beta course and started to discover it.