Reflection on Second Week

students on group-work

The days are swiftly going on, the beautiful ideas are floating around them, I am desperately marching behind; often I clasp them that give me a new energy and valor to proceed.  Donna has her personal stake in this meaningful success of second week. I feel important to share with all of you guys that this week has brought a real shift in my prior conception about search engine; I thought search engine is synonymous to Google search before.

I was simply wondering how we use such innumerable search engines for our academic purpose. I started with; still I confronted awkwardness regarding its effective use. Though noodletools didn’t allow me to stagger my effort, Deborah Healey’s technology tips were awesome; they helped me to make my search easy and effective. I wonder why I couldn’t get such ideas before. I read others’ post before I delivered and was overwhelmed by colleagues’ acumen on technology. Silently I promised myself I shouldn’t feel dwarf, nonetheless. 

When I started next task, I felt I was quite accustomed about it. I scrolled for the assignment of the second week and read the reading task before I started writing about the description and ABCD objective. For this purpose, I found “Planning a Student-centered IT Based Lesson (Part-one)” prepared by Ashley Tan highly resourceful. Nonetheless other materials like planning for instruction, writing objectives and Bloom’s taxonomy too were equally useful and resourceful. More than anything else, I can’t forget the moment when I observed the Donna’s appreciation on this task with a really encouraging terminology—EXCELLENT. Thank you so much for your relentless support and encouraging temperament.

All of sudden, our next task of the week shuddered me with a strange feelings of eeriness. As I glanced this rubric for the first time, instantly I thought a project to be done in the class; a task that is going to be tough, really tough in this phase. But after going through the guidelines I felt quite relief; though it was not so cut and dry, I fount it not as scary as I had thought before. We were supposed to talk about the population, setting and student needs in detail. It’s really going to be great, inspiring and effervescent, provided that we would be able to develop similar web-based classroom like nicenet, where students can discuss, share their ideas, comment on others and process their raw ideas into logical, authentic and meaningful ideas.

It’s simply phenomenal even to hypothesize such marvelous possibility; but this week onward I have been more optimistic and confident on this project. If so, we will witness some exciting results; we will be successful to make our classes more effective, interactive and participatory, students will overcome hectic and monotonous classes and they will be always ready to explore and innovate new and beautiful ideas.

I wish I could do it, I wish you could do it, and all in all, we would do it.   

Creating my blog at first seemed to be an almost impossible task for me. I should admit that I do have feeble knowledge regarding its technical aspects. That is the reason why i am posting my ideas today; so that i will be able to better utilize it for our fruitful conversations and share our feeling and ideas.
Talking about my experience of the first week, it has been really fruitful. Now I am assured that the course will be really useful for our teaching-learning process.
The first week has been really amazing. It has been amazing because lots of noble and creative academic things have begun. Inception of our discussion on nicenet itself was great. First of all we had to introduce with each other. Though we have the guidelines of  Donna, I was wondering how do I introduce myself? I saw the introduction section of my colleagues; they were really sophisticated. On the one hand I was already late to post my introduction on the other, exceedingly  long power cut-off had hurdled on my stipulated time of posting. Second task was more challenging; we had to post our comments on Ground rules and Rubric 1 and rubric 2. I did agree with most of the rules mentioned over there still i did have some genuine disagreement  on some of the rules. For example I opined to use more polite term in stead of using "Poor" while assessing those  the posted comment; second was  better to think about grade than to evaluate the comments with certain score like 0,1,4 or 5 . Third task, for me, has been most exciting. I have been able to reflect my ides through blog.
Journey has begun ,and I believe it will lead us to meet our goal.

Its amazing to create own blog for the first time. Thanks a lot to Donna and my colleagues in web-skills.
To be very honest it was not easy for me to go through the procedure thoroughly. Finally it has been. The blogs, hopefully, will be a medium for expressing our ideas and feelings with each other.
Everyday we face different challenges in the class; often that happens in maintaining the relationship with students, sometimes to the society and parents. As we teachers from the different geographical and cultural locations are sharing this platform, it will be an opportunity for all of us to learn the skills yet further.

prakash